I’ve come to a place in daily prayer where I feel like I’m only just getting started. In a way, this isn’t a surprising feeling. As we go deeper and deeper into a practice (into any kind of practice), we often find that the knowledge or wisdom that we have just worked so hard to gain is actually a fundamental for a far deeper knowledge or wisdom.

This is something we know from our daily lives. For instance, I play a Japanese board game called igo (people often say it looks like reversi, but it’s far more complicated and ancient), and I remember a time when I thought to myself, “Gee, I’m finally getting the hang of this game!” I tried playing an experienced player online and was soundly defeated. I wondered if, perhaps, I actually wasn’t all that good at all, but after playing a few more games, I realized that I was just as good as I had thought – it’s just that what I had discovered was only the start of another set of knowledge that I had only touched upon.

Beyond games, we know this “return” to being a beginner in our relationships as well. I’ve had many great conversations with my friends, and I’ve wondered how much better our friendship could get – then I experience my friends’ depth, consideration, love, and loyalty in ways that utterly surprise me. Marriage is similar, as is having children. Ordination is also constantly becoming deeper and more real with each passing Sunday. I think I understand what my ordination means and then, suddenly, someone needs me at their side in the hospital, or they need an ear to listen to their heart’s struggle, or even some joy in God needs to be mirrored in love and hope. Our lives, especially our lives as Christians, continue to deepen and deepen as we live them.

Prayer is no different, and yet I was surprised with the feeling that my prayers are just barely getting started. In a way, this is because having a stable and steady prayer life as a father of two young children can be difficult. No matter how early I try to wake up to pray, my children always seem to wake up just when I’m in the midst of silent prayer. I’ve taken to praying in the midst of the day, but there’s nothing like starting the day in silence before a candle or an icon. So, in a way, my patchwork type of prayer really is at a beginner’s stage.

This said, I have been praying as a priest for seven years, and praying within one’s ordination is something that immediately starts at a particular depth. It’s like praying within marriage or in the midst of being anointed, and I think it’s also like praying within one’s baptism or confirmation. There’s something to stand on when you pray in this way and with the sacraments under your feet. There’s more to grab on to. There’s more to steady yourself with. At least, that’s my experience of praying within the sacraments.

I’ve wondered if this “beginner’s prayer” is, in some way, a sense of just how long it takes me to settle down from the busyness of the day and enter into the silence before God. A reading from the Bible and six minutes of silent prayer (which is where I am at the moment) is not all that much, at least for me. My wife often teases me that I like things that go slowly, and in a way this isn’t a joke: I take a long time to get into things. I sink into books or moods slowly, and it takes me a long time to get out of them, too. This post alone might be evidence of how long it takes me to play with a single idea.

When I was younger, I was impatient with this part of me, but I’ve grown to love it. I think the slowness of my personality helps me see details of the worlds both inside and outside of me more clearly than if I could dip down into prayer more quickly. I often recommend that people that people should take more time with the individual parts of prayer, though I shouldn’t forget that everyone has their own way of praying. My slow methods might not be the ways of others – or, quite simply, not everyone has the time to sit and let their hearts sink slowly into the silence of God. I wish everyone did, but life is what it is. We get no more, nor any less, than we might want.

In the end, what I come to is this: there are endless things to think about and meditate on in one’s prayer life. And if I could recommend anything as a priest and as a Christian pray-er, it would be: do not be impatient with yourself or too quick to move on from one stage of your prayer life to another. Drink in all that prayer has to offer, even if it is very simple prayer that takes little time. Even whispered prayers at a stoplight have the depths of eternity.