Prayer...

“the real "work" of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me.
Henri Nouwen

Prayer is largely just being silent: holding the tension instead of even talking it through, offering the moment instead of fixing it by words and ideas, loving reality as it is instead of understanding it fully. Prayer is commonly a willingness to say “I don’t know.” We must not push the river, we must just trust that we are already in the river, and God is the certain flow and current.
Richard Rohr

She did not, in the ordinary sense, "pray for" Nancy; she did not presume to suggest to Omniscience that it would be a thoroughly good thing if It did; she merely held her own thought of Nancy stable in the midst of Omniscience.
Charles Williams

These quotes and countless others exalt a sort of prayer that while not in itself evil, (how could these activities be wrong?) is completely unknown in the Gospels, untaught by Jesus and, while it might be looked at as enriching one aspect of prayer, that is, adoration and/or contemplation, I argue is hardly the central essence at the core of our interactions with God. Do a quick online search for ‘the prayers of Jesus.’ Lists abound. And if you look through the lists, you will find none that fit into these admittedly pleasing molds. You might argue that records of the Lord praying all night indicate that he ‘must’ have been doing something like this, but that is pure conjecture. He does teach directly on the subject of prayer (“when you pray, pray like this:”), and, crudely, actually gives his disciples a prayer to pray, that only barely touches on what the above luminaries tell us is the very kernel, the very soul of prayer. (“Hallowed be thy Name.”)

I have said that these mystical statements about prayer are naturally pleasing. Of course they are. They evoke bright imagery of high thoughts and a place of peace and beauty where all is taken care of as we rest in God’s love. If this is where you often find yourself, I would not want to take that away from you, but I suggest that most of the time we are not there. Rather we merely yearn for it without actively doing the one thing that might give us a fleeting taste of that bliss. We yearn for it and we exalt these ideals by sharing these beautiful quotes on social media. And our fellow pilgrims “like” them and everyone goes “ahhh.” And if our prayers are more in the manner taught by Jesus, which I submit is far more intuitive and natural for needy souls such as ourselves, it’s possible we feel guilty that we are not silently flowing down the river as Richard Rohr says we should.

But it’s not merely their implied beauty that draws us to share and reshare words like this about prayer. I think the real reason is a bit more harsh. Prayer like this is never tested for results. By making this the central task of prayer, we completely avoid the nervous question of whether and how our prayers were actually answered. In this we diverge greatly from the one we claim as our rabbi, our model, our guru. Jesus prayed for things to happen, most of the time for things to happen as he spoke them. If he flowed in the river that has been described for us, and there is evidence that he did, he spoke out of his understanding of its current clearly as if what he said was the missing component that the river needed to accomplish its work. This is why I included the quote from Charles Williams. (It’s from one of his novels. The Greater Trumps can be read online at the Canadian and the Australian gutenberg sites. Good read!) The character of Sybil who can safely in the context of the book be called a sage and displays many worthy qualities, is unlike Jesus, because she never presumes to find out what ‘Omniscience’ might want to happen to her niece and therefore never actually prays anything specific for her. It’s the supplication equivalent of the other two quotes. Beautiful and without risk.

I think that the intimacy actually comes in the risk. I think that it comes in finding out one was wrong to pray a thing or wrong about what to pray. I think that the intimacy comes in the agony of asking for something and not getting it for a long while or maybe never. I write this from experience. I have found that the statement, “you can’t always get what you want” applies to my prayer life. But I have found that some of what I ask for, I get, and really, I recognize the hand of God in that. I think the intimacy comes in sensing what God wants prayed and praying that, having a sense that yes, he could have done it without my help, but that he hadn’t just the desired result but also my participation as the end in view. (Daddy, can I help?)

So I really don’t have any use for the “prayer” outlined above. What starts out looking beautiful becomes unattainable, off-topic and counter-intuitive.