Contemplative Prayer: Establishing and Practice; Avoiding the Pitfalls – Part 2

by Brother David

03: What Prayer Is
So then, if prayer is not thinking about God or feeling a certain way about God, what is prayer?
My first grade religion teacher taught us that “Prayer is the raising of the mind and heart to God” and “Prayer is God’s life in us.” At the time those definitions made no sense to me, and now they say too much.  What does “raising of the mind and heart to God” mean, and how do you do that?  If we are to pray always, as St Paul says, then how do we raise our minds and hearts all the time?  When I was a kid I really worked hard at this, with disastrous results: trying to raise one’s mind and heart to God while careening down a hill on a skateboard is hazardous to your health.  I know. 
As for prayer being God’s life in us, well, so what do I do about that?  What does it mean in my day-to-day life?  If we can speak about the “art of prayer” then what is the “art” of God’s life in me? 
The problem with definitions in general is that they lead us to thinking about something rather than experiencing it.  These definitions in particular seem to lead many people to see prayer as some kind of intellectual exercise or as a kind of passivity where God is the artist at work and we are merely the canvas.  So, rather than offer a definition of prayer at this time, I’d like to back into it by briefly considering some of the “modalities” of prayer. 
Traditionally, prayer is divided into four basic “modalities:” Oops, Gimme, Thanks, and Wow! 
Oops = prayer of repentance.  Praying for forgiveness for wrongs done.  This modality of prayer is often connected with…
Gimme = prayer of petition.  Praying for people or things.  This modality of prayer is often connected with…
Thanks = prayer of gratitude.  This modality of prayer is often connected with…
Wow! = praise and adoration.  Telling God how wonderful God is or God’s creation is.  Praying awe.
Let’s briefly examine each of these in a little more depth. 03.1: Prayer of repentance:
Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Lord have mercy.  Christ have mercy.  Lord have mercy.
O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all, because they offend Thee, O my God, how art all good and deserving of all my love.  I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life.  Amen.
These three prayers were impressed on me early in childhood, and I grew up with the understanding that the prayer of repentance could be summed up as: I did something wrong; I feel bad; Don’t hurt me – which is pretty much the mindset of a child vis-à-vis her/his parents.  We even see this attitude between spouses and friends in adult life as well: I hurt you; I feel bad; Please, don’t leave me: repentance and punishment inextricably linked.  In this view, yes, God may be merciful, but God is to be propitiated lest the draconian reprisals of God’s justice be visited upon us.
A second contemporary stance acknowledges the constancy of God’s mercy but in reaction against the reprisals of God’s justice.  Sin, in this view, is construed simply as “missing the mark,” a popular, if not quite correct understanding of the Greek verb hamartano and its noun form, hamartia.  While it is true that hamartano has a base meaning of “to miss the mark,” its general usage, from its earliest use in Homer on, is more “to fail of doing” something or “to fail at one’s purpose” and so “to do wrong.”  “Missing the mark,” then, is understood not simply as having made a mistake but as a failure to achieve one’s purpose: one misses the mark, not by accident, but because one was aiming at the wrong thing or one was using the bow in an improper way.  In the extreme (and the not so extreme, for that matter), sin, when construed as missing the mark in the more popular understanding of the term, is trivialized—and so, its gravity lost, the prayer of repentance is reduced to a dismissive “Well, God, you understand.”
The truth about the prayer of repentance is not merely somewhere in between these two extremes (the fear of the child and the arrogance and nonchalance of the adolescent) but is quite different altogether.  Repentance is founded on two truths:
1.  That we are guilty of sin.  It is important to understand that guilt is not a feeling.  Guilt is rather the acknowledgement that we have willingly enacted a disconnect between ourselves and God – that we have, through our own fault, failed to achieve the purpose for which God created us and to which we are called.  Feelings, such as sorrow, grief, shame, or embarrassment, may ensue upon the acknowledgement of guilt, but they are not an indication of guilt any more than they are an indication of repentance.
2. That God is perfectly just and perfectly merciful – neither at the expense of the other.   It is important that both of these be acknowledged because, without love, God would be a tyrant and, without justice, God would be arbitrary and capricious.  It is because of God’s perfect love and justice that we know in faith that the purpose to which we are called is the fulfillment of our nature – in short, our happiness.
The prayer of repentance, then, is about re-opening ourselves to God’s merciful love (into which we are constantly invited) and, in so doing, accepting willingly the consequences of our actions – God’s justice.  This is the prayer of the responsible adult who can recognize the harm done in the commission of evil and who desires to respond to the continuous invitation to relationship with the transcendent source of the meaning of all and so, also, the meaning of each of our lives. It can be summed up as: “Lord God, I have done wrong; Help me understand the depth of the harm wrought; Give me courage and love to accept the consequences of my sin and to redress the harm done with grace and composure; Guide me into right thinking and right action. Amen.”

