You kneel to pray and within a minute you’re thinking about an email, a bill or what to cook for dinner. Catching yourself, you wonder whether the prayer counted at all.
A monk once brought that same fear to an old monk of the desert. His body stayed in his hut, he said, but his thoughts wandered everywhere. The thoughts kept telling him that staying there was doing him no good, and they pushed him to give up being a monk and go home. The old man called it an attack of the devil. He told the monk to stay in his hut and ask God for patience, and his mind would gather itself again. A foal still nursing may run about all it likes while its mother is tied up, he explained, but sooner or later it comes back to her because it’s hungry. But if the mother wanders loose too, both are lost. In the same way, a monk whose body stays put will find his mind coming back after all its wanderings.
Why does my mind wander when I pray?
Two men who had already spent years as monks in the Egyptian desert asked the same question. In his Conferences, John Cassian tells how he and his friend Germanus went to see an old monk named Serenus during Lent. Even when their hearts were set on God, they told him, their thoughts soon slipped back to wandering. Whenever they noticed and tried to hold the mind still, it slid away “swifter than a snake.” They had almost given up hope, and had come to believe that the wandering wasn’t their fault at all but simply part of human nature.
Serenus told them that was a mistake. A man who can’t swim, he said, might conclude that a human body could never stay up in water, yet other people do it easily. The mind is made to be always moving and can never sit idle, so unless it’s given something to hold on to, it drifts over everything. With long practice it can learn to stay. The blame for its wandering lies with our own carelessness, Serenus said, not with human nature and never with God, and he told them not to let it wear them out or drive them to despair.
A gentler answer came from Mount Sinai in the 600s, where John Climacus was abbot. “Unsteadiness belongs to the mind by nature,” he wrote in The Ladder of Divine Ascent, “but the One Who can steady all things can steady it.” Until we have learned to pray, he said, we’re like someone teaching a small child to walk. When the mind tires and falls, you pick it up and set it back inside the words of the prayer.
Is it a sin to get distracted while praying?
The Fathers were hard on a careless mind that doesn’t try, and gentle with a weak one that keeps trying. In the 250s Bishop Cyprian of Carthage asked Christians who let their thoughts run off during prayer how God could hear them when they didn’t even hear themselves. Yet Jesus saw the weak side in His own disciples. On the night He was arrested, He went with them to Gethsemane and took Peter, James and John further on, asking them to keep watch with Him while He prayed (Matthew 26:36-38; Mark 14:33). He came back and found them asleep. “Were you not able to keep watch with Me for one hour?” He asked Peter. “Watch and pray so that you will not enter into temptation. For the spirit is willing, but the body is weak” (Matthew 26:40-41). Twice more He went back to pray, and twice more He found them sleeping. Luke gives the reason: they were “exhausted from sorrow” (Luke 22:45).
Climacus told anyone who felt their prayer had gone nowhere, “Don’t say, when you’ve stayed long at prayer, that you’ve achieved nothing. You already have. For what higher good is there than to cling to the Lord and to stay united with Him without ceasing?” Centuries later the theologian Thomas Aquinas answered the question directly in his Summa Theologiae. To let your mind wander on purpose is a sin, he wrote, but “to wander in mind unintentionally does not deprive prayer of its fruit.”
Does my phone make it worse?
No Father ever saw a phone, but what they taught about the mind fits the pull of a screen. An old monk named Isaac told Cassian that whatever fills our minds before prayer comes back during it. The things we were doing and saying “dance before our eyes,” he warned, and can even make us “shake with foolish laughter (which I am ashamed to speak of) at some silly joke.” In his Confessions, Augustine of Hippo owned up to the same pull. He had stopped going to the games to watch dogs chase hares, yet if he happened to ride past a chase in the fields, his mind went after it. Sitting at home, he could be held by a lizard snapping up flies. He admitted that small things like these crowded his heart and often broke into his prayers.
Isaac’s answer was to get ready before prayer. The mind at prayer is shaped by what it was doing just before, he said, so whatever we want to be while we pray, we have to be already before we begin. Put the phone away a good while before you pray, then, and not only while you pray. A line of Psalm 119 fits the moment you reach for it: “Turn my eyes away from worthless things; revive me with Your word” (Psalm 119:37).
How do I keep my mind on my prayer?
Give your mind one line to come back to. When Germanus asked Isaac for something fixed that wandering thoughts could be brought back to, Isaac gave them a single verse, “Make haste, O God, to deliver me! Hurry, O LORD, to help me!” (Psalm 70:1). With one short verse always ready, you don’t have to search for your place each time you notice your mind has wandered. You just say it again. Cassian later admitted that he and Germanus found this harder than they’d expected, harder even than their old habit of roaming freely through the whole Bible. Still, he was sure anyone could do it, even someone who couldn’t read, if they kept coming back to this one verse.
Keep your words few, too. Climacus warned against saying a great many words in prayer, because the mind scatters as it searches for them. He pointed to the tax collector in Jesus’ parable, who prayed a single sentence, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner!” Jesus said that this man, “rather than the Pharisee, went home justified” (Luke 18:13-14).
And when your mind drifts, don’t get up and leave. The foal in the old monk’s answer came back because its mother stayed tied. Stay where you are, ask God for patience and bring your mind back as often as it goes. The Church even sings a hymn for this moment, which begins, “Gather my scattered mind, O Lord.”
How long should I pray?
Here the Fathers differ. In a letter on prayer, Augustine wrote that the monks of Egypt were said to pray very often but very briefly, so that their attention wouldn’t fade. He added that a prayer that’s going well shouldn’t be cut short either. Climacus thought beginners need a good length of time at prayer, because the time spent prepares the way for better prayer. How long and how often you should pray is a question to bring to your priest.
When it isn’t only at prayer
Some people can’t keep their focus anywhere, at work, in a book or in a conversation. If that’s you and it’s hurting your studies, your job or your relationships, see a doctor. A doctor can look at whether ADHD or anxiety is behind it, and what support there is.
