Читать книгу The Book of Not So Common Prayer - Linda McCullough Moore - Страница 9

Chapter Two

Why Prayer?

I’ve got a truism that I’m almost certain is actually true. Here it is: If there’s a frequent refrain in the Bible, a word or theme that shows up over and again, chances are it’s downright central. Or, more simply put: If anything is in the Bible more than twenty times, you can bet there is a reason for it being there.

For example, the Bible is chock-full of verses that proclaim our God is greater than all other gods, greater than kings and rulers.

Frankly, these verses never made sense to me.

I mean, why would the Lord of all creation, the Ruler of the heavens and the universe, the God, even bother to state anything so patently obvious? I don’t say to the thumbtack on the table: “I am far above you. I’m wiser and stronger, more dexterous and agile, in short, a better human being.” So why would God compare himself to gods made out of brass and terra cotta, or even mortal flesh?

I don’t take on the thumbtack; there’s no contest. Why would God take on a president or Queen Elizabeth?

But he does take on other “gods.” He goes out of his way to say he outdoes “kings” and “rulers,” and his Holy Word repeats it like it means something. But what might that meaning be?

I don’t think God is comparing himself to actual flesh-and-blood prime ministers and presidents. Rather, it seems to me that he is taking on the real gods we worship, the gods we give our very selves to, the gods we live and die for. He’s saying, “I matter more than even these.”

Let me name the gods we worship, all the things in life we deify. Silly gods: hockey, buffalo wings, and YouTube; serious, staid gods: education, status, and security; secret gods: fraud and pornography; subtle deities: self-image, personal best, and winner; churchy gods: morality, self-righteousness, and pride; old-fashioned gods: sloth, lust, and greed.

These are not our incidentals, harmless pastimes; rather,they are the objects of our worship and self-sacrifice and dedication. If that seems extremely stated, we can do the math; run the numbers; calculate the time we give to all these things and then compare that with the time we spend with God. We can evaluate their relative importance in our lives quite simply, just by going without them for a month.

Or, another telling exercise: we might write down 8:00, 8:30, 9:00, 9:30, 10:00, and each half-hour through the day until bedtime, and for each time write down what we have done, and in the margin, write who was god of that half-hour. God is not God of our lives if he is not God of our half-hours.

Time is the thermometer, the indicator of priorities of the things we value. So too, time used differently can alter who and what will rule our days. There’s a well-kept secret of time management that doesn’t get much press. It’s this: If every morning you take five minutes and jot down what you will do with each half-hour of your day, that one small practice will actually change the things you do with time.

Time. It’s the one thing every blessed one of us is given in exactly the same amount. Donald Trump has no more minutes in his hours than you’ve got in yours. Oprah Winfrey has just seven days in every week she lives. Barack Obama gets 365 days every year, and once every four years when he gets an extra day, you get one too.

Jesus tells us: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). Where you put your minutes is very likely where you put your heart.

I believe that the first step in acknowledging God as our truest treasure is showing up to pray. Every day. Even if it’s raining. Even if it’s not. Even if you have a hundred other things to do. And here’s the astonishing surprise: You start to like this daily prayer. You start to need it. You start to miss it when it isn’t there. You start to love it. You begin to treasure your time alone with God. It becomes the best-tasting, most melodious, harmonious, exciting, satisfying part of your whole day. You crave it, you can’t get enough.

And guess what else? You don’t end up living in a cave somewhere. You don’t get voted the Hermit Saint. People appear from the most unlikely places; your life gets richer with experiences and happenings, relationship and blessing. You seek first the kingdom of heaven and God’s righteousness. You put your treasure where your heart is; you say, out loud, in a big, bold, outdoor voice: “I will have no other God before you. You are my God.”

You come to God in prayer—and you would be very well advised to hold onto your hat.

How Can I Do It If I Don’t Know What It Is?