03.2: Prayer of petition and intercession:
Petition and intercession are essentially the same, the difference being that the prayer of intercession is expressly on behalf of or for the intention of another person.   I’ll use the term petition to cover both.
People pray for things all the time: for peace in the world, for the health of friends and family, to win the lottery, for good weather – and the list goes on.  On reflection, the prayer of petition seems to present a couple of problems: on one hand, it seems to foster a bad theology based on magical thinking; on the other hand, Jesus himself says that we will be given whatever we ask in his name.
Let’s start with some theological givens. We believe that God is omniscient, perfectly loving, and omnipotent, among other things.  What this means, practically speaking, is that God knows exactly what we need, that God wants and wills that those needs be met for our sake, and that God has provided the means and mechanisms in the created order to accomplish those ends.  Let’s also start with a petition: asking that God remember and take care of hungry children.
There are several reasons why children go hungry.  Among them are that individuals and groups fail at their purpose through greed or lack of concern – they sin in such ways that, among the consequences, children go hungry.  There are also circumstances (e.g. natural disasters) wherein the consequences are such that children go hungry.  What we may forget, when we ask God to take care of hungry children, is that we – you and I –  are among the means and mechanisms provided by God to ensure that children are fed. 
What this comes down to is that it’s not supposed to take a miracle for children to have food.  We don’t have to remind God that children are going hungry; God knows that.  When we toss this responsibility onto God and do nothing about it ourselves, we end up asking God to do things which, in the end, comes down to asking God to rewrite reality: making what cannot be happen. This is magical thinking that treats God as daddy, the big rescuer – an omnipotent external agency whose job is to make everything OK according to my desires.  This is bad theology.
For example, God does not make X love Y, nor does God stop A nation from warring on B nation, because to do so would be to interfere with the free will and autonomy of the individuals concerned, and God respects us and is so boundaried as not to do such a thing.  In like manner, for God to stop natural disasters, God would have to suspend the laws of physics selectively, with the result that the universe would be an inconsistent reality.  For example, to avert an avalanche, gravity would have to work selectively to keep the snow from sliding down and accelerating, while still allowing for people to ski down the same hillside.  
Here’s an anecdote about the rejection of responsibility and this kind of magical thinking of looking to God as the fixer. An acquaintance and I were once talking about the homeless, and he said, “Why doesn’t God do something about this?”  I said, “Well, what about you?”  He said, “What about me what?”  “You do something.”  “I don’t know what to do.”  “You could find out.”  He glared at me and said, “Somebody else has to do something” and walked away from me.  He hasn’t spoken to me since and, to the best of my knowledge, he hasn’t done anything about the homeless.
The attitude in this view of petition is that of the child looking to daddy or mommy to take care of things: to give me a pony or a bicycle, to get me out of scrapes, to make it better when I get hurt.  The things and conditions asked for in this form of prayer can also be quite noble:  to give me love or humility or chastity, to give peace on earth, to heal someone who is sick.  The common point is that we’re asking God to change the world so that I can have what I want – even if it is a great, selfless, and noble good.  This is not prayer; this is wishful thinking.
But Jesus does say that we will receive whatever we ask in his name.  The issue here is: What does “In Jesus’ name” mean?  I don’t think it means “God, I like Jesus, so you should do this for me.”  Nor do I think it means “Jesus, take my request to the Father because he’s more likely to listen to you than to me.”  Rather, praying “in Jesus’ name” is more a matter of representing or embodying the character and intention of Jesus in our prayer: i.e. conforming ourselves to Christ just as he conformed himself to the will of the Father.
So when we pray in petition as Jesus prayed, we find ourselves using only a few petitions with variations:
1: Give us what we need: i.e. I know that you know what we need; help me to remember that we are not sufficient unto ourselves.
2: May your kingdom come and your will be done: i.e. let me see reality as you have made it and as you intended it, that I may work to conform myself and the world to your will.
3: Your will, not mine, be done: i.e. let me always be subservient to you who are my life and my meaning.So, in a very important way, the prayer of petition is not about having or getting but about being – being more in the image and likeness of the one who created us – being more fully human. The prayer of petition does not necessarily require action on our part – it may be that we are constrained from doing anything except pray for those affected – but it does mean that we ask for the grace to be open to what is required of us to bring the world and ourselves into conformity with the will of God.  The prayer of petition changes us as surely as the prayer of repentance changes us, and when we are changed, the world is changed. 
