Down Is Up
It happened that while Jesus was praying in a certain place, when He had finished, one of His disciples said to Him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John also taught his disciples.” Luke 11:1 NASB
To pray – This might seem strange to say, but prayer is my most difficult exercise. Even when I revert to printed prayers in the Siddur, I find my attention wandering to the theological content and the philosophical implications. My free-form prayers are a disaster. The best way to describe them is to picture the circumstances like standing in the middle of a rushing river. Everything that comes along distracts me, and there is plenty floating by. To top it off, prayer carries a certain feeling of reverence for me, and since I am more aware of my own failures and sins than anyone else on earth, when I make an attempt to come before the God of all creation, all those failures and sins raise their dour faces. I feel completely unworthy. My fight or flight mode kicks in and I give up and run for the nearest exit, often more study and less intimate confrontation. Then I read Heschel’s comment, and I am thoroughly undone:
“To live without prayer is to live without God, to live without a soul.”[1]
Oh, the condemnation of it all! The hopelessness of conversational vacuum. While Heschel writes, “Prayer is spiritual ecstasy,”[2] I find only despair. My mind analyzes while my heart is terrified. How is it that I feel so far from this joy of His presence? What have I done to myself that I should be an alien at the gate?
Anthony Bloom offers some penetrating insight:
“Very often we do not find sufficient intensity in our prayer, sufficient conviction, sufficient faith, because our despair is not deep enough.”[3]
Maybe he’s right. Maybe the reason I struggle so much with prayer, and experience such disappointing results, is that I am not willing to open the darkest closets in my soul. Frankly, I’m afraid. If I really flung open those tightly-sealed rooms, would I survive the emotional onslaught? Would those vile creatures I keep hidden devour me? I have exercised cognitive control over my monsters ever since I forced them under the bed. How can I let them loose now? Bloom speaks directly to me. I haven’t come to the bottom of the well, so prayer evades me.
You’re probably familiar with the Greek word for prayer, proseuchomai. You have undoubtedly heard some teacher mention that it’s about bowing the knee, but I wonder if that’s a sufficient metaphor. Bowing the knee is a sign of submission, observance, and obedience. But prayer isn’t really about that, is it? If it were just about submission, then mouthing the creedal prayers would be enough. If it were just observance, then we’d just count the number of times we did what we were instructed to do. If it were about obedience, then prayer would be almost trite. Is my heart really overcome with joy because I did what I was supposed to do? No, it seems to me that if prayer is anything at all, it is the deepest level of communication, an intimacy that makes me feel as if I have truly been known and I truly know that other. But that’s precisely the problem. You see, I am afraid to truly know myself, all those dark passages and hidden doorways. I don’t want to go there, and as long as I can find ways to avoid those places, I haven’t experienced the despair that will initiate, even motivate prayer that becomes ecstasy.
It’s so discouraging. I want that kind of intimacy with God, and at the same time, I am scared to death to have that kind of intimacy with me. Do you suppose God feels the same way about me? Larry D. wrote to me: “I suppose I have learned not to confuse how life makes me feel with how God feels about me. About us. Those can be two very different things.”
Yes, indeed.
Topical Index: prayer, Luke 11:1, Anthony Bloom
[1] Abraham Heschel, Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 211.
[2] Ibid., p. 203.
[3] Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray, p. 72.
I am working on a weakness. Lack of vulnerability. Seems I am a master of hiding things, keeping them bottled up, holding back. Just putting it out there is an act of obedience to become vulnerable.
You used the phrase “deepest level of communication”. I have always thought of prayer as a conversation with God. I speak and then I listen. 1 John 1:9 says if we confess the deep dark things, he is faithful to forgive and cleanse from unrighteousness, but it leaves out something from the Proverb from which it was taken – He who conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes will find compassion. Prov 28:13. If I believe that Abba knows my heart, then confession is not about Him finding out something, it is about me facing it and doing something about it – repentance. Is He justice or mercy? Yes. I cannot fathom that what I hold back from Him could ever find mercy or forgiveness, but I believe that He is and does what He says. So, I lay it on the table, vomit it out, whatever . . . and when it is exposed to His light of truth something happens. Always.
He assures me that if I face it by agreeing with Him that it is keeping me from intimacy with Him and then repent of the disobedience, believing the lie, or whatever, He forgives. What I have discovered is that although forgiveness was granted under these circumstances, I continued to punish myself by not receiving it because I felt I still did not deserve it. More confession and repentance for playing God. I still do not have it perfected, but am working it out in fear and trembling. Thanks for the reminder.