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Prayer

Honesty and transparency is something I genuinely long for, so it's only fair to disclose here that which I've privately held for many years. I don't understand prayer. This isn't some blithe ministerial bait-and-switch. I really, really don't get it. I'd like to think of Anselm's famous statement "fides quorum intellectum"--faith seeking understanding--but this only gives a sort of vapid intellectualism to my woeful inadequacy to give words or expression to the genuine needs and petty desires of myself and the people around me.

I've genuinely tried to diagnose this problem, and it wasn't until recently that my wife managed to help me realize my aversion to prayer stems directly from my own "collapse narrative." That's another story in and of itself, but suffice it to say that at some point one must confront the realities of higher textual criticism and all it's claims on Scripture. For most college and seminary students, this is the point at which one's faith is exposed for alleged certainty and the rock-solid foundations crumble like a parlor game of stacking bricks.

Before the collapse I prayed fervently--violently at times. I can remember sitting in a courtyard around midnight as a 16 year old talking with friends as we shared our struggles--I actually thought I might be able to understand how Jesus could bust a few capillaries in Gethsemane. I didn't feel far from that that night. 

After the collapse I confess I couldn't really figure out (and for that matter, I still can't) how or what to pray for. Some of this is theological--if God has it all figured out, what effect could prayer have and conversely the thought that if God is swayed by petition then that hardly seems fair. But a far more likely explanation is that I just wasn't sure what, if anything, was to be accomplished by it. In this case, prayer became purely existential. I consoled myself with a somewhat apocryphal quote of C.S. Lewis from the film Shadowlands
(click to 9:22 on the clip below to see)

The dialogue says simply: 
Harry: Christopher can scoff, Jack, but I know how hard you've been praying; and now God is answering your prayers. 
C. S. Lewis: That's not why I pray, Harry. I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God, it changes me.

When I was in seminary I was asked to lead Community Prayers for Chapel one day. I remember quoting this exact line and saying "We pray because we are helpless--we pray because we need to get it out of us, whether or not God hears us, unsure if God hears us, ultimately in spite of whether God is listening or not." I felt awkward about it afterward, and even now regret forcing my own pain on others. I was at the water fountain right after the service when John Claypool spoke to me. "What you said about prayer--what Lewis said--is right you know. Everyone offers these things up, but we don't know where they're going, what they're doing--but they get us through--we're just reaching at Mystery"

I felt some consolation in that, but I'm not sure I've pushed past that. Friends, professors and colleagues all extolled to me the benefits of spiritual formation but I dismissed it as "un-academic". We always push away that which we fear, which goads our inadequacies puts them front and center for all the world to see. Praying in public wasn't daunting because it was an opportunity to give a lite sermon, or, at best, a form of public poetry that happened to thank God for the things already received and petition God for the outcome I desired. It was selfish, unhealthy and flat out wrong.

Since that time I have struggled all the more. About a year ago I found a wonderful Jesuit resource that provides a disciplined, guided prayer process online. I could easily rattle off endless quotes and images that God has used to move me to action or inspiration, thoughtfulness or repentance. I could also tell you just as many times I have clicked my mouse through those pages as fast as I possibly could. 

I know that this impulse comes from something I heard many years ago. A campus minister spoke to our Baptist Student Union (as it was known back then) and described himself as "half cynic, half mystic." That stuck with me, mostly because I felt the tension of my unyielding academic side pulling over and against my mystic side which was, and, I am glad to say, is now all the more fascinated by the person of Jesus. Trying to reclaim that mystic side has been an uphill battle, but I've found some fellow cynics-turned-mystics along the way. In his book Letters on Prayer, Michael Paul Gallagher restates the words of Anthony DeMello, a Jesuit priest and psychotherapist.

"De Mello contrasted this Judgement God with what he called the God of Welcomes. I can still remember him describing God getting excited like a child because you are coming to pray, ‘God has all these angels with golden trumpets. They are to get ready to welcome you. God has this infinite, red carpet: roll it out, he says to another group of angels.’ And De Mello ended by challenging his audience. ‘You think my pictures are silly and childish. I tell you, they are much, more true than the images you may have, especially if you have some picture in the back of your head of a distant and bored and sulky God. Perhaps even after years of theology studies, false pictures of God can still lurk in our imaginations, so that we too become false. We put on prayer masks. We do our religious duty. We try to bargain with this Boss or placate this judge. We have forgotten that the Lord takes delight in people. In more ordinary language, 'God is thrilled’ to see us. So get yourselves ready patiently. But remember the true God of love to whom you come. Then, some days at least, those ten minutes of yours can flow naturally and easily, and most importantly of all, leave you strengthened for a life of love.”


More recently I read of the poem of George Herbert, an Anglican minister and poet who managed to pen a poem devoid of punctuation or rhyme scheme before E.E. Cummings was a glint in his father's eye. Apparently poets and professors speculate on the inspiration of  Herbert's heretofore unseen "free-form". I think it far more likely that Herbert knew what everyone who prays knows--and what I am s-l-o-l-y learning. Prayer is images and daydreams, visions and dirt under your fingernails. It is conversation and laughter, wordless grief and bitter tears. It is strife, it is conflict and yet it is peace and irrational, unspeakable calm. It is, above all, "something understood."

Prayer 
by George Herbert
Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age,
         God's breath in man returning to his birth,
         The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth
Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,
         Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
         The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
         Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
         Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
         Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
         The land of spices; something understood.