Stop Trying to Pray. Start Learning to See

For twenty years, I worked in humanitarian spaces that most people only see on the news.

War zones. Famine. Refugee camps. I believed with all my heart that love had to be active, embodied, urgent. And it did. There is a kind of sacredness in showing up where suffering is thick in the air. There is a clarity that comes when you are standing in the rubble with someone who has lost everything.

But over time, something in me began to fracture.

The work that once felt like devotion slowly became compulsion. I could not rest. I could not turn off the images. I began to believe that if I stopped moving, even for a moment, something catastrophic would happen. The world needed saving. And I had quietly made myself responsible for it.

Burnout does not arrive all at once. Until one day you realize you are exhausted in your bones and strangely hollow in your spirit. It creeps in and for me disguised itself as dedication. I had spent two decades giving my body and heart to the work of justice. What I had not learned was how to receive.

Around that time, I serendipitously met Father Thomas Keating. In one of our early conversations, he spoke about the contemplative life not as retreat from the world, but as the only way to remain human within it. He helped me see that my activism had outpaced my interior life. I knew how to serve but I sure didn’t know how to be still.

I dipped my toe in the murky waters of contemplative spirituality and started to develop practices that seemed awkward and were impossibly difficult for me. At first, it felt like failure. I was restless, distracted, and convinced I was doing it wrong. But slowly, something softened. I began to understand that prayer was not about performing but that it was about consenting to be seen.

A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting with my spiritual director, Father Larry Gillick, at Creighton University. We were talking about ordinary life like running errands, keeping up with email, and the mundane rhythms that fill most of our days.

I asked him, “How do I move from mindfulness to contemplation? How do I move the ordinary occurrences of my routine life into contemplative postures?”

We talked about attention. About how the invitation is not to add more spiritual practices to an already crowded life, but to allow the life we are already living to become the practice.

Prayer, at its heart, is not first about words. It is about attention. The Latin root of contemplation (contemplari) means “to gaze upon,” to look with reverence. Long before prayer became something we said, it was learning how to see. And more startling still, to consent to being seen.

Prayer is the slow awakening to the truth that Love is already looking at us, already knowing us, already waiting for our attention to soften and return the gaze.

When I began to understand prayer this way, something shifted. Contemplation was no longer an escape from the world but a deeper arrival within it. It was the courage to stay present long enough to notice what I usually rush past.

In contemplation, we discover that prayer is less about directing divine attention toward us and more about allowing ourselves to be addressed. To be seen by Love is not always comforting; it is often clarifying. Love sees what we avoid. Love sees what we have not yet forgiven. Love sees the parts of us still on the move, still restless, still searching.

And this is where pilgrimage quietly enters the story.

Pilgrimage emerges from this kind of prayer almost naturally. If contemplation is learning how to see and be seen, pilgrimage is what happens when that gaze refuses to remain still.

Pilgrimage is prayer that has left the room.

It is contemplation set in motion, the body joining the soul in its search for honesty and belonging. To walk. To leave. To cross thresholds. These are not metaphors added onto prayer; they are prayer, enacted.

We often imagine pilgrimage as something dramatic like the Camino de Santiago in Spain or the Kumano Kōdō in Japan, a far-off shrine or sacred mountain. But what if pilgrimage begins the moment we decide to pay attention to the ground beneath our feet? What if the walking our dogs is simply sacred? What if the conversation we’ve been avoiding is a threshold waiting to be crossed?

Pilgrimage is the ancient wisdom that sometimes the only way to pay attention is to move, and the only way to be found is to risk the road.

After burnout, I urgently needed contemplation because I had lost the capacity to see. I was moving too fast. I was trying to save the world without letting Love save me. Solitude, silence, and stillness taught me how to soften my gaze. and taught me how to receive being seen.

Now, years later, I am learning again that the contemplative life cannot remain confined to a chair in the corner of a room. It must spill into my walking, my driving, my conversations, my disappointments. The ordinary must become luminous.

The question is not whether we have time for prayer. The question is whether we are willing to see our lives as prayer.

Contemplation trains our attention. Pilgrimage tests it. Contemplation teaches us to stay. Pilgrimage teaches us to go. Both are movements of love. Both are invitations into honesty.

What if the dishes are part of the journey? What if the difficult relationship is the shrine? What if our fatigue is not a sign of failure but an invitation to a slower gaze?

We do not set out looking for holy ground. We realize, slowly, that it has always been under our feet.

And maybe the most courageous prayer we can offer today is simply learning how to see

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