How do I keep up my prayer life on vacation?

There is a difficult balance to maintain in the spiritual life between the daily discipline of our prayer and learning to love the Lord in our prayer with heart, mind and soul. Nothing brings this into starker relief than times of transition, such as when we travel, go on vacation or move residences. Anything that takes us out of our routine can stress what normally feels like a seamless rhythm of prayer, revealing the tension between discipline and devotion.

The admonition from St. Paul to “pray without ceasing” is an invitation to maintain a consistent relationship of dialogue with God, but this call to unceasing prayer is not as much about discipline as it is about a disposition of the heart. In fact, Christ underlines the importance of this approach to prayer in the Gospel of Luke, encouraging his disciples that they ought “to pray always and not to lose heart.” We can be assiduous in our discipline of prayer, but unless we pray with all of our heart, mind and soul, we risk developing a temperament akin to what Christ corrected in the Pharisees. In Matthew’s Gospel, Christ is adamant that those who live according to the covenant but are not transformed by fidelity to it are like “whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth.”

‘A surge of the heart’

Continued below.