Terrifying Prayer
One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.” Luke 11:1 NIV
Teach us – “To live without prayer is to live without God, to live without a soul.”[1] When I first read Heschel’s words some years ago, they scared me to death. I am a man without a soul. There are times when I just can’t pray—long times. When life just pushes me along, routine after routine, absorbing my energy to the point where I just want escape. And I don’t escape in prayer. I escape in the mental construction of a world where I am not so stressed, so put upon, so abused. Away from the real world. Prayer doesn’t lead in that direction because prayer is about the real world. We don’t pray about our fantasies. We pray about our realities—our hurts, our concerns, our needs, our anxieties, our obligations. Prayer reminds us of our frail existence—and sometimes it reminds us of all our failures, disappointments, and mistakes. Prayer is the last place of sanctuary. Heschel recognized that.
“Only those who have gone through days on which words were of no avail, on which the most brilliant theories jarred the ear like mere slang; only those who have experienced ultimate not-knowing, the voicelessness of a soul struck by wonder, total muteness, are able to enter the meaning of God, a meaning greater than the mind. There is a loneliness in us that hears. When the soul parts from the company of the ego and its retinue of petty conceits; when we cease to exploit all things but instead pray the world’s cry, the world’s sigh, our loneliness may hear the living grace beyond all power. We must first peer into the darkness, feel strangled and entombed in the hopelessness of living without God, before we are ready to feel the presence of His living light.”[2]
But I don’t want to peer into the darkness. I don’t want to feel that existential loneliness. I don’t want to know, with all my being, what it means to be alone! If that’s where God is found, it’s the last place I want to be. Prayer is terrifying.
And since it is terrifying to me—and at the same time something I know I must experience if I am to have a soul, I will try, once again, to pray—to pray with written words—to pray with emotions splattered on the page—to grasp at God in the hope that He will hear.
How shall I even begin? “Dear Lord”? But that seems too trite, too religious. As if I even have the status needed to address Him as “Lord,” or worse, “Dear . . . Lord.” More than anything else, the very thought of prayer pushes my face into my own wretchedness. I am not a righteous man. I am riddled with guilt, shame, excuses. The one I see in the mirror is not the lauded teacher, the author, the theologian. The one in the mirror is a held-together projection of external expectations crumbling inside. Prayer strips me of my protective shield. All the wounds, the bleeding fissures in my self-abuse are open to judgment. Let me cower in the dark—please. I know the closets only too well. How can I think I could pray when those doors are so tightly shut?
Prayer should be the most natural human action. We are designed for open communication with our Maker. Why, then, does it seem so stressful, so fraught with spiritual black clouds? Prayer is a direct assault on the yetzer ha’ra. Prayer is submission, and the yetzer ha’ra wants anything but submission. Therefore, the slightest hint of prayer causes all the defensive mechanisms of the yetzer ha’ra to leap into action, foremost of which is guilt. How can we pray to the holy God, how can we even imagine communication with such a sublime Being, when we are so unworthy? Perhaps this is why the prayers of pagan cultures are primarily placating angry deities. We know we’re flawed—deeply flawed—and a holy God should have no compassion for us at all. And yet, we long to pray, to find solace from the emptiness within, to discover that our Maker cares for us. It is little consolation to be taught compassion theology if we don’t experience grace. The words of the creed are as brittle as desiccated bones. And we want to live!
If Heschel is right, and I suspect he is, then I must find a way to pray if I am to live. It is not a task. It is a compulsion too long laid aside for fear of failure. Let me begin again.
Topical Index: prayer, Abraham Heschel, teach us, Luke 11:1
[1] Abraham Heschel, Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 211.
[2] Abraham Heschel, God in Search of Man (Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955), p. 140.
If I were Skip I might pray..
Lord…you have amazed me and blessed me above all others. You continually invite me in a bond of covenant friendship. You have created transparency that has taken our friendship to the nations and even when I thought it was me you amazed me yo find out the extents you were creating a poster child, sounding board and the man I didn’t know.
You revealed vulnerability doesn’t block or pretend; it is the gateway to intimacy. You’ve shattered our socialized and internalized concepts of and relationships to women. You’ve helped us acknowledge “seek first the kingdom” as an emotional state of heightened and intense intentionality compelled by love and driven by terror of loss. You’ve defined a war of epic proportions where morality is being properly redefined in relationship to YHVH and community vs relational self centeredness. You’ve challenged me and in turn so many of us all to know the distinction between the commitment of joined in covenant vs connected and contractual. You’ve allowed me to demonstrate the willingness to take on the responsibility for being the voice of the voiceless and in true Hebraic friendship making all you have available to YHVH .
Lord I’m in a familiar place of old fears both confident that tjis in new ways and not alone. I don’t know what is mine what is others I struggle in believing and crying out help my unbelief. I ask for the wisdom and understanding to enter these old familiar ways as you have intended. For the council and strength to follow your leading and for the knowledge of you that overcomes.
Lord thank you that you entrust me with such precious treasures and the ability to touch hearts. Please touch mine in the greater ways you have. I trust you.
Fearful indeed is the conscious self-awareness of the actual poverty of our own soul.
Wow. Skip, what you just did is prayer. Prayer is communication with the Creator. This is exactly what He wants from us! Pure unadulterated confession of our inadequacies – those things that delineate who we are vs Who He is. It is that kind of vulnerability that connects your spirit to His and makes Him weep over the realities we face in the flesh. He knows our frame – that we are dust and when we come to the emptiness of knowing that – – – THEN His Spirit of compassion flows and invades and overwhelms like a flood. LET it. There is room for self evaluation and admission of frailty. Not self pity. Job got it . . . finally.
Abba, Father, embrace your son and be the lifter of his head.
ps – thank you for your honesty.