Dueling the Darkness With Pocket Prayers: Small Acts of Spiritual Bravery in the Age of Invisible Wars
There is, beneath the surface of the days and the breastbone and the busy and brash noise of our age, a question quietly pulsing: What if everything the soul suffers or loves or longs for is itself a kind of wrestling with the Divine? Consider this—let the mind and heart take a breath, a real breath, and wonder: What is spiritual warfare now, when the battle is not against legions charging across fields but against the silent invasions of apathy, distraction, the thousand needle-pricks of doubt and loneliness and gentle, eroding cynicism? Might it be that beneath every distraction is an invitation—yes, maybe even from God—to listen deeper, to seek the shimmer under the scum, to ready oneself for the honest and messy work of prayer? What would happen if, for a moment, we believed that attention and love—stubborn, daily, battered—could change a heart, a family, a world?
Let’s begin not with answers, but with curiosity, and a flicker of hope that spiritual combat is not for saints alone or prophets with fire in their eyes, but for anyone who aches for meaning at breakfast, or blurts out a prayer stuck in traffic, or finds, in the tumble of the days, an echo of God’s call.
Paul tells us, in his punchy letter to a bustling and baffled Ephesus—a city of magicians and yearning souls—that our battle is not against “flesh and blood” but against principalities and powers, those fretful and silent tides tugging at the heart’s edge (Ephesians 6:12). It’s tempting to picture war with swords and shields, but look closer: the real drama is quieter and stranger. The soul is drawn, always, toward Christ, and always, something tugs the other way.
Church wisdom says this is spiritual warfare, the contest that happens while you make coffee or stare at your phone a little too long, or scowl—again—at the news. The Catechism (CCC 409) says: “This dramatic situation of ‘the whole world which is in the power of the evil one’ (1 Jn 5:19) makes man’s life a battle.” It’s not a metaphor, but a description, a diagnosis as sharp as any doctor’s chart.
Prayer is the sword, the shield, the battered old helmet of this kind of battle. But not the kind of prayer that booms or thunders or postures—no, not that. The kind parents love is more slipshod, more heartbeat-like, stitched of the ordinary murmuring, the thousand whispered thank-yous and help-mes and please God, let my children be safe.
What advice from the saints? Consider Teresa of Avila, who marveled at God in silence and rolling laughter, who found that a distracted mind—her “wild horses”—could be reined only by gentleness and perseverance. The Rosary, that river of Hail Marys, beads running through fingers while the world spins too fast. The Liturgy of the Hours, which keeps time for the world when it forgets who made time. These are not ancient relics; they are shields for today’s storms, and they absolutely can be prayed with a phone in hand, if that is what is needed to arm oneself against the noise outside and the noise inside.
Secularism is not simply a monster; it is a mist. It’s in the way the world is perpetually on. Notifications. The way every answer is “out there” except the one that is in here. Joseph Ratzinger (our very own Pope Benedict XVI) spoke slantwise of this—modern prayer as an act of resistance, the refusal to be drowned in information, the choice, moment by bumbling moment, to say Yes to God’s invitation.
Relativism, apathy, and the loneliness that sometimes fills even the digital crowd—these are the new battlegrounds. Sometimes, spiritual battle is just resisting the despair that nothing can change. Sometimes it is refusing to become iron-hearted.
Ignatius of Loyola, battle-scarred in both soul and body, had his famous rules for discernment: pay attention to consolation and desolation. Ask: where is the gentle nudge toward love, faith, hope? Which thoughts, which clicks, which words, pull us gently or not-so-gently away from God? His rules are tools for a world awash in choices, many very good, some thinly veiled distractions.
The end is the beginning: the home is a monastery, the table is an altar, the parent brushing a child’s hair is a contemplative in the thick of things. Here is where us parents might say that holiness is mostly about stumbling forward, holding onto hope by the fingertips, owning one’s holy inability and yet choosing, anyway, to reach toward the sacramental.
Let the armor of God be the old prayers said in new ways, the candor of confession, the act of gathering at a table, digital or wooden, to share the mysterious, stubborn hope that God is here. Reclaim prayer as a way of refusing to despair, a way of holding space open in the soul for God’s persistent, unreasonable, renewing love.
And if all that seems too much, then whisper what you can: God hears. And the saints? They fight with you. Maybe, sometimes, they just laugh and hold you in the light for a moment. That is battle enough.
References
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 409, 2725.
Ephesians 6:10–18, New Revised Standard Version.
St. Augustine, Confessions, Book X.
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, Q.83.
St. Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle.
St. Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, Rules for Discernment.
Ratzinger, J. (Benedict XVI). (2005). Deus Caritas Est.
von Balthasar, H. U. (1967). Prayer.
Mark D. Owens. (n.d.). Spiritual Warfare and the Church’s Mission According to Ephesians 6:10–17.
Church Life Journal. "Discernment for the Postmodern Condition".
Zondervan Academic. "What Ephesians 6 Says about Spiritual Warfare".
Loyola Marymount University. Essays on Ignatian Discernment.
