THE FIRST TRANSFORMATION
PRAYER MAKING
Any discussion of prayer
requires a definition of prayer.
When attempting to define prayer, however, one enters into dangerous
territory, for the subject of prayer does not easily lend itself to definition. Nor is it possible to exhaust the depth
of meaning of prayer. With that
caveat in mind I will proceed to propose a definition of prayer.
If spirituality is a
response to life, and Christian spirituality is a radical response to life which results from a relationship
with God as giver of life, then prayer is the mode of that relationship. The mode of a person's faith
relationship with God can be conceptualized as a "sense of
awareness". Prayer, then,
becomes a "heightened sense
of awareness". Specifically,
it is a heightened sense of awareness of Presence, Promise, Power, and Person.
AWARENESS OF PRESENCE
Prayer is first the
communication of a relationship (with God). We must communicate with one another if we are to have a
relationship. In the final
analysis, all breakdowns in relationships are a result of a lack of
communication. In counseling we
hear over and over, "He/she never talks to me anymore!"; "He/she
treats me as though I am not even there". And so we have things like "Couples Communication"
and "Marriage Encounter"/"Engaged Encounter" to teach
people how to talk to each other; how to communicate with one another.
Talking presupposes that there
is someone present to hear us.
Prayer is, therefore, first of all a heightened sense of Awareness of
Presence: the presence of God, and
the presence of myself.
I am aware that I am in the
presence of God. At the same time
I am aware that God is in my presence - that we are present to each other. (When we share prayer with someone
else, a third dynamic becomes operative - a heightened sense of awareness of
the presence of God, myself, and the other person or people).
What are the dynamics of
presence or of "being present"?
First there is joy. We are happy to be in the presence of
the other person. There exists a
bond between people who are joyful at being in each other's presence. And unless that bond is there
"real presence" is not possible. For example, if I am in the company of someone who I feel
ambivalent about, my mind may have a tendency to wander, or I any look around
the room for a more friendly, familiar face instead of looking at them. Or, I may become easily distracted by
what's going on around me. In a
word, I am not "present" to that person. I am not giving them my undivided attention. I am not listening to them and I am not
comfortable in their company. If I
dislike the person it is even worse.
I may not just be distracted, I may go into myself. Instead of listening to them I am
thinking of the next thing that I am going to say that will counter what they
are saying, put them down, or show them up. In other words, I "react" to the other person
instead of "respond" to them.
Being present to another, then, requires that I do three things:
1. I
must be happy to be in their company;
2. I
must listen to them; and,
3. I
must respond to them
In order for me to be
really, totally present to another I have to go out of myself and give my
complete attention to them. I must
make them the only thing that exists in the moment of our encounter.
Presence implies immanence
or closeness. Jesus teaches us to
call God "Abba" or "Daddy". He also talks about being sons and daughters - children of
God. This suggests a close,
intimate, familial relationship.
Jesus carries the presence of God even further, however. In his High Priestly Prayer, he prays,
"that they may be one, as you are in me and I am in You." (John
17:21,24a).
How does a person become
"one with God"?
One way is to strive to see
things the way God sees them. One
of the continuing motifs in the New Testament is that of Jesus healing the
blind. He says that he was sent by
God to, among other things, "give sight to the blind". He not only cures many blind people and
restores their sight, but he comments on those who believe they can see, but in
fact, see incorrectly - "You have eyes, but you cannot see". Awareness in this sense is awareness of
the world and the people in it as God see it. This is to see the world as Jesus saw it. A world in which the weak are powerful,
the poor are rich, the last are first, and the masters are servants. This is "seeing" as God sees. This is a step toward being one with
God.
This happens when we are
aware of God's presence in the world.
It is a matter of perception.
Some people wake up in the morning, open the window shade, look out at the
sun rising and say, "well, its another day. I have to go to work, school, clean the house, or
whatever." Another person can
wake up, open the window shade, look out at the same sun rising and say,
"praise God! It happened
again. The mystery of life begins
anew today". The difference
one of perception that is determined by the recognition or non-recognition of
the presence of God. Some people
believe in coincidences, others in Providence. The difference between the two is faith.
