Prayer (Excerpt from Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace,

Vocabulary of Faith)

Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your

heart has turned to stone. – Thomas Merton

It is a not a perfect prayer if one is conscious of oneself or understand one’s prayer – St.

Anthony of the Desert

Prayer was impossible for me for years. For a time I was so alienated from my

religious heritage that I had the vainglorious notion that somehow, if I prayed, I

would cause more harm than good. But when a priest I knew asked me to pray

for him – he’d been diagnosed with a serious illness – my ‘yes’ was immediate,

sincere, and complete. I wasn’t sure that I could pray well and was shocked that

the priest would trust me to do so. But I recognized that this was my pride

speaking, the old perfectionism that has dogged me since I was a child. Well, or

badly, that was beside the point. Of course I could pray, and I did.

The ancient monks understood that a life of prayer would manifest itself in

relationships with others. “If prayer is a matter of concern to you, then show

yourself to be merciful.” said the sixth century monk John Climacus. As “a

dialog and a union with God,” he said, prayer has the effect of “holding the

world together.” This seems like a radical perception of prayer …

Benedictines know that their personal and communal prayer need to be in

balance; one affects the other, and the whole provides support that they need to

remain faithful in their response to the monastic call. I suspect that many

members of ordinary church congregations would say much the same thing

about the way that their own everyday prayer is reflected in the experience of

Sunday worship and vice versa. While prayer may originate in our own desires,

it quickly moves beyond them, into our life with others, and toward the greater

society. The inward/outward dynamics of prayer is perfectly expressed in the

way that the sixth-century monk Dorotheus of Gaza imagined our world. He

saw it as a circle, with God at the center and our lives as lines drawn from the

circumference toward the center. As Dorotheus relates it, the closer the lines

crowd in toward God, “the closer they are to one another and the closer they are

to one another, the closer they become to God.”

Dorotheus demonstrates the kind of wisdom I have come to expect from serious

and habitual practitioners of prayer. They have moved way beyond the

simplistic “gimme, gimme” of pietistic or privatized prayer, which can function

as a kind of Republican agenda for the soul: Give me mine, and let those less worthy

fend for themselves. Grounding themselves in a profound, all encompassing

gratitude for all that God has given them, including their trials and tribulations,

they are open to both the private and the public dimensions of prayer. Their

prayer is not pie-in-the-sky, but stark realism.

Sometimes people will say things like, “Your prayers didn’t work, but thanks,”

as if a person could be praying for only one thing. A miracle. A cure. But in the

hardest situations, all one can do is to ask for God’s mercy: Let my friend die at

home, Lord, and not in the hospital. Let her go quickly, God, and with her loved

ones present. One Benedictine friend, a gentle, thoughtful man who has been in

constant physical pain for years and is now confined to a wheelchair, says of

prayer, “Often, all I can do is to ask God, ‘Lord, what is it you want from me?’”

From him I have learned that prayer is not asking for what you think you want

but asking to be changed in ways you can’t imagine. To be made more grateful,

more able to see the good in what you have been given instead of always

grieving for what might have been. People who are in the habit of praying – and

they include the mystics of the Christian tradition – know that when a prayer is

answered, it is never in a way that you expect.

But prayer stumbles over modern self-consciousness and self-reliance, a

remarkably ingenuous belief in our ability to set goals and attain them as quickly

as possible. I recently received a mailing from a group of New Age witches who

state in a kind of creed, their belief that “I can create my own reality and that

sending out a positive expectation will bring a positive result.” I suspect that

only America could have produced Pollyanna witches, part and parcel of our

pragmatism, our addiction to self-help and ‘how-to.’ No wonder we have

difficulty with prayer, for which the best ‘how-to’ I know is Psalm 46: 11, ‘be still

and know that I am God.” This can happen in an instant; it can also constitute a

life’s work.

For discussion and reflection:

1. From this short piece, what ideas about prayer struck you or made you

think?

2. Kathleen Norris reflects on the difference between the kind of

‘gimme’/shopping list kind of prayer for the self to what she and other

classical writers describe as, prayer ‘that holds the world together’ or prayer

that changes the one who prays, or prayer that moves toward the greater

society. How does this paradigmatic shift in understanding of prayer come

about? How might this cure the radical individualism of Western culture?

3. What would you like to see in your own prayer life?

Guiding Principles of Prayer

1. In prayer one enters into relationship with the Trinity, undergoes

mortification and grows in virtues. One becomes a practicing Christian by

practicing prayer.

2. A few basic tools in the hands of a master carpenter can produce works of

fine workmanship. The same can be said of spiritual tools. It is not always

the latest spiritual technologies that help make better Christians. There is no

lack of sophisticated gadgets on the market but what counts ultimately, is

what use we make of them.

3. Spiritual exercises like meditation and self-examination are more like

preliminaries to prayer but are usually included under the category of

prayer.

4. The relationship between habitual and actual prayer may be best explained

through an analogy. In a successful marriage husband and wife live in a

habitual state of love, which is the foundation of their relationship. As good

spouses, they also set aside special times to be with one another, to

demonstrate their love in tangible ways be it a holiday or a special meal

together or gifts. Both actual and habitual prayers are necessary.

5. Prayer is a divine initiative. God speaks to us first, prayer is our response to

the God who speaks to us first. The human race, says von Balthasar, was

created to hear the Word, and only in responding to the Word rises to its full

dignity.

6. Praying Beyond Ourselves – When we see God as the center of all things,

our prayer begins to have far-reaching social implications. We come to

realize that all things are ultimately connected to God. Prayer thus enlarges

our vision. It is according to Eugene Peterson, an ‘unselfing’ process that

reverberates into every social and political realm.

7. Page 131, prayer is not magic.

In seeking to integrate …

Another way of abusing prayer is …

8. Prayer is hard and humbling work. Hard as the spiritual life may be, we

have spiritual fathers and mothers who have gone before us. Their progress

in prayer enabled them to chart a generally reliable path of growth to us.

9. Page 133. Growth in prayer

It is important …

The one who grows in prayer moves farther and farther away ….

10. Vocal prayers vs. mental prayer p 134. Here I will …

11. Marriage analogy page 134-135,

Marriage usually starts with a …

Romance gives way to reality …

12. Page 136, but the soul that perseveres through the