Our short course “Prayer: Being Yourself Before God” has been very well received in parishes throughout Perth this year (it will soon be offered in Nedlands and Kelmscott. Click here for more details). Clearly, prayer is a topic that tugs at our hearts and interests us deeply. The below article offers some wonderful insights into prayer. Do your mind and heart a favour and take the time to savour what’s on offer!
Some Reflections on Prayer
Starting off on the right foot
Prayer. We take the word for granted but ought we to do so? What do we mean by prayer? What does the word mean in the Christian context? Almost always when we talk about prayer we are thinking of something we do and, from that standpoint, questions, problems, confusion, discouragement, illusions multiply. For me, it is of fundamental importance to correct this view. Our Christian knowledge assures us that prayer is essentially what God does, how God addresses us, looks at us. It is not primarily something we are doing to God, something we are giving to God but what God is doing for us. And what God is doing for us is giving us the divine Self in love.
God — total Love, total Gift
Any talk about prayer, if we are to stand in the clear, pure atmosphere of truth, must begin by reflecting in firm belief on what Jesus shows us of God. Let us push straight to the heart of the matter. What is the core, the central message of the revelation of Jesus? Surely it is of the unconditional love of God for us, for each one of us: God, the unutterable, incomprehensible Mystery, the Reality of all reality, the Life of all life. And this means that divine Love desires to communicate Its Holy Self to us. Nothing less! This is God’s irrevocable will and purpose; it is the reason why everything that is, is, and why each of us exists. We are here to receive this ineffable, all-transforming, all beatifying Love. Well-instructed Christians know this notionally but, alas, few know it really. And here I must add an important reminder that knowing it ‘really’ does not imply ‘feelingly’. To know really – or really to know – means living that knowledge, living out of it. It means that our way of looking at things, our attitudes, our actions arise from this knowledge. Of this real knowledge we use the word faith. This must give us pause and make us very cautious of claims to faith. ‘Of course I have faith!’ We can feel quite indignant if someone implies otherwise! My experience tells me that real faith is rare and it is best we acknowledge this so that we may really work at believing.
God — or ego?
Basing ourselves, therefore, on what Jesus shows us of God (and we Christians have only one teacher, Jesus the Christ, who is our Way), we must realize that what we have to do is allow ourselves to be loved, to be there for Love to love us. It cannot be a matter of our finding some way of contacting God, of making God real to us, of getting hold of a secret key with which to open the mystic door. Nor is this faith in Jesus our Way compatible with such distressed meanings as: ‘I can’t pray’ or ‘my prayer is hopeless’ or ‘I have never had anyone to teach me how to pray and therefore I don’t pray.’ When we find ourselves dissatisfied or anxious about our prayer it is worth asking ourselves the question: ‘What do I really want?’ and trying to listen honestly to the answer. We can be fairly certain that it will be some kind of ego-satisfaction. I may want to feel I am making progress, that my prayer is ‘working’ or that I am a spiritual adept. I may want to feel I am getting something for my money! True prayer means wanting GOD not ego. The great thing is to lay down this ego-drive. This is the ‘life’ we must lose, this the ‘self’ we must abandon if we are to have true life and become that self God wants us to be, which only God can know and ultimately only God can bring into being. We have to recognize that a great deal that goes for interest in and longing for prayer is a subtle form of self-seeking. To give ourselves seriously to prayer is to recognize this and face up to the choice it presents: will we cast aside our egotism, allow God’s love to purify it more and more whatever the cost, or will we camouflage it, give it other, more spiritual names, and look around for so-called spiritual guides who will offer us ego-satisfying techniques with the promise of an ‘experience.’ Perhaps we give up the prayer-project altogether with the reflection that, after all, what matters is living and loving and serving our neighbour. Another very popular form of evasion is just to go on worrying and asking endless questions about prayer with the illusory aim that one fine day we will be shown ‘how to do it.’ The thing to do is, of course, to get down to praying! That will answer our questions.
Get out of the boat; walk on the waters with Jesus
Let us assume that we do want God or, at least, we want to want God, wobbly and weak though we know ourselves to be. ‘If it is you, bid me come to you upon the waters’ (Mt. 14.28). It is the Lord and he says: ‘Come!’ So we can confidently enter into the Mystery that is God, relying solely on Jesus and not at all on ourselves. To enter into real prayer, prayer that opens us to the mystical dimension is, in one sense, to enter into an alien element. At least, it is experienced as such, though, if we are faithful we shall discover that it is in fact our true home. But we have to be willing to let go of our own criterion of what prayer is and what growth in the Spirit might mean. There are all sorts of ways of praying and there are books galore to direct us on them; yet these, at bottom, keep us in the boat. The boat might rock a bit and feel uncomfortable at times; but at least, with our method to guide us, we can man it and have some control. Real prayer lets go of the controls, or, more truly, lets go when they are wrenched away from us, and how often we experience this, even to being tipped out in a squall. Oh dear! Most of us see this as an unfortunate occurrence that must never be repeated and so we refit our boat, and improve our sailing skills to ensure that we have control once more.
Methods are not prayer
What does it mean in practice to say we must be there for God and let God control our prayer, let God act? Does it mean we remain inert, completely passive? No, decidedly not! The essential thing we have to do is believe in the enfolding, nurturing, transforming Love of God which is the Reality: the Reality that is absolutely, totally there whether we avert to It or not. Prayer, from our side, is a deliberate decision to avert to It, to respond to It in the fullest way we can. To do this we must set time aside to devote exclusively to the ‘Yes’ of faith. If we are convinced that this is the heart of prayer, this basic decision to remain open to the inflowing of divine love, then we shall understand that we can choose any method we like to help us maintain this basic desire and intention. Our troubles and distress arise from our instinctive assumption that the method is the prayer, and so we gauge the genuineness and success of the prayer by how well the method has worked.
God’s secret
We must remember that prayer takes place at the deepest level of our person and escapes our direct cognition; therefore we can make no judgement about it. It is God’s holy domain and we may not usurp it. We have to trust it utterly to God. This is one of the principle ways in which we surrender control and ‘walk on the water’. We must be ready to believe that ‘nothingness’ is the presence of divine Reality; emptiness is a holy void that Divine Love is filling. Remember, we are casting ourselves wholly on Jesus, on his ‘Come!’ We must give up wanting assurances either from within or without. You see, we cannot have it both ways!
Prayer versus achievement
To maintain this simple, trusting exposure to divine Love inevitably means resisting the temptation to ‘make a success’ of prayer. We could, for instance (depending on our temperament), repeat a mantra with such concentration that our thoughts did not wander, or we might, perhaps, enter into a mesmerized, suspended state, or even achieve some sort of ‘experience’. But an experience of what? We could give ourselves up to fascinating reflections on a passage from the Bible, our thoughts so gripped, so uplifted that they did not wander. This is not prayer. Here we touch on what is, in practice, a tricky issue. To repeat a mantra (i.e. a short prayer) can be an excellent way of helping us to focus on receiving God’s love. So, too, can reflection on a Scripture text. Most of us certainly need some support to keep us there. But we must learn to distinguish between making use of a support and of substituting the support for prayer. Keeping our deepest heart exposed, refusing to usurp God’s place by making ourselves the agent, the giver, will mean that, most often, we have no sense of having prayed well or having prayed at all. I am convinced that, if we are sincere in our desire for God and are willing to pay the price, we can listen to our heart of hearts and know that it’s all right and go on quietly in trust. Many times it has been said to me by those who have come to understand real prayer: ‘How different it is from what I thought and what people in general think it is!’ Jesus, God’s revelation, has turned our merely human, worldly expectations upside down. Learning true prayer means learning to die in the sense Jesus meant by this: dying to egotism, self-determination and self- achieving, and letting God recreate us in love in a way that only God can do.
Union
Committing ourselves to this faith-filled, exposed and selfless prayer ensures that divine Love can work in us the blessed work of union. A profound, obscure knowledge of God will be infused into us and with it a passion of love. This has nothing, of itself, to do with feeling but it means that God does indeed become the passion of our life; that we do, most truly, live for God and fulfil our divine vocation to be for the praise of his glorious love. The inflowing of God into our secret depths of its very nature must remain secret, as John of the Cross tirelessly insists: ‘… it happens secretly in darkness, hidden from the faculties … so hidden that the soul cannot speak of it.’ But its effect on our life will be marked and perhaps the umbrella word here could be selflessness. The fruits of the Holy Spirit abound in the selfless heart.
Nourishing faith on the Word
If we are to persevere in constant believing, we need nourishment. The Word is the normal source of nourishment and the Word above all others is the Jesus-Word: what he did, how he was, what he said. Here – and in the letters of Paul and others – is where we learn what God, the ineffable Beauty and Love to whom we are surrendering ourselves, is truly like. Scripture is not easily understood; we have to approach it with faith and we have to work for it to yield its meaning. There are, of course, excellent books of consummate scholarship to help us in our understanding if we have the time, capacity and opportunity to avail ourselves of them. But a rich source of theology and prayer at hand for each of us is the Missal. Here we find theology at its purest, theology that is prayed, that is prayer. If we were to absorb the contents of the Missal we would need little else. Study the four Eucharistic Prayers, the Prefaces throughout the yearly seasons and the great doxology ‘Glory to God in the Highest.’ Look carefully at the Collects, especially the one so easily overlooked, the ‘Prayer over the Offerings.’ Then, of course, there are the daily readings from the Old and New Testaments with verses from the psalms: a wealth of prayed theology – the Church’s understanding at its purest consisting of treasures old and new.
The Mass: the prayer that is Jesus
Another great advantage of this study of the Missal is that it will deepen our understanding of the Mass, the central act of our worship. This is the supreme prayer, since it is the sacrament of Jesus’ perfect prayer, that of his very being as he surrendered in passionate love to his Father in his death on the cross. Expressed in this sacrament is all that we mean by mystical prayer. It is our precious Catholic inheritance to realize that the essence of worship and prayer must always lie with God’s Self-communication to us and that our part is merely response. We who know Jesus do not depend on our own prayers, our own ways of getting in touch with God, pleasing him, atoning for our sins and so forth. We know that all this has been given for us in Jesus. We have to go and claim it. The fountain is there for us, overflowing, and all that we have to do is drink. We notice in the Mass prayers how we are, so to speak, continually ‘mingling’ with Jesus, immersing ourselves in what he is doing. Our offering of ourselves is to become one with the perfect offering of Jesus. We too are to become the perfect offering that the Father lovingly accepts, an offering that is first and foremost God’s own gift to us. O marvellous exchange!
Source: Ruth Burrows, Essence of Prayer, 1-10.
