By Mark Argent
A protracted brush with pneumonia a few years ago had some interesting repercussions. At a practical level, it meant that a siesta took the place of my daily jog and my car seemed to know its own way to the local hospital, but what about the spiritual dimension of the experience? A bout of pneumonia is far from being the most serious illness faced by people of my age and fitness level in a hospital, but it is inevitable that such an ordeal has an effect on the prayer life.
A little while back I found myself talking with my spiritual director about ‘accidental meditation’, by which I meant those times when circumstances take you close to a meditative state purely by accident. When you are some way short of firing on all cylinders, the mind is a lot less inclined to wander off and meditation can feel rather easier.
Maybe it is inevitable that, in trying to ‘teach’ prayer, people end up talking about specific prayer techniques. At its best, this is a way of inviting people to explore ways of praying which others have found helpful and to try new things. But when you are not in good health, you are starting in a different place where things don’t work as they otherwise might. At its worst this is a problem. It is also an invitation into new territory. From that perspective the familiar ways of prayer start to look like an invitation to rummage in the rich treasury of things people have found useful, rather than an exhaustive list.
Even the pain and discomfort that go with illness actually present a choice. On the one hand, they are clearly unpleasant. Yet most meditation methods involve focussing on one sense, or one sensation as an entry point to a meditative state. Something like a burst of chest pain from pneumonia, assuming it isn’t a reason to call an ambulance, is something that focusses the awareness. That’s as good a starting point as any for being present and moving from there into prayer. That isn’t to encourage people to seek pain in order to pray, but it might be quite important to let whatever comes along be something that draws more deeply into God, rather than be processed as something to get in the way.
The wisdom which prayer in times of illness offers us is that people often try too hard, especially when using new methods of prayer. If illness means that trying too hard is not possible, then it also means there is an invitation simply to be, letting the illness itself be graced, and God encountered in the reality of where one is, rather than where one would be if one were someone else. This is what meditation and prayer are all about, which is why such a strong emphasis is put on this idea that EVERYONE, regardless of their situation, can pray, perhaps the most important thing any of us can ever do.