AWARENESS OF POWER
Prayer is secondly, a
heightened sense of awareness of power. This is the power that we
have access to through the Holy Spirit.
"After
this I will pour out my spirit on all humankind.
Your
sons and daughters will prophesy, your old will dream
dreams
and your you will see visions.
Even on the slaves,
men
and women, will I pour out my spirit in those days".
Joel
3:1,2
Jesus is certainly the prime
example of the awareness of this power.
He lived a life filled with miracles. His faith was an expectant faith:
"Jesus
said, 'take the stone away'...so they took away
the
stone. Then Jesus lifted up his
eyes and said,
'Father,
I thank you for hearing my prayer.
I knew
indeed
that you always hear me, but I speak for the sake
of
all these who stand around me, so that they may
believe
it was you who sent me'.
When
he had said this, he cried in a loud voice, 'Lazarus,
here! Come out!' The dead man came out, his feet and
hands
bound with bands of stuff and a cloth around his
face. Jesus said to them, 'Unbind him, let
him go free'".
John
11:41-44
Jesus fully expected Lazarus
to be raised from the dead and he thanked God in advance for answering his
prayer!
Jesus tell us to pray in the
same manner: "I tell you,
everything you ask and pray for, believe that you already have and it will be
yours" (Mk 11:23,24). He then
goes on to promise that we too can have miracles in our lives:
"I
tell you, whoever believes in me will perform the
same
works that I do myself - he will perform even
greater
works".
John
14:12,14
The Book of Acts is filled
with examples of people living this life of expectant faith as when Peter and
John heal the man at the Beautiful Gate (3:1-7); people are cured by Peter's
shadow (5:12-16); Peter raises Tabitha from the dead (9:36-42); or when Paul
raises the man who has fallen out of the window during one of Paul's sermons!
(20:7-12).
To the early church none of
this seemed unusual. On the
contrary, it was the normal expectation of the people as is shown by the direct
form with which they deal with people; "walk", "stand up",
"get to your feet". They
used the same form of prayer that Jesus used - a prayer that expects something
to happen just because we have prayed for it. In Samuel Becket's play, "Waiting for Godot",
Godot is heard to remark, "miracles are just so many answered prayers".
People of prayer are people
who live with expectant faith rooted in the awareness of the power of the
Spirit in their lives.
"The
(one) who prays pushes hope into areas where
(those)
who never dream never venture. And
so it is
not
difficult for him to believe. He
believes his
prayer
reaches God and that it influences reality
although
never in a strict cause-effect relationship.
Prayer
is successful not in terms of what it logically
produces
or pragmatically achieves, but in terms of
what
it forces reality to experience.
Prayer
gives strength and insight. It
supports those
who
go beyond human hopes and human reasons.
Unless one prays, he (or she) is likely to dream not at all
or
to dream only of what shall actually come to pass
or
to dream only of what is humanly possible. Hence
God,
who is not humanly possible, becomes unreal;
providence
is dismissed as magic, heaven as medieval,
hope
as wishful thinking, life after death as the
invention
of the emotionally weak...
Prayer
reaches our lives as we being to do things we
could
not have done unless we had prayed.
We begin
to
believe, we seek forgiveness, we love those who
would
otherwise have been unlovable to us, we attend
to
the important things in life.
Prayer is not a
pious
addition to things we would have done anyway.
It
is a force allowing things to happen which could
not
have occurred without it. Jesus
could not have
gone
to the cross unless he had first prayed in
Gethsemane.
Prayer
is a unifying factor in our lives, binding
together
poetry, devotion, and contemplation,
transforming
wishes into hopes, hopes into dreams,
dreams
into reality. Prayer inspires us
to serve
the
mystery of (humanity) and the mystery of God.
It
makes us reasonable but not with human reason,
volitional
but also grace-conscious. Prayer
is a
venture
beyond boundaries, an exploration in search
of
beauty, an expedition in eagerness for something
or
someone worthy of more devotion, more love, more
sacrifice,
more hope".[i]
AWARENESS OF PERSON
Prayer is thirdly a
heightened sense of awareness of person. First, the person of
God. It is in prayer that God's
self revelation is most dramatic.
