Occasionally, when I am feeling particularly adventurous, I load up the minivan and bring my five kids (eight and under) to the nearby Benedictine monastery for one of their hours of sung prayer. It is a little monastery, and when we go, we outnumber the nuns themselves. Sung chant with the traditional back and forth antiphonal prayer is a deeply immersive experience, sort of like watching waves crash rhythmically on a quiet beach. 

Or at least it should be. Toddlers can disrupt the tranquil beauty like a flock of hungry seagulls. That is why we go so rarely. Still, it is nice to introduce my squawking flock to one of the most immersive, formal, and ancient forms of the Church’s prayer life.

You might think that the monastic experience of prayer could not be more alien to that of children—and parents of small children. After all, their entire life is overtly centered around prayer, while our lives (at least if your house is like mine) are centered around dishes, diapers, and dinosaurs. Prayer is often disjointed, distracted, maybe even disappointing. I spend most Masses trying to pray.

But as it turns out, monastics are not experts in praying. A contemplative nun told me recently that the hours dedicated to prayer are times where monastics become experts in trying to pray. Saint Teresa of Avila, the great doctor of the Church, described her prayer life as a castle under siege: so many distractions crashed against her outer walls, and she could not beat them back or quiet them. “We cannot stop the revolution of the heavens as they rush with velocity upon their course; neither can we control our imagination. When this wanders we at once imagine that all the powers of the soul follow it; we think everything is lost, and that the time spent in God’s presence is wasted.” However, the great mystic assures us, deep in the innermost keep of our soul’s castle, we can still be wrapped in God’s presence, even while many parts of us are called like little soldiers to defend the outer walls. Or perhaps wander the back of church with a grumpy two-year-old!

So how do we maintain the prayer of that inner chapel, the sort of prayer that can continue no matter what outside drama demands the rest of our attention? Over the past few years, I have been talking to several contemplative nuns on the topic of prayer for my book, Mother to Mother: Spiritual and Practical Wisdom from the Cloister to the Home. Here are some of the tips they have given me that have already begun to bear fruit as my attention is demanded by little hands and loud voices as I try to pray.

5 Tips From Nuns To Help Catholic Parents Pray

1. Do not pass judgment upon your prayer. A Cistercian nun reminded me that God values our prayer differently than we do. Our most imperfect attempts at prayer can be the most precious in His sight. The earnest desire to pray well, even if the execution is rocky, is deeply efficacious. Remember Jesus’ story of the Pharisee doing all the externals correctly and emptily while the publican barely mumbles out a little prayer from the heart! 

2. Use those inner distractions. Even when I finally find a moment of silence to pray, I find that the inner crowd in my mind makes more noise than my children! Contemplatives absolutely struggle with this, too. They have so many suggestions for how to calm your mind for prayer, but my favorite is to turn all those distractions rushing around inside your head into a prayer intention. Instead of battling past my anxieties and frustrations, I can bring them to God as they pop up. That way, instead of letting the worries get the starring role in my mind, I subjugate them to the power of God and leave them in His hands.
3. Focus on little things but dedicate yourself to them. A Carmelite echoed Saint Teresa’s idea of the innermost keep in her advice. Keep a little closet in your mind and heart that is set aside from your worries, concerns, and plans for the day. That little space inside you is dedicated to God. Make little visits to that Divine closet throughout the day, even if it is for ten seconds. The Poor Clares reminded me that while Christ instructs us to go to our room to pray, that room can be anywhere—even the bathroom, if that is the only place we find a moment to focus! A Capuchin suggested little phrases, perhaps a sentence from a psalm or even just one of the names of Jesus or Mary. Use these phrases over and over throughout the day as a little prayer themselves. 

4. The nuns tell me that one of the great benefits of chanting the psalms over and over throughout the day and night is that they become earworms, and you find yourself repeating a prayer or psalm reflexively as you cook or clean or as you slip off to sleep. I have begun to replace some of the sounds of our day with hymns, and the family is slowly memorizing psalms at bedtime in the hope that we too can cultivate some holy earworms! My three-year-old has psalm one down cold, just from hearing it over and over.

5. Your children are part of your prayer. We can meditate upon the image of Christ in the faces of our children! He has sent them as part of our path to heaven via our vocation. Cultivating a wordless holy gratitude for them is a form of prayer. This makes waking up with my six-month-old several times in the night opportunities for prayer, even if I am too groggy to put anything into words.

Perhaps most encouraging of all, I have discovered that contemplative nuns take very seriously their call to be spiritual mothers for the world. They are praying for us and our children at all hours of the day and night. When I find myself struggling to pray, it is good to remember that there are quiet prayers being prayed for me around the world.

Image: Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash