In the last issue of this article I presented one way to reach out to God by the use of Prayer of the Heart or Mental Prayer. While this kind of prayer is simple, the complication of our lives makes it difficult for us to be at peace with ourselves so that we can enter into true solitude. I wonder how many of my readers can find time to enter into this type of   personal solitude. I know that if you have a family it only complicates things. It is not an easy thing for us to do this – surrounded   as we are by countless noises – to sit quietly and wait. It is not easy for us – people who are geared to be productive and not to waste time – to be present and expect “nothing” to happen as a result of our presence.

Many of us find great difficulty with reaching out to God in the simple, quiet prayer of the heart. We find it most difficult to shift gears and go from living frantically, productively, noisily and always conscious of time, to being quiet, peaceful and open to whatever God wants. We need some form of discipline that goes counter to the hurly-burly mood of our culture. We need to practice some kind of introductory method as a prelude to the prayer of the heart. We need to learn “how to be” in a simple and quiet way so that we can actually be with the Lord.

There are several things we can do to make this type of prayer more possible in our lives. First, we must become truly convinced that we need to have a quiet time for ourselves and a desire to actually integrate this type of prayer into our lives. Second, we have to have a place where we can be alone. We need to use the same place always for our alone time. Third, we need to designate a very definite, fixed time when we go to our prayer place to be alone. This means that we need to ask others, if we don’t live alone, to honor our “alone time” by not interrupting us during this period (we don’t need to tell them why we need alone time). Fourth, we need to just begin sitting for short periods of time doing nothing, so that we can get use to having alone time with ourselves and God.