So, we can and should pray for hungry children in Jesus’ name.  And when we do so, we will be praying something like this:
“Lord God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, help us to see the plight of these children and the way to alleviate their hunger.  Help us to understand reality as you have made it and as you intended it, that we may work to conform ourselves and the world to your will. Help us to understand that we cannot do this by ourselves but that we need and are dependent on you and those others whom you also inspire and empower in the fulfillment of your will.  We ask this in the name of your Son who fed the 5,000.  Amen.”

03.3 Prayer of gratitude:
Gratitude recognizes everything as a gift, and a prayer of gratitude recognizes God as the source of all gifts.  As it says in the epistle of James, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from you, the Father of lights.” (James 1:17)  Among the things that impede the prayer of gratitude are the belief that we have anything, the belief that we deserve what we have or want, and absentmindedness.
When we take the world for granted, when we take our own existence and the existence of the people around us for granted, when we take our health and our possessions for granted, when we take anything for granted, we forget that just about everything in our lives is contingent; i.e. everything can be other than it is: our health can change, people can die or leave us, things break or are taken away or wear out.  Nothing stays the same.  Everything passes away.  Even us.  Even we will one day die.  It rarely occurs to us that we never really had any of these things in the first place. 
If, on the other hand, we recognize our poverty – if we come to the awareness that nothing belongs to us; if we recognize that everything is contingent and that nothing except God is necessary, eternal, and absolute; if we recognize that what we hold is not ours and furthermore that what we hold is held in trust for another, then we will hold everything with greater respect, greater reverence, and greater gratitude.  With this comes also an awareness of the interconnectedness and fragility of the world, and we come to understand the destructiveness of something as mundane as littering (whether literal or metaphorical). 
The belief that we deserve what we have also runs counter to the spirit of poverty, but it also adds a contractual element as well: “You owe me because I’ve done this or that.”  With this comes also the idea of “fairness:” “It’s not fair that my car broke down, I didn’t get the job, my child died, because I played by the rules: you owe me.”  (Of course, fairness goes only so far: we rarely demand our just deserts from God for our wrongdoing.)    But, as noted in the section on the prayer of petition, this insistence that I should receive good because I’ve done good demands of God a constant re-write of reality: just because I’ve been good does not mean that my mother shouldn’t die of Alzheimer’s.  Once more we are in the realm of magical and wishful thinking.  Furthermore, this kind of “contractual” thinking makes gratitude difficult: if the “deal” falls through, it’s God’s fault; if the “deal” succeeds, it’s because of my sacrifice.
When we finally accept the world as it is, when we stop trying to bargain or set up contracts with God (If you do this for me, I’ll do this), then we can begin to look past ourselves.  Then we can begin to appreciate the rightness of the world.  For several years, my sister took care of my mother, who was suffered from Alzheimer’s.  She would tell me about mom taking care of children that my sister couldn’t see: dressing them, sewing, ironing, and folding clothes for them.  When my sister stopped being angry that this was happening, she saw and appreciated, in a way she had not before, how my mother served her family willingly and selflessly through her life.  And in the end, after my mother died, she came to see, through her own grief, how deep the wound of love ran.
Perhaps the most pernicious block to gratitude is absentmindedness – not noticing the world.  More than anything else, gratitude is based on our awareness of the given-ness of the world, and our lack of awareness keeps us from recognizing that: How can you be grateful for a gift that you don’t know exists?   Our very existence is a gift: “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” (Psalm 139:14)  Our awareness of our existence is also a gift.  When we open our eyes to the world and understand the gifts that it holds – even if those gifts are merely an opportunity to serve to make the world a better place, to bring it into conformity with the will of God – then we can be grateful.  Then we can see the gift of what is and our prayer might well be:
I thank you, Lord, for all that you have given,
I thank you, Lord, for all that you have taken away,
And I thank you, Lord, for all that is left.


