If you lose focus during prayer is that prayer lost?

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ocuinn

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As it is so easy to get distracted when praying are those prayers lost. For example if praying a decade of the rosary and your mind wanders for say four of the hail marys is it then necessary to say and extra four at the end to make up for the four youve lost? I know some people will say that because the intention is there to pray then no prayer is lost but others like St. Louis de Monfort say that an unfocused prayer is transferred to the devil. What is the churches position on this?

AP Quinn
 
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ocuinn:
As it is so easy to get distracted when praying are those prayers lost. For example if praying a decade of the rosary and your mind wanders for say four of the hail marys is it then necessary to say and extra four at the end to make up for the four youve lost? I know some people will say that because the intention is there to pray then no prayer is lost but others like St. Louis de Monfort say that an unfocused prayer is transferred to the devil. What is the churches position on this?

AP Quinn
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Prayer is not a tax audit. You do not have to have all of the pieces totally together all at once to make it work. So, there is no need to start over all the time. However, if your mind is wandering, then you need to pray on that first.

I say this one every time I go to Mass, and when I find myself prone to distraction.

“Lord, open my heart to your devine word and wisdom, and close my mind to my Earthly cares. Amen”

Then I pray. I find that this little prayer centers me and keeps my mind on what I am doing.

Good luck!
 
I had a similar problem with the rosary… Most of the time I’d lose count but I also butchered some prayers…

The Our Father ended up like this: …give us this day our daily bread from Thy bounty through Christ our Lord…

The Hail Mary ended up like: Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee and bless us o Lord and these thy gifts… or Hail Mary full of grace, our life our sweetness and our hope…

Anyway, I felt terrible for butchering the rosary like that and decided to go with praying the Sations of the Cross.
 
Pray is a gift from God. Just think, we are invited and encouraged to talk with Our Creator.He loves us so much that He died for us and all we can give Him is our thanks, attention and love.

God knows what we need and feel before we start. I am sure that like when my son calls me, I am glad to hear from him, even though I know what he wants(he is a teenager). Jesus talked about this: If we being evil will give good things to our children, how much more will Our Heavenly Father will give us since He is good?

So to answer your question, God wants a clean heart, a humble spirit and a love for what He loves. Maybe we are distracted because we are praying for the wrong thing. A good prayer starter is:

Lord, I am tired give me strength to focus on what You want.
 
Thank you for the advice on how to pray but that is ignoring my question. If your mind wanders on a prayer is it still a prayer to God or is it just the equivalent of babbling repeated words? Does the prayer in a sense lose it’s power? (thats the best way I can ask the question) What is the Catholic Churches position on this? I’m not asking how to avoid being distracted. I’m asking if you are distracted have you just wasted your time praying?

AP Quinn
 
I’m asking if you are distracted have you just wasted your time praying?
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Ocuinn, No, your time is never wasted when you pray even if you are distracted. I’ve been praying the rosary all my life and I have yet to pray one perfect Hail Mary. If my mind wanders I will simply say “Sorry” and move on. No, I don’t repeat the Hail Mary’s which were fumbled; obviously, that would be impossible because if one is too distracted to focus how could one be attentive enough to count? Rather a conundrum don’t you think?

Jesus took on our human flesh and He knows all are weaknesses. Did He not tell his apostles Peter, James and John in the garden during his last agony, ’ the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.’ ? It is the intention to pray and the good will shown in setting aside time for this purpose which counts. God knows better than we do how scatter-brained we are since the fall of Adam and Eve: concupiscence being the operative word. It’s a matter of doing one’s best and trusting in Divine Mercy.
If your mind wanders on a prayer is it still a prayer to God or is it just the equivalent of babbling repeated words?
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Check out the book of Revelation and see all the saints who are constantly offering up the same repeated prayer to the Lamb on the throne. “Day and night they do not stop exclaiming: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty, who was, and who is, and who is to come.” Rev. 4:8 God is eternal and our prayers on earth are united with the prayers of the saints in heaven forever offering Him glory. Each Hail Mary recalls the most magnificent moment in our salvation history when the Word was made flesh. The central figure of the Hail Mary is Jesus which is placed right in the middle of it. That is why Pope John Paul II recommended pausing just before pronouncing the name of Jesus. In fact, read his letter on the rosary and you will find a wealth of ideas to assist you. :blessyou:
 
