Bishop Griswold: Praying Our Days
Former Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, who taught a spring course at Seabury, has written a new book called Praying our Days.
Praying Our Days: Chapter I
Lord, Teach Us to Pray
In the Gospel of Luke the disciples say to Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray.” Ever since, faithful people — like ourselves —who want to learn to pray, have echoed the plea of the disciples. Sometimes the request has a hint of desperation about it because insecurity about how to pray is not uncommon, afflicting even those whose lives are firmly grounded in an ongoing relationship with God. Our ability to pray can actually be undermined by the fear that we don’t know how to pray properly, and by our concerns about the purpose and results of our prayer. We may find ourselves plagued by such questions as: Is God meant to answer? Is it selfish to pray for myself? Doesn’t God already know before I pray? Such questions have been asked again and again across the ages as prayer has been variously described and understood. This is not surprising; at its heart prayer is a means of encountering the Divine, and such encounters defy easy description. The Catechism in the Book of Common Prayer describes prayer as “responding to God by thought and by deeds with or without words.” It also identifies categories of prayer: adoration, praise, thanksgiving, penitence, oblation (the offering of our life and our labor in union with Christ), intercession (prayer for others), and petition (bringing our own needs before God). As these categories represent aspects of a relationship, they overlap and run together. Our prayer life reflects the various dimensions of our ongoing and ever unfolding relationship with God.
As we struggle to know how we are best to be in that relationship, we can take heart from the eighth chapter of the Letter to the Romans in which St. Paul tells us that we do not know how to pray as we ought, and that the Spirit prays within us “with sighs too deep for words.” Paul assures us that prayer is an impulse planted deep within us by God’s own Spirit. How liberating it is to realize that prayer, at its deepest and truest, is the activity of the Spirit at work in us rather than something we do on our own.
Madeleine L’Engle, a writer who was shaped by the Anglican tradition and a life of prayer, bears witness in her poem, “Word,” to the interior working of the Spirit who transforms our words into revelatory silence. We turn ourselves to the Word, and all the while the Word, who is the risen Christ, is seeking us and praying within us.
I, who live by words, am wordless when
I try my words in prayer. All language turns
To silence. Prayer will take my words and then
Reveal their emptiness. The stilled voice learns
To hold its peace, to listen with the heart
To silence that is joy, is adoration.
The self is shattered, all words torn apart
In this strange patterned time of contemplation
That, in time, breaks time, breaks words, breaks me,
And then, in silence, leaves me healed and mended.
I leave, returned to language, for I see
Through words, even when all words are ended.
I, who live by words, am wordless when
I turn me to the Word to pray. Amen.
Madeleine L’Engle
In Psalm 27 the psalmist addresses God, saying: “You speak in my heart and say, ‘Seek my face.’” The psalmist is aware that deep within the Spirit is praying, “Seek my face, seek my face, seek my face.” The psalmist then yields to the Spirit and responds, “Your face, Lord, will I seek.”
In various ways, sometimes in the form of words that well up from deep within, sometimes in the form of a sense of yearning, awe, gratitude, or compassion, God speaks in our hearts and invites us to respond. Our prayer, then, is our response to God’s loving invitation. We are to give ourselves over to what the Spirit is already praying within us, even below the level of our consciousness. It is immensely freeing to know that prayer is always going on, and we are to tap into that reality rather than creating the reality ourselves. In order to do so, we must simply be present to the moment.
As a contemporary Benedictine teacher of prayer, Dom John Main, has said, prayer is “an openness to love on every level of our being.”
Prayer requires what the French writer Gabriel Marcel describes as “availability.” When you are “available” your heart and mind are open to the motions of the Spirit who moves within the depths of your being, and who also meets you through the words and presence of toehrs and the circumstances of your life. A single word of wisdom on the subject of prayer comes from a great teacher of prayer, Thomas Merton. Shortly before his death, he was asked how to pray. His response was: Pray. His practical advice puts me in mind of those of us who love to read and collect recipes but never quite get to the stove. As we learn to cook by cooking, so too we learn to pray by praying. Another counsel on prayer I have remembered over the years comes from Dom John Chapman, a wise English Benedictine monk. He says: Pray as you can. Don’t pray as you can’t. Though this seems obvious enough on the surface, at times in my life I have been tempted to emulate one or another of the saints by trying to make my soul fit their particular pattern of prayer. My success has been dismal! Since prayer is a matter of intimacy and companionship with Christ it is always ordered by the Spirit to correspond to the particular shape of our soul. In short, I am meant to meet God as I am, not as if I were St. John of the Cross or Hildegard of Bingen. And, you are meant to meet God as you are: praying as you can, not as you can’t.
Prayer, because it is a living relationship, has its seasons in which patterns that have oriented and sustained us may become dry and seemingly lifeless. At such times there is the temptation to blame ourselves for an insufficiency of fervor or attention. In fact, the Spirit may be revealing to us that it is time to move on to some new or deeper encounter with divine Mystery.I believe the fundamental question we each need to ask ourselves is this: How is the Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, seeking to pray within me and how can I be faithful to that call to prayer? At times ordered patterns of prayer such as those found in the Daily Office section of the Prayer Book can best serve us. At other times we may find ourselves drawn to less formal and more spontaneous ways of praying.
Because Jesus tells us the Spirit “blows where it wills” we must be prepared for those times when the response to our prayer is not what we expected, and also for those instances when we feel our prayer has not been heard. Sometimes when we pray we ask for “answers,” and when no answer seems to be forthcoming we are afraid our prayer has gone unheeded. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds us that the purpose of prayer is not information but communion with the Divine.
That the fruit of our prayer can catch us by surprise indicates the sovereign freedom of the Spirit. I think God wants us to know that the fruit of prayer is the gift of the Spirit and not the result of our efforts. What God chooses to give us, and when God chooses to give it to us, is up to God, as much as we might want certain graces or gifts in particular circumstances. It is always God’s choice to take our prayer and use it in whatever ways God in God’s love for us desires. We might pray earnestly for quiet confidence and find ourselves continuing to feel anxious. Yet, later on, at a time when we would normally be fearful, we are filled with an unexpected inner reservoir of peace and courage. We are able to act in ways that are far beyond our own perceived capabilities.
I would note here that a distinction is sometimes made between prayer and worship, with the underlying assumption that prayer is something personal and private while worship is in a different category. I prefer to think of personal prayer and corporate prayer — that is, liturgical prayer — as profoundly related, sustaining and enriching one another.
Our encounter with God, which is at the heart of prayer, can occur as we pray alone in a quiet corner as well as in the midst of a liturgy. There are times when the proclamation of scripture, the words of the preacher, the prayers of the people, the exchange of the peace, the receiving of communion draw us beyond ourselves into an encounter with Christ. Our prayer in our quiet corner may have worked in us an increased capacity to recognize Christ’s presence in the liturgical assembly. At the same time, our liturgical prayer can inform and deepen our personal prayer outside the liturgy.
All prayer, and indeed the desire to pray, flows from the same divine source and leads us deeper into the mystery we call God, which is also the mystery of who we, in grace and truth, are called to be. And indeed prayer is not simply an activity but also a way of being. Through prayer our consciousness is transformed and conformed to the mind of Christ, and we begin to see and act as Christ in us sees and acts. As Julian of Norwich tells us, prayer “ones” us to God.
--From Praying Our Days: A Guide and Companion, by Frank T. Griswold (ISBN: 978-0-8192-2359-3) and used here with permission of Morehouse Publishing, an imprint of Church Publishing Inc., New York. For more information, visit www.churchpublishing.org.