Prayer as Personal Encounter

 

By Brother Vladimir

 

Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, of blessed memory, once instructed his audience on a BBC television series to set aside regular periods of silence for sincerely praying this (seemingly) simple prayer: “Help me, O God, to put off all pretenses and to find my true self.”

 

Since my first encounter with this prayer, I’ve often returned to it as a way of acquiring what the Zen tradition calls “beginner’s mind.” For in its pithy phrasing is contained the inner dynamic of prayer as entry into a deeper, more profound knowledge of self. “Enter eagerly into the treasure house that is within you, and so you will see the things that are in heaven; for there is but one single entry to them both,” St. Isaac the Syrian informs us.

 

When approaching this short prayer, one should tread carefully: its words, when deeply felt and experienced, are extremely potent. There is no rule book as to how such a prayer, pronounced with faith, will grow and evolve for any given person. So much depends, among other factors, on the level of authenticity with which its words are uttered and how deeply they descend into the heart—as well on a person’s consistency and patience in persevering with it even when it seems that “nothing is happening,” at least not on the surface.

 

Recovering the “Image”

 

Our Christian tradition teaches that all human beings are born with a precious inheritance: we are, all of us, made in the image of God. This is that pearl of great price, the “Truth at the heart of my being” and the “wisdom deep within” (Psalm 51(50):6, New Skete Translation). However, it is also a fact of life that this pearl gets covered over by many layers of grime and dirt. The woman who has lost the silver coin (Luke 15:8-10) - the coin that symbolizes the deep self as made in the image of God - has to light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it. And what is that luminescent lamp that helps her to re-discover it if not interior prayer repeated within the heart’s deepest chambers?

 

Metropolitan Anthony offers another evocative image to describe the action of prayer. Imagine, he says, a magnificent and very ancient wall fresco. Over the centuries this fresco has been painted over by individuals who, in not perceiving the stunning beauty of the original painting, have tastelessly covered it over with supposed improvements and kitschy flourishes. The deceptively simple prayer that he offers, when it begins to penetrate deep inside us, is like a slowly acting solution that begins to eat away at those thick layers of exterior dross, starting very gradually to offer glimpses of the original wall fresco that has always remained intact underneath the surface.

 

St. Theophan the Recluse, an Orthodox saint of the 19th century who had a masterful grasp of human psychology, once succinctly wrote that the essence of prayer is to “stand before God with the mind in the heart.” An incredible amount of wisdom can be unpacked from that statement (which there is no space to go into now). For present purposes, it is enough to say that often the biggest challenge in prayer is to figure out which self will stand before God in the first place.

 

To begin to discover the “innermost self” (which is what the Christian tradition refers to as the heart or nous), hiding somewhere in between all of the public personas and “surface selves” is precisely the point of Metropolitan Anthony’s prayer. He said: “We think that we are standing before God in all truth, whereas we are putting forward someone who is not our real self, who is an actor, a sham, a stage personality. Every one of us is a variety of persons at the same time…we are different according to circumstances and surroundings: the various people that meet us know us as different persons.”

 

Like the Gerasene demoniac described in the Gospels, we too can say that our “name is Legion; for we are many” (Mark 5:9). To use the language of modern psychology, we consist of multiple subpersonalities and play many roles, some of which are quite discordant and most of which are activated without our conscious knowledge. Even a mild experience of hunger can alter how we think, feel, and act. This is one meaning of Jesus bemoaning a “perverse generation” (Matthew 17:17). Being “perverse” really refers to having a heart that goes off in many different directions, constantly pulled this way and that. As we are, we think one thing, feel another, say a third, and do something else entirely. It is no wonder that our lives can feel so chaotic when the head, heart, and gut have not been integrated.

 

Pretenses need not be exaggerated versions of phoniness; they extend very far down and can be very subtle, difficult to detect in ourselves. Often we require others to point out our blind spots. If “pretense” sounds too harsh, we can think of distorting lenses that bias what we see when we look inside and outside. This allows a person to deny, edit, and distort reality as it is, so as to feel more comfortable. We sometimes drink, take drugs, engage in “retail therapy,” over-intellectualize, or otherwise do things (like judge others and take pleasure in their misfortune) to escape reality and feel better about ourselves.

 

According to one line of thinking, the personality is a multilayered network of such distorting lenses, with different degrees of filtering capacity. To quote Meister Eckhart: “A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.”

 

Most of those skins that Meister Eckhart mentions were initially formed because they had a useful function to perform—or they may even continue to perform useful functions—but they can be so many obscuring veils when we desire to enter into a deeper personal relationship with God.

 

God, to use a certain phrasing, is reality as it is, so to deny reality is to deny God. To begin to shed those layers built up throughout our lives is to let go of our elaborate defense mechanisms. When our defenses relax even a little, then the heart becomes more sensitive, and we catch glimpses of another consciousness and awareness, where we experience ourselves not as lonely and isolated individuals struggling to escape from persistent sources of dissatisfaction but as immersed in an ongoing communion with God’s uncreated energies of love. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock” (Revelation 3:20): our choice is to either open the door and allow ourselves to be found or to keep it closed.

 

So the first step in praying Metropolitan Anthony’s “simple” prayer is a great “coming home to one self,” an in-gathering and concentration of all our vital forces from their outward dispersal, so that they can begin to cohere or collect themselves into some kind of wholeness. We are, in fact, “re-membering” ourselves on an inner level. When recollection grows stronger we can sense our innermost self being irradiated by an entirely other source of light and warmth.

