Let Us Pray
There are many couples that I’ve worked with in therapy as well as in marriage classes that truly struggle to pray together. Often couple site many different reasons: we can’t find the time, we struggle with the way each other prays, it feels awkward, we often don’t remember to do it, and we don’t know what to pray. It’s a shame that many couples avoid praying together as a couple because it is such a powerful and intimate way to connect and to seek out the grace of God for our marital strength and healing.
While I know prayer is extremely important for married couples, I also recognize the need to help many of these same couples learn first how to simply communicate better with each other. I’ve learned that you can’t expect a couple to feel comfortable doing something as intimate as speaking to God together in a unified voice, when they can’t even talk with each other civilly nor do they feel safe or confident in sharing their own heart to their spouse.
As I teach my Building a Eucharistic Marriage course, we work on both at the same time. We work at improving couple’s ability to speak invitingly and to listen attentively. Then we encourage praying together first in simple ways (common prayers and scriptural readings), then in deeper ways through petitions, novenas, and heartfelt prayers (if they are comfortable).
It is important for couples to seek God’s help out for their marriage and to ask for His assistance. Our marriages come with an abundance of grace from God for us to tap into and to utilize for healing, strengthening, and flourishing our marital bond. But we have to ask and we have to be active in allowing it to form and reform our lives, because grace builds upon nature. So for those of you that see prayer as comparable as taking bad tasting medicine, finding that it “is not your favorite thing to do” or its “hard to swallow,” please know that it is the very thing that will have the most healing effect on our marital struggles. But with time, it gets easier, and for many of us, it is our joyous lifeline to our spouse through Christ!
ACTION STEP: This week, take time every day to pray with your spouse for your marriage, even if it is in simple ways. Seek guidance if you get stuck or don’t know where to start.