And yet, what is prayer? That one short word is asked to cover a multitude of mysteries. Prayer is worship. Prayer is sitting down with God, abiding in his love, filling our minds with images of him. Prayer is being in the presence of the living God and being acutely aware of how unlikely and astonishing that is. Prayer is resting. Prayer is wrestling. Prayer is the most outrageous and transforming thing that we will ever do, but often we reduce it to a wave, a knee bend, and a please and thank you. Prayer is, most simply put, being consciously in the presence of God. In a very true sense, prayer is being, not doing. It is less an activity than a location. (It goes without saying that we are in God’s presence all the time, but being aware of this reality is another story.)

And yet prayer is not all peaceful and serene. I have been considering starting a campaign to abolish the term “quiet time.” True, we prepare our hearts to receive God by quieting ourselves—stillness really is the place where it all begins—but what pervades our prayer times is often anything but quiet. There will be moments that are holy, soft and gentle, but so many others that we will experience as monumental and imposing, riveting our full attention. And, it must be said, we are guaranteed there will be times when prayer is dull and vacant, parched and dry as dry can be. These times will be interspersed with encounters with God we find to be enlightening, shocking, and in the end life-changing.

Prayer involves every aspect of our being: thought and reason, emotion and desire. This conversation with our Heavenly Father will encompass all of life. And it will surely touch our deepest beings, joining in rich paradox happiness and sorrow, satisfaction and disappointment. Prayer knows how to hold the contradictions of our lives in one brilliant understanding.

“Come now, and let us reason together” are the words we read in Isaiah 1:18 (KJV). Prayer can be exactly this: reasoning together. We do it all day long, with ourselves and with the people in our lives. We may not give it this name, but we are always thinking and deciding, discussing and arguing about ideas. Reasoning is part of prayer. Prayer can be the questions we ask God, and when we allow ourselves to listen, it can be the questions God asks us. “Have you ever stopped to think about it this way?” asks the Holy Spirit. Faith is not a blind venture; it is based on serious thought and understanding. On reasoning. On reason.

For anyone—such as me, to take one random example—whose first experience of prayer was limited to asking God for things, there is much to learn. And that’s the good news. The challenge of learning to pray can get me out of bed some mornings. Imagine how boring and lifeless would be any practice that was not dynamic, multifaceted, and richly textured.

Perhaps a useful starting place might be to think about what it is we do in prayer, to help us move toward an understanding of living in a state of being with our Heavenly Father. Many Christians know the acronym ACTS, which offers one good description of prayer: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. The order of the letters recommends the sequence we might pray.

First, we adore. Think of the bride and groom standing at the altar on their wedding day. It’s not hard to imagine a bit of adoring as the first order of business, the natural impulse, automatic and exactly right. So it is that we are made to love and adore our Savior. But, the argument arises, marriage is a human relationship, not the connection of God and his child. True, it’s not; but human love can help us know the nature of adoring, caring, and blessing, so long as we do not confuse comparison with definition. We cannot think of relationship with God without referencing our experiences in human love. And so we do compare, always with the understanding that it is the same and it is different, that the two are alike and unalike, one a shadow image and the other the real thing.

In this sequence of prayer, we start out by adoring, knowing adoration as a feeling we have for those we love the most. And is this automatic? It is not. Or, not in my experience. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that it took me approximately forever to reach the place where I even knew what adoration of God could be. It has truly been a long time coming. And how did I get there? I prayed. I asked God to give me love for him. I prayed the truth; I prayed the very words, “I do not love you. Would you give me love for you?” And he did. There is nothing we can do apart from him. We cannot even love him. But what a blessing to be given access to the experience of adoration.

I have found that hymns of praise foster my adoring best of all. The music primes my heart, allowing words to penetrate my consciousness, enlarge my loving. I hear, “Angels, help us to adore him, / Ye behold him face to face; / Sun and moon bow down before him; / Dwellers all in time and space,” and I glimpse heaven—angels, planets, and images beyond my knowing.

Sometimes, art can be the way in. Every public library in the United States has books of Christian paintings. Steal an hour. Take one off the shelf and sit with holy images, allowing them to touch you. Let God surprise your heart in worship in the middle of the reading room.

Adoration is my favorite part of prayer, the part that now resembles no other aspect of my life, the part that doesn’t leave me second-guessing or dissatisfied. Taking certain pleasure in something outside ourselves feels wonderful, and when that something is definitively perfect, there’s no downside. When we worship and adore anything or anybody who is not God, we are always shushing hushed but niggling, slight misgivings about the object of our worship. It sort of takes the edge off. But when we worship God, we adore perfection.

The second part of the ACTS prayer is confession. Here, even more clearly, we experience ourselves to be entirely dependent upon the grace of God. We pray that the Holy Spirit will convict us of sin, in order that we can confess. I know no more frightening human condition than for a person to think he is just fine when that is not the case, to be unaware of danger, which, if recognized, could easily be avoided. A blindfolded man runs toward the cliff’s edge, laughing, saying he is fine. In our deepest beings, we must pray that God will show us the reality about ourselves, how fecklessly we run to peril.

I have a very simple exercise I do. It is modeled on the Daily Examen of Ignatius Loyola, which is a practice of prayerful reflection on the day in order to see God’s presence and discover his direction. In the evening, I sit in a quiet place with my eyes closed, and I review the events of the day. It is almost like watching a movie as I bring all of the day’s activities and interactions to mind. I watch this movie twice—the first time, on the lookout for all the ways I see God’s hand in what has happened; the second time, praying to see the instances of things I’ve thought, and said, and done that have not been pleasing to the Lord. The Holy Spirit brings to mind those things for which I need to ask forgiveness.

Confession seems to be a focus on the negative, for so sin surely is, but paradoxically, this is the path to peace. There is nothing lovelier in all the world than to feel regret and pain for something I have done and then have God obliterate all memory of that forgiven sin. Sins, fire-engine red, washed freshly-fallen-snow bright white. We misunderstand the Cross if we think Christ died to mute remembrance.

The T in ACTS, thanksgiving, is perhaps a bit more straightforward. The primary glitch in this regard is trying to give thanks in the middle of the muddle of our lives. On a bright sunny day with no work and everybody healthy, our thanks is at the ready. But give us stormy weather, deep-sorrow sadness, or pain in mind or body, and praise is sometimes hard to come by. I have discovered, though, that it is an extraordinary experience in the middle of a migraine to sing out hymns of thankfulness. The blessing in those moments is the miracle that as I sing my heart fills up with what is good, and pure, and peaceful. I might still have the pain, but it is not the only thing contained in that one moment. I often wonder if I would know God as I do if I didn’t have a migraine brain. Chronic, quirky, unpredictable, and disorienting migraines help keep me tethered to the Lord. I thank God for the agency of anything in life that draws me close to him.

If we wait for everything around us to be OK before we open up our hearts to praise, we will wait forever. The secret in life is to make a place for joy and thanksgiving no matter what the circumstance. “But that’s impossible,” you say. Of course it is. God traffics in the impossible all day. And if we are his children, so will we. Imagine a world where only the possible was possible. I wouldn’t want to live there.

Our ACTS prayer ends with supplication, an antique word that is our invitation to ask God’s blessing—for so very long, the first (and sometimes only) part in all my prayers. This aspect requires little explanation, except perhaps to say that there is nothing in the world we cannot ask God for. He is the One who says, “The very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matthew 10:30 KJV). It is his will and pleasure that we come to him with every longing that there is. There is no part of daily life that we are not meant to bring to God in prayer.

I have a friend who has enlarged my thinking about prayers of supplication. This is a woman who has lived through a campaign of genocide, of ethnic cleansing, and she tells me she doesn’t want to ask God for anything that she can get from any other source—she’s thinking food, water, safety from being harmed—because she says if she gets that thing from some source other than God, then she will be inclined to worship that. She tells me she wants from God what one can get only from God. Me too. Basically. Only I don’t know what that is or how to ask for it. But I love the way her words have made me think about my prayers of petition. There’s the old saw: be careful what you ask for, you may get it. I thank God that he protects us from so many of our prayers, that he spares us by denying our requests. But it seems to me that my friend prays a holy prayer, one that will not be denied.

