New Understandings of Prayer
Two women met unexpectedly one day in the parking lot of a local bookstore. One had a great bundle of books in her arms. “What in the world are you doing,” her friend asked, “opening your own bookstore?” “No,” said the woman, “these are all books about prayer. All my life I have been hearing about the importance of prayer, so I finally decided to learn how to pray. I have bought fourteen books on the subject. And not only that, I have signed up for two courses in prayer, one at my church and one at a friend’s church. I am really going to master the subject!”
Several weeks later, the friend ran into the woman again, this time at the grocery store. “How is the big project going?” the friend asked. “Have you learned to pray?” The woman hung her head and made a gesture of despair. “It was too complicated,” she said, “and I gave it up.” As an afterthought, she added, “Now I’m taking a course in yoga.” (What Jesus Taught about Prayer, a sermon by Dr. John Killinger, delivered at First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, February 14, 1988). Prayer is never to be mastered, but to be lived!
One football coach was in a rebuilding season. He was desperate. Someone asked him, “Say, Coach, I hear you keep a chaplain on the bench to pray for your team during games. Would you mind introducing me to him?” “I would be glad to,” said the coach. “Did you want to meet the offensive chaplain or the defensive chaplain?”
Often we turn to prayer when we are in distress, and we give up easily because we don’t receive the answers we want. Could we be asking the wrong questions? Jesus tells us that our prayer life is more fruitful when we just spend time learning to seek God. Prayer is a life always seeking God, waiting to be discovered. Jesus teaches us that prayer is something entirely different from bowing in a respectful attitude, asking God to supply our needs and fix our life with our desires. Prayer is not a vending machine. We do not pull levers in prayer, but a life in prayer expects something deeper of us.
Jesus challenges us to persist in perseverance, to patiently wait in the face of what appears to be an indifferent God. In this rather strange, but effective story, Jesus tells us about a widow who seems to be dismissed as unimportant. The judge just doesn’t have time to deal with her petty concerns. Nevertheless, she continues to pester the judge until her request is satisfied. She continues to bother him until the judge is heard saying, as the original Greek says, “I better give her what she wants or else she may give him a black eye.”
Maybe God is seen more in the widow’s actions of persistence rather than the reaction of the unjust judge. God does ultimately come to us in the man, Jesus, like the poor widow with her concerns, and we seem to react like the judge, distracted and unconcerned.
The persistent widow opens our eyes to a unique understanding of God. She, like God, continues to bother me at times until I am worn out or receive the black eye in wrestling in prayer. Like Jacob, who limps away from his deep moment in prayer wounded. God in the persistence of the widow shows us, once again, how we are to pray and what we are to expect from our efforts in prayer.
The widow and the judge give us a radical picture of what a real prayerful life looks like. The faithful prayer life is one that continually seeks to abide in the presence of God. A prayerful life is always involved in a thoughtful and contemplative pattern of life with God. Always and everywhere seeking God’s way for our life.
In an article entitled, Ways of Knowing, Doing Your Homework, Rich Rohr says, “mature religion will always lead us to some form of prayer, meditation, or contemplation to balance out our usual calculating mind. Believe me, it is major surgery, and we must practice it for years to begin to rewire our egocentric responses. Contemplation is work, so much so that most people give up after their first futile attempts. But the goal of contemplation is not success, only the continuing practice itself. The only people who pray well are those who keep praying! In fact, continued re-connecting is what I mean by prayer, not occasional consolations that we may experience.”
The human condition, Thomas Keating says, “is to be without the true source of happiness which is the experience of the presence of God, and to have lost the key to happiness which is the contemplative dimension of life, the path to the increasing assimilation and enjoyment of God’s presence. What we experience is our desperate search for happiness where it cannot be found . . . . the key was not lost outside ourselves. It was lost inside ourselves. This is where we need to look for it” (Thomas Keating, The Human Condition:
Contemplation and Transformation, (New York: Paulist Press, 1999, 13)).
I often wonder why God does not grant my requests the way I have presented them to Him. Then I am reminded that I only have a limited perception of the world and my own needs. It’s not that my prayers are wrong. . . they are just too narrow. God has a different view of the world. He sees all those who are affected by the prayers that we may make from our heart. Through prayer, we learn how to see the world through the eyes of more people than ourselves. In prayer we soon discover God’s vast care for the world around us and his unlimited view for us when we participate in a faithful prayer life with him.
Seeking God’s heart for our lives and the lives of others is what stirs our life of prayer. Bishop Barron tells us that Teresa of Jesus was driven into a life of prayer by the compassion she felt for others in the world. Teresa felt the pain of injustice for others and that compassion is what kept her coming back to the heart of God. We’re not dealing with an abstract Aristotelian moral philosophy, but rather with something more visceral – more natural. And we can only seek God rightfully through our compassion for others.
Our purpose in life is to seek communion with God. Communion – being in common union with God – completely reorients our lives from a self-centered perception to God-centered and kingdom-centered life. Henri Nouwen says, “Prayer is the radical starting point for a life in God, because in prayer we slowly experience a reorientation of all our thoughts and feelings about ourselves and others.” Radical reorientation occurs as we cultivate what Scott McKenzie refers to as “a prayerful attitude of willingness. Prayerful willingness is, in its simplest form, a willingness to be open to the desires and the will of God” . . . and that requires patience and persistence in living without answers right away.
In prayerful willingness, we begin to ask, “Lord, what do you want to do through me?” When God called Abram to leave his home, Abram was prayerfully willing, he went, and again the world was changed. When God appeared to Moses and called him to confront Pharaoh, eventually Moses was prayerfully willing and the world was forever changed. In the garden, Jesus made it clear he did not want to suffer and die, but in a transforming process of perseverance, he was prayerfully willing and the world was forever changed.
Blessings,
Dr. Simpson