Lord, I know not what I ought to ask of you. You only know what I need. You know me better than I know myself. O Father, give to your child what he himself knows not to ask. Teach me to pray. Pray yourself in me. -- Francois Fenelon
SOMEWHERE ON A PATH IN THE MISSOURI RIVER BOTTOMS -- God, why don't I want to be alone with you? These hours on this hike are yours. There will be no interruptions. No one knows where I am. Heck, I don't even know where I am. Do you?
How many thousands of times have we met in solitude over the years because I needed something? Peace. A plan. Forgiveness. Revenge. Understanding. Comfort. An analysis. Proof. Tears. Mortification. Vivification.
And you were there, mostly.
Too often the center of my prayer has been, "Medicate me."
I'm sick, write the script.
I hurt, up the dose.
I need a decision, make the incision.
I've resented you for refusing to be my pharmacological pusher. But out of loving discipline you whispered, "Physician, heal thyself." (Because you knew I'd try and you knew I couldn't.)
So if prayer is not about doing, fixing, creating or prestidigitating, I'm afraid I've been doing it wrong. And it's not that I regret the great prayers that could have been answered. And it's not that I blush with embarrassment over my theological error. And it's not that I feel ashamed over my narcissism.
I weep because I missed you. You stood at the door and knocked. And I stared through the peephole and announced, "I gave at the office."
Pray yourself in me. Pry yourself into me. Take hold of what I don't know how to let go of. Let me learn again that prayer is mostly about loving you and letting you love me.
I guess nothing productive has to happen on this walk today.
I just want to be alone with you.
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A friend years ago shared a lesson in prayer that her two-year-old taught her. Every morning when he first got up she would sit in a rocker and he would crawl up in her lap and snuggle. No talk, no questions, no wishes ... just contact. As she reflected on how that time blessed and sustained her, she thought how our Abba must desire the same thing. If loving God is centrally relationship, it is a two-way street. Especially when I am down and dysfunctional, snuggling next to the heart of God is a beautiful experience of Truth and Reality. Sometimes it is all I can do. Always it is all I need do.
We thank Thee for the lights
that we kave kindled,
The light of altar and sanctuary;
Small lights of those
who meditate at midnight
And lights directed through the
coloured panes of windows
And light reflected from the polished stone,
The gilded carven wood, the coloured fresco.
Our gaze is submarine, our eyes look upward
And see the light but see not whence it comes.
O Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!
In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light.
We are glad when the day ends,
when the play ends;
and ecstasy is too much pain.
We are children quickly tired: children
who are up in the night and fall asleep
as the rocket is fired; and the day is long
for work or play.
We tire of distraction or concentration, we
sleep and are glad to sleep,
Controlled by the rhythm of blood and the
day and the night and the seasons.
And we must extinguish the candle, put out
the light and relight it;
Forever must quench, forever
relight the flame.
Therefore we thank Thee for our little
light, that is dappled with shadow.
We thank Thee who hast moved us to building,
to finding, to forming at the ends of our fingers and beams of our eyes.
And when we have built an altar
to the Invisible Light, we may set thereon
the little lights for which our
bodily vision is made.
And we thank Thee that darkness
reminds us of light.
O Light Invisible, we give Thee thanks
for Thy great glory!
--T. S. Eliot, from "Choruses from 'The Rock'"
"At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no differece to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us putting things into their minds; in reality our best work is done by keeping thingsd out.
Whenever there is prayer, there is a danger of His own immediate action. He is cynically indifferent to the dignity of His position, and ours, as pure spirits, and to human animals on their knees. He pours out self- knowledge in a quiet shameless fashion. But even if He defeats your first attempts at misdirection, we have a subtler weapon.
The humans do not start from that direct perception of Him which we, unhappily, cannot avoid. They have never known that ghastly luminosity, that stabbing and searing glare which makes the background of permanent pain to our lives. If you look into your patient's mind when he is praying, you will not find that.
Keep him praying to the "composite object" - to the thing he has made Him in his mind to be and not to the Person Himself who has made him.
If he ever consciously directs his prayers "Not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be", our situatin is, for the moment, desperate."
-Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE
So many times I feel like I've finally made progress spiritually and am moving forward, only to find that I'm right back at the beginning...
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