 

There is a raw and tender vulnerability in allowing our innermost self to be seen by the “eye” of God. “O Lord, examine me and know me yourself, You know when I sit still and when I move about; you read my mind even from afar” (Psalm 139(138):1-2, New Skete Translation). “O Lord, you know my every desire; my sighs are no secret to you” (Psalm 38(37):9, New Skete Translation). A legion of desires (often contradictory) lurks in the murky depths of our subconscious mind. Some of them are less salutary and wholesome than others. Being seen at that level requires uncompromising self-honesty; it requires a willingness to bare our wounds, not as an exercise in masochism but in order to invite God’s loving glance to penetrate into these secret recesses. An increase of light (consciousness) can begin a very gradual process of healing and fostering a growth of our life in Christ.

 

As the Romanian schema-nun Mother Siluana put it in her wonderful book God, Where is the Wound? when we pray during the Divine Liturgy to commend all our life to Christ we are consenting to invite Christ down into the furthest depths of our subconscious mind, to allow ourselves to open and be transformed by grace. We are not just presenting our conscious self-evaluation, which is ever-occupied with conducting its own public relations campaign to make itself appear self-justified and in the right. Christ came to save us in our brokenness, not our imagined saintliness. As Metropolitan Anthony said on another occasion, and here I am paraphrasing from my memory: “God can save the sinner that you are, but not the saint you pretend to be.”

 

The truth inside of our being is that we are both fragmented and whole, both broken and healed, both sinner and saint. Our task is to realize this consciously and to be able to live from it, even in times when the storms of life bear down on us. Peter was able to walk on the stormy waters until he took his eyes off Christ and began to sink into those frigid, turbulent waters. The ability to simultaneously hold and honor the ultimate paradox (or mystery) of a reconciliation of opposites is the beginning of an authentic feeling of sacredness. In the Orthodox tradition, mention is made of a “joyous sorrow” that infuses a repentant heart at prayer. This joyous sorrow is what we feel in those moments when we can allow ourselves to be absolutely shattered by the tragic beauty of life: the beauty of God’s image that is hidden in our depths and a vivid realization of how far off the mark we’ve come in actually incarnating that beauty in our life, along with the hope of growing more fully into this call throughout a lifetime. The countenance of many of the saints depicted in icons bears witness to this joyous sorrow.

 

A Few Closing Reflections

 

Here is just one more thing to mention, based on my experience with Metropolitan Anthony’s prayer. And that has to do with answering the question “How do I know if it’s working?” When prayer is sincerely felt, felt by the whole body, and when, as St. Theophan and other Holy Fathers and Mothers say, the prayer descends into the heart, then it will inevitably set in motion tremors that reverberate throughout one’s life, inner and outer. It often seems that to sense these vibrations and tremors requires that we quiet the whirling “monkey mind” that is constantly jumping around from thought to thought or finding itself engrossed in one external happening after another. As Metropolitan Anthony put it: “Too often we are immersed in what is happening around us, all the unnecessaries we gather from the wireless, television, newspapers…” In our day, this digital distraction is now “on steroids.”

 

But if we sharpen our intuitive sense, become receptive to the inner world, and open ourselves to receive, then something may begin to reach us. The tremors and vibrations set in motion by prayers like this often manifest themselves in insights, realizations that can arrive as brief glimpses that ultimately facilitate lasting change (or what our tradition calls metanoia—a positive transformation of one’s way of existing) by giving us a different perspective, a “big picture.” These illuminations can come at the most unexpected times, so one has to be vigilant enough to notice their flashes. Christ extorts us to watch and pray.

 

Speaking personally, these insights often reveal ways in which I’ve been trying desperately, usually unconsciously, to cling to some recurring attitude or pattern of behaving, thinking, or feeling that, even if it was once useful, is now causing more harm than good to self and others. A deeply intuited insight that cuts to the core then gives permission to, at least temporarily, shed one more layer of pretense or inauthenticity. Instantly there comes a sense of release, relief, joy; a feeling of lightness (of light!) grows stronger, and the darkness retreats a little more. Some new burst of life energy becomes available again, instead of remaining stagnant. Such insights are very special. They are a kind of food for nourishing the growth of our spiritual being. Maybe they are a way of very gradually building that interior spiritual, “glorified body” that St. Paul speaks of. Just as our physical, carnal bodies require food for sustenance, another type of food is required to nurture an inner growth, of some crystallized deposit that grows as our spiritual being matures. Other sources of such nourishment come from regular participation in liturgical worship, lectio divina, and maybe most strongly through a conscious participation in the Holy Mysteries (Sacraments) of the Church. Growth of spiritual being has no end.

 

God, in Christ (the Logos, Word, Truth, Wisdom, and Grace), seeks ceaselessly to be allowed to enter into our life, based on our freely given responses to the promptings of the Holy Spirit. However strongly we may thirst and desire to discover God, we can be sure that God has an infinitely stronger desire to seek out you and me. It is us, not God, who need to free up the time and attention to be present for this intimate and sacred rendezvous. It was Christ’s disciples who kept falling into slumber at Gethsemane (Matthew 26:33-43).

 

The Parable of the Prodigal Son teaches us that God the Father never stops looking for us and waiting for us to take small steps toward the Kingdom of Heaven. When we begin to follow the Spirit’s gentle stirrings, there is no telling where they might eventually lead us in the circumstances of our own life journey—but these stirrings of the breeze are also the exhilaration of becoming a living human person in a teeming, holy, living, and luminous cosmos that strives to become aware of itself through us.