Gazing on God

ACTS is just one way of describing what prayer might be. Indeed, much of what we say about prayer, and certainly any comparisons we make between our conversations with God and our conversations with other people, will be no more than skimpy and segmented efforts to teach our hearts the truth. We know these little metaphors miss the supernatural mark, no doubt by several light years. And so, it is important that we square these comparisons with our theology, making sure they don’t mislead us, cause us to invent some different deity. Do I overstate here? I don’t think so. I know that personally I go through life inventing images of God and prayer that bear only slight resemblance to reality. I compare prayer to some ordinary chat, and so reduce it to a miniature approximation of the splendor that it is. And when I do this, I diminish prayer and chip God down to size as well. We must give thought to the comparisons we make. We must be careful what we say, for we are listening.

For example, prayer can surely be companionship, but it is not always like two friends meeting for coffee. More often, it is like one friend giving the other a blood transfusion; one giving the other life, physically and spiritually. I’ve said it before, and we all need to say it again—many times—prayer is a relationship between two beings, where one of the two is God, and one is not. Embedding prayer in Scripture will keep this at the forefront of our minds.

Prayer is so much more than our speaking words to God. It is God’s communicating with us, working on us, transforming us into the image of God, making us more and more like him. Prayer is a workshop where we are handcrafted,completed, caused to be what we were designed and—by God’s grace—created to be. For good or ill, whether we pray or not, we are always being changed; worked on by our surroundings; shaped and molded and defined. We get to choose the influences that will work upon us, but we do not get to choose their effect. In prayer we choose the influence of the Holy Spirit of the living God, never knowing what results might follow, but all the while trusting the One who says, “I know the plans I have in mind for you . . . ; they are plans for peace, . . . to give you a future filled with hope” (Jeremiah 29:11).

The outcome will not be our doing, but we know the One who will cause us to be more than we can ask or imagine. Our thoughts run to new hairstyles; his thoughts run to new heads, new thoughts, new perspectives, and brand-new understanding. Our thoughts run to fit bodies; his thoughts run to fit souls. We envision happy days; he envisions everlasting glory.

The focus of our prayers must be, with concentrated gaze, on God—because this focus is the only way to avoid making our prayers be for our glory. Even in our prayers for good things—for righteousness, for holiness—if we focus on ourselves and not on God, we’ll lose our way for sure. I say that what I want is God, to live for him and in his glory, but sometimes I think what I really want is my self—but my self made perfect, in fact made wonderful, so I can feel really good about me, and who I am, and what I do. That is so very unlike a preference for the Lord himself. It is a subtle temptation; but even mechanical reminders to look at him, to “taste and see how good the Lord is” (Psalm 34:8), can help us redirect our gaze.

When we focus on ourselves, prayer can summon up both anxiety and worry. A time of quietness can set the stage for every shaky feeling there can be. Worry as worship. Make no mistake, we do know how to worship; the question is, What is the object of the honor and attention that we give? When I’m supposed to be adoring God, I catch myself fretting because I took a world-class lasagna to the Alpha class last night at church, and no one said how wonderful I was. I am worshiping. I am adoring the image of myself. I worry about my kids. I worship, I adore, a perfect family. I sit to pray and feel an old familiar twang of pain. I’m worried about my shoulder or my knee. I am worshiping my health.

“But shouldn’t we adore health?” comes the question. Well, Paul prayed for healing, and God offered him grace instead (2 Corinthians 12:8-9). God got it right, or he got it wrong. We must decide. This is the magnitude of the questions we explore every time we pray. I want to say that prayer is not for the fainthearted, but of course prayer is precisely for the very faintest-hearted. We have only to be willing to leave our fright and fearfulness with God when we rise up from our knees. But far too often we pray, “Dear God, I’m worried and afraid. Please take these fears from me. In Jesus’ name, Amen,” and then we snatch them back before we walk away.

We can trade in times of gentle sweet communion, walking with God in the cool of the evening in the garden of Eden, for our frantic, harried pleas that God do what we say. There is a great line in the movie Shadowlands, a line I’m told may have been written specially for the movie. No matter; it rings true. In the film the actor who plays C. S. Lewis says, “I do not pray because it changes God; I pray because it changes me.” That is, we pray in order to be brought into conformity with the Lord’s design. “Thy will be done,” the smartest line in every prayer we pray. We have only to look back across the years and see the things we prayed for that would have been disastrous had our prayers been granted. Only after the passage of time can we see the answers that at the time seemed wrong but that have turned out to be for our solid, certifiable good. “Thy will be done” (Matthew 6:10 KJV). This prayer does not need to be cut to fit us; we need to be changed, transformed through the slow-drip splendor of God’s grace, in order that we fit this prayer. But we start where we are. We walk before we run.

