Oh Do Concentrate

Intercession is terribly good for you spiritually, quite apart from the good it may do the person for whom you are interceding. I know, for instance, that it's helpful to focus particularly on the people with whom you have problems and disagreements, holding them before God and asking for insight into your relationship with them and what their motivations may be. In the past I've found this has indeed achieved something, as a difficulty or disagreement, perhaps irresolvable in itself, has at least become less painful and fraught with resentment or self-justification as God has got to work on it. 

Yet focusing on anyone is hard enough. As well as praying my personal intercessions in the morning - which can sometimes rather be clattered through - I try to set aside a few minutes in the middle of the day, when the diary finds me at home between mid-day and 1pm, to pray for folk in the parish, as well as more generally trying to reconnect with God from whom my thoughts may have wandered over the course of the morning. But more often than not I find individuals drift in and out of my mind with great rapidity, and when I try and grab one of them as they waft past, no sooner have I done so than my imagination has already leapt on to someone else. Actually turning over the particular problems or experiences of this or that person requires much effort, and even while I try to do so a fog of alternative thoughts and demands clouds the attention.

The answer is probably to pray consistently through my parish lists, which in the past I've tried to do - the problem being that it's dull, unspontaneous and adds yet another challenge of discipline to the one of merely managing to pray at all. 

I take comfort from a story about the sainted former Archbishop Michael Ramsey, who, while staying with friends in his retirement, once came in from the garden and announced 'Well, I've spent half an hour praying and actually spoke to God for about five minutes of it'.