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ocuinn:
Thank you for the advice on how to pray but that is ignoring my question. If your mind wanders on a prayer is it still a prayer to God or is it just the equivalent of babbling repeated words? Does the prayer in a sense lose it’s power? (thats the best way I can ask the question) What is the Catholic Churches position on this? I’m not asking how to avoid being distracted. I’m asking if you are distracted have you just wasted your time praying?

AP Quinn
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I don’t know the Catholic churches position on the mind wandering during prayer and its subsequent effectiveness.

However, as God made all creatures great and small, He knows of our problems and our distractions. If you get yourself praying again and yout turn to Him again, I would think the your credit is good with God!
 
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ocuinn:
As it is so easy to get distracted when praying are those prayers lost. For example if praying a decade of the rosary and your mind wanders for say four of the hail marys is it then necessary to say and extra four at the end to make up for the four youve lost? I know some people will say that because the intention is there to pray then no prayer is lost but others like St. Louis de Monfort say that an unfocused prayer is transferred to the devil. What is the churches position on this?

AP Quinn
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No it is not lost but it does not contain the value that a focused prayer contains. The more you learn to focus on God the greater your prayers become. But your prayers aren’t lost if your mind wanders; they still have value because they are done out of a love or fear for God.
 
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ocuinn:
Thank you for the advice on how to pray but that is ignoring my question. If your mind wanders on a prayer is it still a prayer to God or is it just the equivalent of babbling repeated words? Does the prayer in a sense lose it’s power? (thats the best way I can ask the question) What is the Catholic Churches position on this? I’m not asking how to avoid being distracted. I’m asking if you are distracted have you just wasted your time praying?

AP Quinn
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No. God hears it all.

My favorite prayer is: I’m sorry Jesus, please help me.
 
if your mind wanders while you are praying, the advice of St. Teresa is to simply recollect yourself and return to prayer when you “come to”. There is no need or value in going back to the beginning and starting over. Simply let go of the distracting thought and return to prayer. when praying the rosary or LOTH the thing that has helped me the most is to pray out loud, or at least mouth the words under my breath if I am in a crowd. For some reason the more the body is involved in the prayer, the more the brain is engaged. Also walking while praying the rosary, and standing, sitting or kneeling when prescribed for LOTH has helped enormously, probably for the same reason. Sitting in a comfortable chair and reading the prayerbook like a novel is a sure way to zone out. What helped me when I was first returning to the rosary and praying with scripture was forming mental images, as St. Ignatius suggests, of the mystery or scripture events.
 
Everyone suffers from distractions. The trouble is so few people have the opportunity to discuss spiritual matters and so people can think it is something perculiar only to them. (by the way that is why CAF is a great place because it brings folks together to feel less alone in their faith).

You might like to think of God as your Father. I know you know He is your Father, but in the structure of some prayers like LOTH and somewhere in our hearts we can place God very remote from ourselves, we dwell on His Almighty Power and forget this God humbled Himself to become one of us, we forget the Tenderness and Love of God, the Tender Father He is. If you start to spend time simply meditating on this fact that God is your most tender and intimately close Father and is ever present to you, you will find you grow in recollection and distractions, though they will still happen, will not unsettle your soul.

Think to yourself what a Loving Father would say to His child if He caught this child with their mind wandering. I can imagine a few lines as I’m sure you can; I know what my own late father would have said to me ‘Away with the fairies are you?’, my father wasn’t angry with me, he didn’t discount all the times I was ‘fully present’ with him, just because some of the time, in my mind, I drifted off somewhere else during his company. How much more loving and understanding therefore is God our Father? Infinitely more!

