Mama Monday #59

Good words from a favorite writer: 

For Those Who Struggle With Prayer

I grew up hearing stories of “travailing prayer,” moving accounts of rigorous prayer warriors who spent hours in their prayer closets (figurative and literal) laboring over the sick, the heartbroken, the cataclysmic state of the world. The travailing image is potent and beautiful, emerging from the prophet Isaiah describing prayer as “a pregnant woman about to give birth, writhing and crying in her pain.”

One man fasted and prayed 40 days and nights, nothing but water and juice and persistence, and the stories of his experience were moving. A missionary couple, serving orphans a meal with the last scraps of food in the cabinet, pleaded with God as they did every day—and within the hour a delivery truck pulled up with a full load of donated goods. Grandmothers spent hours on their knees every morning beseeching God to help their grandchildren who were struggling and their litany of friends in the hospital or grieving or alone.

These stories were inspiring, but they also felt heroic. I tried really hard to follow the example, but focusing more than 10 minutes was herculean. My prayer list took all ofo 3 minutes, then I was lost. In college, I went to our prayer room before dawn only to wake up, startled and embarrassed, when another student shuffled into the room. Few things triggered guilt and shame like my failure to pray the way others prayed.

A friend told me the story of his grandmother whose whole life had been so shaped by prayer. After dementia had ravaged her mind, she didn’t know what year it was or whether she’d had breakfast that morning, but when someone asked her to pray, the old words flowed free and sharp without a single pause or misstep. Prayer was so deep inside her not even malady could wipe it away.

This is what I missed for so long: prayer’s dynamo (the point of the whole shebang) is not the regimens or the rigor but rather allowing prayer to get deep inside us. And what’s often missing in these conversation is the us part. Prayer doesn’t get inside me, or you, the way it did for my 40-day fasting friend, nor the woman who remembered prayers even after she forgot her children’s names. Prayer is how we discover God in the deepest places of our being, in the unique aches of our own soul.

This is why a good question to help us begin to learn how to pray (a question I learned from Eugene Peterson) is what do you love? If we follow our true loves long enough, into our depths, we’ll inevitably trace our way back to God. Prayer is how we follow the breadcrumbs. Deep prayer happens when we recognize God as the core of our longings, our pleasures, our joys. This explains why some of my most meaningful prayer is when I’m walking or hiking, or when I’m encountering beautiful words. God finds me in these places. God underwrites everything. My work is to open my heart and receive.

We suffocate prayer when we think of it primarily as a discipline or a schedule, or an achievement of religious green berets. Prayer is a way of being, a way of learning over years how to live attentive to God. How else could we imagine prayer if it’s something we do “without ceasing”? We’ve seriously misunderstood prayer if it’s become a heavy burden, a millstone around our weary, exhausted neck. We do not “get prayer right” — let that entire methodology and weight die a thousand deaths. Prayer is how we continually wake up to what is real, to God. Prayer is how our heart grows larger and larger in grace’s wide country. Prayer is liberation.

I said what was missing in the conversation was us, but that’s not exactly right. Too much emphasis on us only becomes another burden from a different angle. This is why I’m grateful for the Book of Common Prayer, where I’m welcomed into the communion of the faithful across centuries. While there’s always room for my individual prayers, I don’t have to concoct a plan or rely on my diligence. I can just pray. With others.

But however we pray, we are not the end. God is. Our discipline isn’t the point. Our fervor isn’t primary. God is the start and the finish. I recently heard Rowan Williams say, “Prayer is God returning to God through us.” Do you feel the relief?

Prayer is where the Spirit inside us animates our mind and longings and even our grief and returns everything to God. Prayer happens through us, through our words and silence, through our action and our love. But God is the start and the finish.

Be free.

-Winn Collier