Hello everyone.  I hope you are well and keeping safe.  "Monday, Monday, So good to me.  Monday mornin it was all I hoped it would be!" Do you remember that song?  It was written by John Philips and recorded by the Mamas & Papas.  Philips said he wrote it in 20 minutes.  In 1967, the Mamas & Papas won a Grammy award for it.  It's kind of a schizophrenic song (Monday is good, Monday makes me cry), just my opinion! 

 Sorry for being silly.  On a serious note, here is a great insight about praying when it is difficult to do so by 

Fr Ronald Rolheiser taken from his website.  Enjoy the rest of Monday! 

"We tend to think of prayer far too piously. It is rarely unadulterated altruistic praise issuing forth from a focused attention that’s grounded in gratitude and in an awareness of God. Most of the time our prayer is a very adulterated reality – and all the more honest and powerful because of that. For instance, one of our great struggles with prayer is that it’s not easy to trust that prayer makes a difference. We watch the evening newscasts, see the entrenched polarization, bitterness, hatred, self-interest, and hardness of heart that are seemingly everywhere, and we lose heart. 

How do we find the heart to pray in the face of this? What, inside of our prayer, is going to change any of this?   While it is normal to feel this way, we need this important reminder: prayer is most important and most powerful precisely when we feel it is most hopeless – and we are most helpless. Why is this true? It’s true because it’s only when we are finally empty of ourselves, empty of our own plans and our own strength that we’re in fact ready to let God’s vision and strength flow into the world through us. 

Prior to feeling this helplessness and hopelessness, we are still identifying God’s power too much with the power of health, politics, and economics that we see in our world; and are identifying hope with the optimism we feel when the news looks a little better on a given night. If the news looks good, we have hope; if not, why pray? But we need to pray because we trust in God’s strength and promise, not because the newscasts on a given night offer a bit more promise.  Indeed, the less promise our newscasts offer and the more they make us aware of our personal helplessness, the more urgent and honest is our prayer. We need to pray precisely because we are helpless and precisely because it does seem hopeless. Inside of that we can pray with honesty, perhaps even through clenched teeth."