Can we undistract our prayer time?

We sit down to pray, but instead find ourselves jumping up to do non-urgent tasks or maybe even nodding off. Or we glance at social media and end up scrolling for hours. Then we might waste further time berating ourselves for the lapse rather than doing what we intended to do in the first place: pray and commune with God.

What causes these lapses? Certainly not God! It is a foundational point in Christian Science that God is good and that we each express that goodness. And there are no lapses in either God’s goodness or our right and ability to express it. This was consistently proved by Christ Jesus in the far more significant lapses he healed—when people had lost their health or moral bearings, for instance. But it’s true for any discord in our experience, no matter how small, that would say that we’re less than the pure, spiritual expression of God. Describing the majesty of our true identity, Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer of Christian Science, wrote, “Immortal man is the eternal idea of Truth, that cannot lapse into a mortal belief or error concerning himself and his origin: he cannot get out of the focal distance of infinity” (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 79)

So we have spiritual grounds for challenging whatever would seem to rob us of the good, fruitful activity of our true, God-created identity. Thinking that we are the problem, however, isn’t a helpful starting point for resolving the situation. Yes, we must be both self-aware enough to recognize that there is a problem and determined to take steps to correct it. But blaming ourselves for the problem tends to reinforce the belief that we have, or are, a material self distinct from that spiritual identity. In seeing that we can have only the identity God made, we recognize that the resistance to spiritual growth calling itself distractedness is nothing more than an imposition on us.