Your desire to pray is a prayer itself. Where this rumour came from that prayers are wasted or lost etc I don’t know but it’s piffle. No prayer is ever wasted or lost and don’t be tempted to think so, that sounds to me like the discouragement of the evil one. God the Holy Spirit is not so clumsy as to lose prayers!

Pray to the Holy Spirit to teach you to pray.

Prayer is a journey, it transforms the soul to the likeness of Christ, vocal prayer is fruitful we know, but the soul must progress in the way God has called it to do so internally by way of meditation and contemplation. Man has two internal dialogues, one with himself and one with God and it is very easy to conduct the internal dialogue with oneself, but it is not so easy to conduct the internal dialogue with God, for this we must pray for the gift of constant recollection to God, so that with practise and grace the internal dialogue with God increases and the internal dialogue with oneself decreases. The is part of the transformation to the likeness of Christ.

‘I must decrease so that He may increase.’
‘It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me’

Persevere, but don’t force it and try too hard, we must rely on God. God always blesses our meagre efforts; we are only the branches, He is the Vine.

In my prayers
 
Boy, me too. I get so distracted. I hope I at least get partial credit for the times I started a prayer and got lost midstream!

Praying is so peaceful sometimes, I actually fall asleep. It works well for me to pray in the car, aloud, while driving to work, etc.
 
Part I of 2 (I love this subject so much).

Oh my God! This poster (and the one earlier about losing focus during the Rosary) have stumbled upon my favorite subject!

The Rosary is a relatively recent development in the Church. I have several Rosaries - I rarely pray the Rosary myself. My favorite Rosary is the Mother Theresa Rosary available for a cheap price from EWTN’s website. A close second is one given to me at Terri Schiavo’s bedside made of plastic melted upon string given to me after she had made it herself as a Nun in Ecuador. With the relatively recent waxing and waning of “Indulgences” in the Church, repetetive formal prayer sort of lost its focus within the Church, yet the Rosary hangs in there solidly. So important was the Rosary and Mother of God Mary, the Virgin Mary according to all modern interpretations of our Queen of Heaven that the Holy Father Pope John Paul II actually changed it.

And while it seems that I am getting off-topic, I am not. There is a time and a place for everything, and yes, Catholic Prayers serve one primary function that you rarely hear about … they may not be something that we can focus our minds upon, but at the same time they do help us to not focus our minds on other things. One thing I really wish our Church would do, for example, would be to restore the routine of praying a meaningful Litany after Mass, and it is my understanding that of all of the Litanies that have come and gone over the year, only 4 are authorized, and none are widely said. Pope John Paul II all but BEGGED the U.S. Church to pray the Angelus Prayer after Mass, and I DO LOVE THIS PRAYER above all others but for the Our Father because HIS version contains both the “Hail Mary” and the “Glory Be.”

Our society has a short attention span. It is better to go to Confession to be told of a Pennance of One Our Father and Five Hail Mary’s to just concentrate throughy on every word that comes from just one of each than to sit there and numbly make sounds without supporting meaning.

Yes, sounds without supporting meaning is Catholicism’s greatest struggle in a society with such a short attention span as it is. I love the idea of the Mass changing soon in America in the English Vulgate because it will require for people to get back to reading the words until they learn their new habits.

Something I do (that drives those around me absolutely nuts) is I say the Hail Mary, the Our Father, and the Glory Be with real passion and fire. Some (correctly) call me a Spiritual Pyromaniac - the greatest compliment I’ve ever received. I don’t just mumble “holymarymotherofgodprayforussinnersnowandatthehourofourdeath. Amen.” No … I say it like I mean it. “HOLY Mary … Mother of GOD! PRAY for us sinners! NOW … and … at the hour of our death, Amen!”

