For me it feels natural to converse with the entity who I am so in awe with. Just like most Christians and even Non-Christians (it would seem) there are times when I 'pray' without necessarily meaning to. I get natural outpourings of worry or pain, the desire to share my doubts and seek answers in someone or something that, if there and if willing, would choose to hear and answer my uncertainties and bring me to a point of resolve.
This book came highly recommended by friends and I too am inspired by the honest wisdom that Yancey writes and his gift in worded illustration and storytelling. If you are in anyway bewildered by the strange art of prayer I know of no other book that can take one from the surface to the deep freedom bringing waters of conversing with God.
Just As We Are
Sometimes I wonder if the words I use are the least important part of prayer. Who am I? And who is God? If I can answer those two questions, the words I pray recede. Prayer invites me to lower defences and present the self that no other person fully knows to a God who already knows.
I begin with confession not in order to feel miserable, rather to call to mind a reality I often ignore. When I acknowledge where I stand before a perfect God, it restores the true state of the universe. Confession simply establishes the proper ground rules of creatures relating to their creator.
Prayer forces me to catch sight of this my true state. In Henri Nouwen's words, 'To pray is to walk in the full light of God, and to say simply, without holding back, "I am human and you are God." At that moment, conversion occurs, the restoration of the true relationship. A human being is not someone who once in a while makes a mistake, and God is not someone who now and then forgives. No, human beings are sinners and God is love.'
In the presence of the Great Physician, my most appropriate contribution may be my wounds.
For a time I did not appreciate humility, which I confused with negative self-image. Humble Christians seemed to grovel, parrying compliments with an 'It's not me, it's the Lord' attitude. Since then, however, I have seen true humility at work in the people I most admire. For them humility is an ongoing choice to credit God, not themselves for their natural gifts and then to use those gifts in God's service.
The God Who Is
My feelings of God's presence - or God's absence - are not the presence or the absence. Whenever I fixate on techniques, or sink into guilt over my inadequate prayers, or turn away in disappointment when a prayer goes unanswered, I remind myself that prayer means keeping in contact with God who is already present.
Though needs may drive me to prayer, there I come face to face with my greatest need: an encounter with God's own self.
Why Pray?
Words fail to capture the enormity of descent when a sovereign God takes up residence in a person and says, in effect, 'Don't hurt me. Don't push me away.'
For most of us prayer serves as a resource to help in a time of testing or conflict. For Jesus, it was the battle itself. Once Gethsemane prayers had aligned Him with the Father's will, what happened next was merely the means to fulfil it. It was Gethsemane where the Jesus sweat drops of blood not in Pilate's Hall.
Partnership
God did not design this planet as an arena in which to demonstrate natural law-bending skills, much as we humans may crave that at times. Mainly, God wants to relate to creatures personally, to love and be loved. Restoring such a relationship has been painfully slow, fraught with error, and punctuated by fits and starts. Compared to Old Testament stories of miracles and triumph, it often seems like regression. To the contrary the New Testament presents a long but steady advance in intimacy with God.
Does Prayer Change God
Why pray? Evidently God likes to be asked. God certainly does not need our wisdom or our knowledge, nor even the information contained in our prayers ('your Father knows what you kneed before you ask Him'). But by inviting us into the partnership of creation, God also invites us into relationship. God is love, said the apostle John. God does not merely have love or feel love. God is love, and cannot not love. As such, God yearns for relationship with the creatures made in his image.
By using prayer rather than other, more direct means, God once again chooses the most freedom-enhancing style of acting in the world. God waits to be asked, in some inscrutable way making God's activity on earth contingent on us. Does the kingdom, or 'God's will', advance more slowly because of that choice? Yes in the same way parents slow their pace when the youngest child is learning to walk. Their goal is to equip someone else, not themselves.
Ask, Seek, Knock
The real value of persistent prayer is not so much that we get what we want as that we become the person we should.
Yearning For Fluency
For years I resisted a regular routine of prayer, believing that communication with God should be spontaneous and free. As a result I prayed infrequently and with little satisfaction. Eventually I learned that spontaneity often flows from discipline.
Prayer Grammar
But consider what Rabbi Abraham Heschel said to the members of his synagogue who complained that the words of the liturgy did no express what they felt. He told them that it was not that the liturgy should express what they feel, but that they should learn to feel what the liturgy expressed.
Tongue-Tied
Prayer expresses a relationship between two persons, one of whom happens to be God. Reality, not flawless technique, is the goal.
Ask young parents what is the correct way for their toddlers to approach them and you will get a puzzled look. Correct way?