03.4 Prayer of awe, praise, or adoration: 
The prayer of praise is similar to the prayer of gratitude, but adoration, the prayer of praise and awe, is more about the awareness of the beauty, complexity, simplicity, awesomeness, and sometimes awfulness of existence, and attentiveness to the very nature of the Author of creation. This awareness of creation stems from the given-ness of the world, as does gratitude, but it is also constituted of focusing on reality as a child might and allowing ourselves to be amazed.  I believe that the prime impediment to the prayer of praise is jadedness. We’ve all seen so much – from galaxies far far away to the structure of DNA to the evidence for quarks – and the sheer amount of information, both esoteric and mundane, pounding on us today has dulled us into a stupor of inattentiveness.  It is the practice of simplicity, the attitude of the child, and focus, the blotting out of extraneous noise, that allows us to be amazed once more:
The sun is approximately 93,000,000 (93 million) miles away from the Earth.  Sunlight takes an average of 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach the earth.  The light of the Sun’s nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, takes 4,243 years to reach the earth.  Which places it (approximately) 24,988,100,530,120 miles away from us.  That’s 24 quadrillion, 988 trillion, 100 million, 530 thousand, 120 miles (give or take).  And that’s just the distance to the sun’s nearest stellar neighbor.  Also, the sun’s average density is about 1 gram/cubic centimeter – just about the same as liquid water.  The sun can contain one million Earths and contains 99.86% of the mass of the solar system.  So if the solar system weighed 200 pounds, everything except the sun – all the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets – would weigh about 4 ounces.
If we savor these kinds of facts, roll them around in our heads, grasp the enormity of what is being shown, and then consider that Someone, God, created the conditions that allow a universe where such things are possible (and that this is but a tiny bit of that universe), we can allow ourselves to experience awe, and we can be led to render praise.
Another aspect of the prayer of adoration is to focus on the very nature of God.  Recall that thinking about God is not prayer, but our focus on appreciating the nature of God is not the same as thinking about or studying God.  There is a great distinction between a botanist appreciating a rose and a botanist studying a rose, and yet all of the botanist’s knowledge and awareness are brought to bear in her or his appreciation of this rose and increases the delight and wonder around the rose.  So it is with God: as we consider God in Trinity, the more we understand about the nature of God – God’s simplicity, God’s necessity, God’s mercy and justice, God’s awareness and knowledge, God’s “relationality;” the mystery of Jesus’, the Christ’s, incarnation, passion, death, and resurrection; and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and so on – the more we perceive and appreciate the reality of God, the more we want to express our wonder and appreciation.  Adoration is reveling in the God who has chosen to be present to us.A simple prayer of praise might well be:  What God is great as our God.  You are a God who works wonders. (Psalm 77:13-14)
Another simple one is: Wow!
Another simple one is: silence.

03.5: The unity and cohesion of the modalities of prayer, and a definition:
While it is convenient to speak about these modalities as independent realities, they are, in fact, intertwined such that it is almost impossible to pray one without praying them all.  For example, when we pray in repentance, we ask for forgiveness and strength and we are grateful to our God who shows mercy and compassion, allowing us to right wrongs to the extent possible – and we acknowledge that all of this is done under the aegis of the perfection and dignity of the One who calls us to be more and more the image and likeness we were created to be and whom we proclaim to be the source of goodness and meaning by that very same prayer of repentance.
So, given what we’ve been talking about, what might be a definition of prayer?
We have seen that:
1: Prayer is always in response to God’s invitation.  That response may be to God coming to us by grace through the ministry of other people or through creation or through the express overture of God’s own self.
In repentance, it is the call of God’s love and mercy that inspire us to acknowledge God’s justice.  In petition, for us as Christians, it is Christ’s example and our recognition that we are not sufficient unto ourselves that lead us to ask for what we need to be what we were created to be.  Gratitude is in response to God’s generosity; adoration is in response to God’s very being.  The invitation comes first and is prior to all our actions – we are forever responding to God.  As the prophet Isaiah sang: “Before I was born the Lord called me; from my mother’s womb, the Lord has spoken my name.” (Isaiah 49:1)
2: Prayer is intentional.  We can’t accidentally pray.  The question might be raised: if an action becomes habitual (as we might hope prayer will) can it still be intentional?  If it is my intention always to close doors quietly and I become habituated to doing that, then I am fulfilling my intention of always closing doors quietly.  Good habits work towards our intentions; bad habits work against them.
3: Prayer is being actively conscious of and actively in relation with God.  It is not so much that we do things that are prayer (although, as we shall note later, there are practices that enhance prayer and lead us into deeper prayer), rather, prayer is actively being with God. 
 So we might say this:
Prayer is the conscious deepening of our response to God’s continuous and continual outpouring of mercy and love.  As such, it is the awareness of who God is and what God is and of the goodness and rightness of God’s actions in all things; as well as the recognition of our God in Trinity who creates, redeems, and sanctifies us; and it translates into action as docile submission to the will of God.
In this sense, then, prayer is, in fact, the raising of the mind and heart to God inasmuch as it is the dedication of the whole self to this process. It is the experience of God’s life within us: to the extent that we conform ourselves to God’s will, the more fully do we realize in whose image and likeness we were brought into being, and so the more generous is our response to the gift of our being.  And the art of prayer consists in finding ways to deepen our conscious response to God’s invitation.