Ash Wednesday is here, and so, I began the discipline of learning to pray the Morning Prayers of the Divine Office. For the unacquainted, the Daily Office is a way of praying through the Psalms (and selected scriptures) at certain hours of the day, which is why it is sometimes called “The Liturgy of the Hours.”

As I worked my way through the Psalms, my mind wandered, fickle as it is. Some small phrase reminded me of Eliot’s poem “Ash Wednesday,” which of course reminded me of the references to Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” which of course led me to thinking about a conversation Shawn Smucker and I had about writing a serial novel in which a middle-manager from middle America realizes that he is the Antichrist. This was no less than a five-minute diversion.

This is how the mind wanders in prayer.

Prayer, meditation, contemplation—why are we so distractible in it? When communicating with the Divine Love, shouldn’t we be more attuned?

Last night, I read Amber’s latest newsletter, “A Witness, a Work, and a Word: For When You Might Not Feel It.” (This is a subscriber’s only newsletter, but I promise it’s worth your time and a few bucks.) In it, she shared of Jacques Fesch, a twentieth century French murderer:

“Yesterday morning I read an excerpt from one the Prison Letters of “Servant of God” Jacques Fesch, who was a thief and a murderer in the 1950s. It was in prison that he came to believe and understand how very loved he was by God, and as he awaited his death sentence, he spent his meantime writing letters, testifying to that love in such a profound and real way that the church in France seeks his beatification. Again, I am a sucker for the saints, particularly the ones who know good and well how easy it is to pull a gun on a man.

In the excerpt, Fesch discusses his current season, how hard it is to pray, his mind wandering, a lack of concentration, a stagnation, and what feels like spiritual paralysis. Oh, Brother Fesch, I feel you. He says he had experienced such lack of clarity and emotion before and knew that the recovery on the other side of it brought him to a state much greater than the one he was in before he’d fallen so low. The healing he needed to receive required the obstacles he was enduring. It’s faith that can say a thing like that in the midst of such loss and such expectation for further loss. He knew he’d be walking to a guillotine one day.”

To be human is to be distracted in prayer, whether we’d like to admit it or not. To be human, though, is also to keep pursuing the practice of prayer, even if our lot is the guillotine.