10,000 Hours, Prayer, and Mother Teresa

Now that this is written, I see it is one of my "pondering" posts. Ready to follow those connection? Don't say I didn't warn ya. It's long, baby, long!

... ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert -- in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is the equivalent to roughly three hours per day, or twenty hours per week, of practice over ten years. Of course, this doesn't address why some people don't seem to get anywhere when they practice, and why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

Dr. Daniel Levitin, Your Brain on Music

My husband came across this concept when reading Your Brain on Music and it resonated. This is because we are at that age of life when we have put in 10,000 hours and more during our careers. It is also because he was trying to pinpoint how best to get across the "practice, practice, practice" concept to a new employee. This did it in a nutshell. Once we knew about the 10,000 hours it seemed as if we saw it everywhere. Often it was not communicated using that exact phrase which has been picked up by pop-sociologist Malcolm Gladwell and now is relatively common. However, the concept always was there. It is one that mankind knew for most of our history, that to be very good, a master of something, one must continually strive to be better. In other words: practice.

I was thinking over my New Year's resolution to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, in essence three times a day using Magnificat which I already receive to use for our priest's weekly scripture study class. (For more specifics about the Liturgy of the hours, look to Will Duquette at The View from the Foothills and Jen at Conversion Diary who blogged about their experiences taking up this daily prayer.) I have said before that I don't make New Year's resolutions which I don't in terms of something big and new to change my life. What I do is tend to make that one of the three or four times annually that I renew various resolutions to incrementally move forward. Occasionally, I actually do move forward. Which is so gratifying that I can then reset that resolution up a notch for more improvement.

A couple of days ago, that 10,000 hours and daily prayer collided in my brain. I suddenly realized, "How do we get good at prayer? We need 10,000 hours!" Perhaps I don't need to tell you the simultaneous feelings of triumphant discovery and of dismay that resounded. After all, those of us in regular life are unlikely to spend an entire hour a day at prayer. I mean to say ... 10,000 days ... why that's ... wait, 365 days a year ... where's a calculator ... oh never mind, I already know the answer. Oy veh, that's a whole lotta prayer!

Right. Steady, daily prayer, for our whole lives. Got it.

Now it isn't as if I haven't known this, read it, heard it around, sagely nodded my head at it. After all, who in their right mind would think that they could get to know someone really well with maybe 10, 15 minutes a day talking to that person? And with us doing most of the talking?

It is not that I do not pray. I do in little bits here and there all day long, but it is about the mundane things of every day life, the "help me to stay patient" that in a marriage would be something like, "can you take the trash out, honey?" Hard to build and maintain a deep relationship on that.

Somehow combining all this with the actual idea of 10,000 hours hit hard. I carried it around with me at the same time as it made it much more compelling to pick up that Magnificat thrice daily and make a serious effort to find silence and to dive deeper than I have been lately into listening as well as speaking.

Then last night I was reading Mother Teresa's Secret Fire in the most comfortable of circumstances. A cold, sleeting night outside, Hannah's head on my shoulder as she napped. Occasionally I would read her "this great little piece" from the book (she may have been napping in self defense). Rose leaning on Tom's shoulder on another couch as they worked together on a problem in exporting a video clip with a transparent background mask (or maybe without ... I couldn't tell) and their voices occasionally good-naturedly rising in: "Oh, you film people don't get it ..." "Oh, you graphics people ..."

I meant to only read one chapter but was drawn on and on. It is written that way, so simple but compelling at the same time. The book tells us of how Mother Teresa was transformed by God and then leads us to consider how we are called for that same sort of transformation. The chapter about the mystery of prayer didn't hit me like a brick but gently was integrated into my previous thinking as a natural progression. The following excerpts are cobbled together from the chapter to give you a taste. In a nutshell let me give you this summary: "What can be more important than prayer?"

"My secret is simple...I pray."

She knew that everything stands or falls depending on the depth of one's prayer. Our transformation depends entirely on God and, therefore, on our conscious contact with him -- and so, "What can be more important than prayer?"

If prayer unlocks the door to our encounter, then the key that unlocks the door to prayer is faith -- the sum of our freely chosen, actively applied convictions about god. But faith is more than the sum content of belief -- it is above all the act of belief. It is the act of clinging in the night to an unseen sun, and by that simple act bringing the fullness of that sun within us; as St. Paul writes, "[May] Christ ... dwell in your hearts by faith" (Eph 3:17). Faith is a virtue; it is that God-driven, beyond-human power ("virtue," from the Latin virtus, meaning "power") to place ourselves, with or without feeling, in direct and intimate contact with the very God in whom we believe:

Prayer is the fruit of faith. If we have faith, we will want to pray.

[...]

Faith determines the boundaries and the horizon of our entire spiritual life. We do not need more information about our faith, as much as we need more actual faith -- more conscious faith-contact in our daily prayer-encounters with God. The dimensions of our faith become the exact dimensions, large or small, through which God and his love must pass in order to reach us. God's gifts are not a reward for our faith; they are instead the direct consequence of our faith, the result of opening with the faith-portal between our soul and the Almighty.

[...]

We cannot change ourselves, no matter how long or hard we try. Love along changes us. We can only be loved into a new life -- and most powerfully, by the One who is love. The source of all love, source of all the goodness we saw in Mother Teresa, abides within each one of us. Were we able to interrupt our hurried lives and take the time to go within, we would gradually find ourselves caught up in this tide of divinizing, transforming love. But this process can only be started through prayer. It is only in prayer that we access god's unlimited love, and unleash its transforming effects in our lives.

This transformative process begins in the innermost recesses of the soul and moves outward -- to embrace thoughts, emotions, activities, and the whole of one's being. That Mother Teresa's transformation came about through prayer was confirmed in her own words: "My secret is simple -- I pray." ...

There is a simple key to fruitful prayer. It is to first take the time to touch God in faith before we engage in prayer, to be in a state of contact with him before "saying" prayers. Simply put, it is to "pray before you pray."

This simple practice can change our experience of prayer. This may seem like a small adjustment, but it opens us onto a reality as large and powerful as God himself. Without conscious faith, our prayer is not true contact, not prayer at all, but simply cogitation. Transformation is God's free gift, but it is only our free act of contact in faith that makes that gift possible. We will still encounter struggles and distractions -- but we will at least be touching the hem of his robe, however briefly, every day of our lives.

[...]

Love to pray, feel often during the day the need for prayer and take the trouble to pray. If you want to pray better, you must pray more. Prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God's gift of Himself. Ask and seek and your heart will grow big enough to receive Him and keep Him as your own.

In other words, quit thinking and talking about prayer and take the time to go do it. Repeatedly. Faithfully in faith.

As I say, I already know this. In fact, at various times in my life I actually have done it. However, it is so easy to fall away from doing into talking about something as if it were being done.

Perhaps in addition to that 10,000 hours, I need 10,000 reminders. At any rate, I will begin again ... I have at least 10,000 hours of listening and conversation to achieve and I need to start now.

One other thing. As I read that section about Mother Teresa's transformation I thought, "But I don't want to be transformed into Mother Teresa." Of course, that was a knee-jerk reaction. We all know the answer, right? The one that shot into my head immediately. "I don't want you to be Mother Teresa. I want you to be you."

Yes. Time to get started.