I also do this with the Our Father … and I correct the English verbage as Pope John Paul II also did when most say “Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be done … on Earth as it is in heaven.” The correct flow is “THY WILL BE DONE ON EARTH … as it (already) is in heaven!”

With the Glory Be … there isn’t any way to improve the flow but to really put some emphasis on the words “IS NOW - and ever shall be.” The point of this prayer is to express in the moment of how that we are glorifying God’s Three Persons - all deserving name recognition, with glory that we are giving in the moment.
 
Part II

With the Creed - well, it would be too long for me to show where I show emphasis there. Which brings me to my next point.

At Mass, I wonder truly if Priest or Parishioner really does much but “go through the motions” in blind senseless repetition. It is obvious that to almost everyone who bothers to attend Mass - because perhaps it makes them feel better or more holy, the Priest and Parishioner alike are too easily “losing focus.” This is not becuse of the words, but because of the lack of enthusiasm for what is going on. Even the Priest themselves take their own role for granted, when in fact, let’s look at what is happening. In our Midst - an event greater than any rock concert from the night before, or charming scientific space launch, or nice story on your evening news, is something so great that it is even greater than the Star above Bethlehem, the Transfiguration itself with Elijah, Moses, and the 3 Persons of God together within the Earth’s Atmosphere. If Catholics - the ones reminded to turn their cell phones had any real appreciation for what is happening at the Altar, they would grab their cellphones, run outside, and call the local TV station to get a crew down to film the event of the miraculous appearance within ordinary unleavened bread and wine of Jesus Christ - as He is today on Earth, in direct contact with He as He is beyond the farthest star of the Universe He helped co-create, in heaven. The Sacred Liturgy, in words, is magnificent. But here, too, it is mumbled with senseless repetition. “We lift them (our hearts) up to the Lord …it is right to give Him thanks and praise.” Interesting to hear these words mumbled, but rarely in any Congregation of Catholics are they said with conviction as if they are said with any authentic meaning.

So my challenge to you all - each and every one of you - is to get ahold of a copy of the Mass as it is said wherever you are in print form. Study the words - each and every word - as if you are reading it for the first time. And then next Sunday, at Mass, go there not softly mumbling the words out of repetition. Rather, loudly praise God from the bottom of your heart, with all of your heart, all of your soul, and all of your mind. The Rosary and other Catholic prayers are not such good ideas, I think in the end, because they make us insensitive to the words we are saying, leaving us with an activity that is useful only for keeping our idle minds and souls from drifting elsewhere - which they do, anyway. When you pray, pray as the Father taught us. Everything else is a bonus, but with the Mass - the ultimate form of Prayer - pay attention to every syllable - every word - every punctuation mark, and read and understand what you out of repetiton have been blathering without heart or soul like a blathering idiot. “Get into” the Lord by really “getting into” the words at HIS Mass.

The Lord wants our attention with all of our heart, mind, and soul. The heart is our body - our emotions … created by quite recyclable chemicals that will return to dust. But while alive, some emotional investment is good. Our mind means our focus factor, for sure. Why think about NFL or sex or particle physics when our attention is supposed to be on the Lord? If we are distracted by something on Earth, just thank God that God created the object of our distraction, and the limits of our minds that allow us to so easily lose track.

Primarily we are to pray through our souls. How could Terri Schiavo, with some a terribly disfigured body and mind pray? Believe me, without the distracting throughts or hormones, she could pray better than any of us ever could. The soul is where we should channel all of our prayers, and we should always live with our souls over our minds, and our minds over our bodies.
 
I think it can be made simple. What is your intention when praying? Is it with a sincere, honest, and humble heart? If so, then God knows and do not worry about errors.

With love.
 
St. Thomas Aquinas said "If, during prayer, if you must bring your mind back from distraction, even if you must do it again and again, it is time well spent"
 
I sure hope not…

If so, then my ‘prayer records’ would show that I havent prayed in years… scary thought!
 
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