Unanswered Prayer: Whose Fault?
Apart from prayers impossible to answer - those that involve a logical contradiction such as opposing sides praying for victory, or farmers and athletes praying for conflicting weather patterns - what would happen if God answered every prayer?
By answering every possible prayer, God would in effect abdicate, turning the world over to us to run. History shows how we have handled the limited power granted us: we have fought wars, committed genocide, fouled the air and water, destroyed forests, established unjust political systems, concentrated pockets of superfluous wealth and grinding poverty. What if God gave us automatic access to supernatural power? What further havoc might we wreak?
Someone asked Mahatma Gandhi, 'If you were given the power to remake the world, what would you do first?' He replied: 'I would pray for power to renounce that power.'
Jesus actually did renounce that power while on earth, refusing the tempter's three offers: to dazzle the crowds with a miracle, to rule the world, to protect himself from harm. He exercised supernatural power, yes, but on a local and not global stage, prompted by compassion and not spectacle, and never self-promotion or self-protection. Jesus' life, in fact, shows the delicate balance required when supernatural power impinges on this world.
Unanswered Prayer: Living With The Mystery
God could act alone, ignoring us and our prayers. Or, God could leave matters entirely in our hands with no direct involvement in human history. The first option contradicts the whole motive behind creating personal beings made in God's image; the second option is too ominous to contemplate.
We have, instead, a relationship with God based on constant negotiation. We inform God what we think should be done in the world, and in the process God reminds us of our own role in doing it. Rarely do we get everything we want, and I imagine the same holds true for God.
Prayer And Physical Healing
'God of all comfort', one of the most beautiful descriptions of God, appears in Paul's letter to the Corinthians. God offers us a minimum of protection and a maximum of support, as one minister wryly put it. Paul, however, moves the emphasis to us: God 'comforts us in all out troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.'
What To Pray For
Sometimes there is no happy ending, and we're simply suspended in grief. When I'm with suffering people, I feel like a deep-sea diver accompanying them into the depths. Come up too fast, and you'll dangerously decompress. We need to stay with the grief for a while, feel it, let it out. Maybe we can see things through tears that we can't see dry-eyed.
Flannery O'Connor, a brilliant writer struck down before the age of forty after a battle with lupus, lamented, 'I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow.' She added these words, amazingly in light of the sufferings she endured: 'Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies.'
Prayer And Me
With prayer, much of the benefit takes place behind the scenes, beneath the level of conscious awareness, in ways difficult to measure. The very process of 'wasting time' with God changes me on the inside. A child does not decide, 'I think I will imitate Dad', and then go about practicing posture, mannerisms and voice inflections that bear an uncanny resemblance to his dad. He absorbs family traits unconsciously, by sustained contact.
We wait for what is waiting for, and in the process learn patience.
Prayer And Others
We defeat our enemies by loving them, and prayer activates that love. If I nurse a grudge and have not the strength to forgive, I present to God that wound, along with the one who inflicted it, and ask for strength I cannot supply on my own. (Could this be why Jesus prayed, 'Father forgive them...' from the cross rather than pronouncing, 'I forgive you'?) In effect, I transfer the wearisome burden to One far better equipped to carry it. Over time, the wound shows tender signs of healing. God works in me what I could not work in myself.
Prayer And God
The prayerful person takes ordinary things that happen and moves them 'into the Light'. Everything gets realigned. The down-and-out becomes a child of God. The opening for revenge becomes an opening for grace, the temptation to greed a temptation to generosity. At first it seems a split life to perceive things on two levels at once. With practice, it seems the only whole life.
Jesus likened prayer to a child approaching the Father. A child who crawls into her father's lap with a fantasy Christmas list may not get everything she desires. But the very fact that she crawled into his lap, making known her deepest desires, helps cement the bond of love the father cherishes above all else. We do far better to act like a trusting child, presenting foolish requests and letting the Father make judgments, than to fret in advance over appropriate petitions.
I pray in astonished belief that God desires an ongoing relationship. I pray in trust that the act of prayer is God's designated way of closing the vast gulf between infinity and me. I pray in order to put myself in the stream of God's healing work on earth. I pray as I breathe - because I can't help it. Prayer is hardly a perfect form of communication, for I, an imperfect, material being who lives on an imperfect, material planet am reaching out for a perfect, spiritual Being. Some prayers go unanswered, a sense of God's presence ebbs and flows, and often I sense more mystery than resolution. Nevertheless I keep at it, believing with Paul that, 'Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.'
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