Prayer Is Connection in Community

Despite the fact that our conversation here is focused on private prayer, it is also true that we must always pray with others, and that the people in our lives will pervade our prayer times. Prayer is a way we are related, interconnected, dependent on and involved with others. In the Bible, we read the words of the prophet Samuel: “I would never sin against the Lord by failing to pray for you” (1 Samuel 12:23). No casual calling, this. The Trinity, the Three Persons, is a community, and so is the body of Christ. We are taught that we are members of one another—as deeply connected as that. We are to pray for and with each other always.

I sometimes wonder what somebody means when they say they’ll pray for me, but with certain saints, I know exactly. When I ask my pastor for her prayers, I know she falls down on her knees and seeks God’s mercy in fervent devotion. I also came to know what the man sometimes called “the evangelical pope” meant by praying for another. That man, John Stott, spoke one night at Amherst College. At the end of the evening, a long line formed to speak with him. I joined the line, and when my turn came, I spoke from a deep experience of the phrase “to covet someone’s prayers.” I said, “I’m here with my friend Annie. She does not know the Lord. Tonight when you are traveling over the Atlantic Ocean flying back home, would you please pray for Annie?”

John Stott looked at me with kindest eyes, and he said no.

“I will, however,” he said, “pray for your friend right now,” and as he stood there, surrounded, in a crowded auditorium of people who seemed unwilling to leave, he prayed a prayer that I will always remember. When John Stott prayed that night, I knew that I was praying with a man who walked with God. It was a prayer like few I have experienced in my life.

For saints, prayer comes first. It just does. It is the bedrock foundation of every action of every day. We are helped in prayer just knowing others pray. There is such beauty in awareness that when we pray the hourly prayers of the church, numberless others all across the world join hearts and minds together in that prayer.

Prayer connects us with other people when no other contact is possible. My ninety-seven-year-old aunt—the dictionary definition of a prayer warrior—never leaves her nursing home. But oh, the places she will go; oh, the places she has been. She’s on more speed dials than anyone I know. “Will you pray?” Those three words have echoed down the years, and will be said with no less fervor in a call she might well get this afternoon. Her life is actively involved with people and events across the globe.

Prayer is praying for the people we love. Prayer is a dynamic, powerful, supernatural involvement with other people. Prayer might be asking God to bless a stranger on the street, the mail carrier, the librarian, your doctor, or the crossing guard. Prayer might be choosing one person, a close friend, or maybe someone you don’t know particularly well and praying for him every single day, perhaps for years. You might be the only person who ever prayed for him. I had known and prayed for someone for twenty years who one day said to me, “I don’t know if your beliefs in God are right or wrong, but you may be the only person on earth who cares about my soul.” I repeat these words here because it is a calling every single one of us can take upon ourselves: to care, in prayer, for the soul of another.

There is another way, however, that we sometimes do damage to one another’s prayer lives. Friends sigh and say to us, “You know, I hardly ever pray.” And we commiserate and say, “I know. You’re so busy now. It’s so hard.” And we sell each other down the river. We diminish these friends; we patronize and sell them short. In an effort to be nice—the scourge of humankind, I sometimes think—we fail to hold each other to account. Bottom line, we have to decide whether prayer is a harmless pastime, a lovely interlude, there to indulge in when we have the time, or, if it is food for body, soul, and mind, air to lungs, fire to life. If we decide prayer matters, we deprive and dishonor one another by placating, patting one another on the head, and saying it’s OK not to pray. I can remember with precision those times in my life when I’ve said to a good friend, “I shouldn’t do that,” and the friend has replied, “No, you shouldn’t.” Replies like this can make us understand what friendship is. The Bible tells us to “consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works” (Hebrews 10:24 KJV).

May prayer itself be love and a good work.