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What happens when you pray? For the last few weeks we’ve been discussing what happens when you close your eyes. You can experience powerful emotions, surprising insights and consoling memories. You can also experience feelings, both physical and otherwise. Sometimes when you’re praying you might feel physically more relaxed. That’s quite common. It may be a physiological response to simply slowing down from what may be a busy life, but, more often than not, it’s much more than that. We are not just purely spiritual beings, and so God communicates to us through our bodies as well. That’s part of our own incarnation. So pay attention to those physical feelings in prayer. At the same time, you may also experience feelings in prayer that are hard to name. Sometimes it can feel like a confusing mix of feelings. Sometimes people say to me, “Well, I felt happy and sad at once.” Or “I felt a sense of confusion about what my life was going to be like, but at the same time I knew it would be fine.” It’s okay if you can’t precisely say what you’re feeling. Just because you can’t describe it doesn’t mean that it’s not real. And it doesn’t mean that it’s not coming from God. So just ask yourself: What might God be telling me through these feelings? And trust that God will help you, in time, to understand them.
