Prayer Reflections

"To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world."

--Karl Barth

Prayer is "the soul's blood" (seventeenth century poet George Herbert). What would it mean for the church to be a "house of prayer," even to become "The Lord's Prayer?" What would it mean for believers to move from "faith in praying" to "praying in faith?"

John Wesley learned from his mother Susannah not to have a good opinion of anyone who did not spend at least four hours a day in prayer. "God does nothing save in answer to prayer," Wesley wrote. In this article we shall explore what theologians mean when they say Lex Orandi Lex Credendi, or "the rule of prayer is the rule of faith. "

II Thessalonians 1:11: "We pray always for you, that our God would count you worthy of this calling, and fulfill all the good pleasure of his goodness, and the works of faith with power."

When Francis Asbury, and generations of Methodist itinerants or revivalists after him came to town, one of the first things they did as they dismounted from their horses was to ask whatever lay persons met them: "Got any praying people around?" "Where are the praying people here?"

In his study called Crucified Love: The Practice of Christian Perfection (Nashville:Abingdon, 1989), Robin Maas points out how,

"Just as it makes no sense to tell someone, 'I love you more than anything in the world, but I just can't manage to find the time to be with you,' it makes no sense to claim that we have no time for prayer. When we love someone we naturally want to spend time together; and when we are 'in love' with someone, we make the time to be with our beloved." (49)

The mystic Guigo II talked about four rungs in our ladder to God. In ascending order, they are Studying, Meditation, Prayer, Contemplation.

Studying: True study is searching the mind of God. Reading the Bible and books, listening to music, watching films, even composing on a computer can be forms of prayer. In fact, there is an ancient Jewish proverb that "An hour of study is in the eyes of God as an hour of prayer." Another proverb has "Those who sing pray twice." For Gregory, the fourth-century bishop of Nyssa in Cappadocia, the life of the mind is to know God. The first approach to God is the marinating of our lives in the Word of God as it interacts with the world in which we live.

Meditation: Meditation is communicating with God. It is our assuming the initiative with God. Prayer is not best seen as talking to God. The Bible says to pray without ceasing. It does not say to talk without ceasing. The Christian church has largely lost, to its detriment, the classic distinction between meditatio and prayer and contemplatio.

Meditation refers to quiet thinking and reflection about life and God. In the prayer-life of early monks and nuns, novices were sequestered from the community for meditation training, so important was its value. Meditatio included mental exercises such as memorization of scripture, biblical imaging and reflection, and focusing the mind through the mantric repetition of the Jesus Prayer: "Lord have mercy."

Prayer: Prayer is God assuming the initiative with us. The difference between meditation and prayer clarifies our complaint about prayers having poor connections, or it seeming as if no one is "listening." Speaking technically, God does not answer prayers. We answer prayers. Meditation is our speaking and God hearing. Prayer is God speaking and we hearing. Prayer is God questioning us and us answering with what we do with our lives. Meditation is asking God for help and direction. Prayer is receiving God's help and direction. Prayer is not us trying to grab hold of God. Prayer is God coming to us, giving us the divine through the "flowers in the field" and the neighbors across the street. Meditation is our talking to and thinking about God. Prayer is God talking to and thinking about us. Evagrius of Pontus even defined prayer as "putting away of thoughts." Because any thought is necessarily less than God, we endanger God's coming to us by the mental shaping of the mind.

Prayer is the soul's love for God. Prayer is not our asking for favors, or presenting God with some shopping list for the kingdom, or begging God and bargaining with God to give us what we want. In the words of New York City's Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church preacher R. Maurice Boyd: "The problem with making bargains with God is that the best you ever get is what you bargained for." Prayer is offering ourselves to be what God wants. Prayer is not asking what God can do for me, but listening to what God can do in the world through me. Prayer is not something you do that gives you a better day or week. Prayer is something you are that makes you a better disciple, that transforms you as a person. In prayer we listen. In meditation we talk.

To pray as Jesus prayed is to practice presencing God - listening and talking, sleeping and waking, sitting and walking.

Contemplation: A Greek monk described the journey of prayer in this way: "When I begin it is ME and GOD. Then it becomes GOD and ME. Then it becomes only GOD." Contemplation, the highest form and most mystical stage of prayer, is the point at which we go beyond consciousness of praying. "When we contemplate," someone has said, "we no more know that we are contemplating than we are conscious of our own sleeping." Contemplation releases the soul from thought and image. It is the closest we come to union with God.