God does this most directly through the Divine word in scripture. God also is revealed in the quiet of
our hearts when we are still and listen. We must, therefore, allow
God to be self-revealing to us. We
cannot "do all the talking" ("When you pray do not babble on as
the Pharisees do..."). We
must listen to the small, still voice with which God speaks to us ("Be
still and know that I am God". Ps 46:2).
Prayer also unlocks the
power of the Spirit to reveal ourselves to us. This may sound like
double talk, but it isn't.
The key to self-revelation
is honesty. We cannot experience
anything in prayer unless we are totally honest with God. We must be transparent and vulnerable
and reveal our true selves, with all the bumps, bruises, and flaws.
If we are totally hones with
God then we cannot help but be honest with ourselves. We allow all of the masks and illusions to fall away and we
see who we truly are. When we do
that two things can happen. First,
God can love me - just as I am.
God created me and tells me I am Divinely loved. Throughout all of human history God has
told us we are loved. Adam and Eve
were told by God, Abraham was told, Mary was told, Jesus was told, and you and
I are told. But we find reasons
not to believe it! And until we
can accept God's unconditional love we can't accept our own self-love, nor can
we love others.
Lake of self-love is the
major problem facing people today.
The Church is at least partly to blame for this. If we tell people that they are sinners
and in need of redemption long enough and loud enough it becomes a self
fulfilling prophesy. The message
of the Gospel, however, is God loves me.
And if God loves me, who am I not to love myself? This is not to say that we are free
from committing sin, that we have been absolved of all our failings. God loves us, but doesn't necessarily
always like the things we do. But
through the power of prayer we can have insight to recognize our failings and
the power to change - to be transformed.
We can be healed.
AWARENESS OF PROMISE
Prayer is fourthly, a
heightened sense of awareness of promise. The promise of the
Covenant. The covenant promise is
the promise of living in the grace of a faithful God - in other words, the
promise of BLESSING. And just what
is this blessing that God has promised to Abraham and his descendants (Isaac,
David, Jesus, us)? Jesus says in
Johns Gospel, "I have come that they may have life and live it to the
full" (10:10). Irenaes, one
of the early Fathers of the church probably said it best, "the glory of
God is a person fully alive".
And just what is a "person fully alive"?:
"...fully
alive people are those who are using all of
their
human faculties, powers, and talents.
They are
using
them to the full. These
individuals are fully
functioning
in their external and internal senses.
They
are comfortable with and open to the full
experience
and expression of all human emotions.
Such
people
are vibrantly alive in mind, heart, and will.
There
is an instinctive fear in most of us, I think,
to
travel with our engines at full throttle.
We prefer,
for
the said of safety, to take life in small and dainty
doses. The fully alive person travels with the
con-
fidence
that, if one is alive and fully functioning in
all
parts and powers, the result will be harmony, not
chaos.
Fully
alive human beings are alive in their external
and
internal senses. They see a beautiful world.
They
hear its music and poetry. They
smell the frag-
rance
of each new day and taste the deliciousness of
every
moment. Of course their senses are
also insul-
ted
by ugliness and offended by odors.
To be fully
alive
means to be open to the whole human experience.
It
is a struggle to climb a mountain, but the view
from
the top is magnificent. Fully
alive individuals
have
activated imaginations and cultivated senses of
humor. They are alive, too, in their emotions. They
are
able to experience the full gamut and galaxy of
human
feelings - wonder, awe, tenderness, compassion,
both
agony and ecstasy.
Fully
alive people are also alive in their minds. They
are
very much aware of the wisdom in the statement of
Socrates
that 'the unreflected life isn't worth living'.
Fully
alive people are always thoughtful and reflective.
They
are capable of asking the right questions of life
and
flexible enough to let life question them. They
will
not live an unreflected life in an unexamined
world. Most of all, perhaps, these people are
alive in
will and heart. They love much. They truly love and
sincerely
respect themselves. All love
begins here and
builds
on this. Fully alive people are
glad to be
alive
and to be who they are. In a
delicate and sen-
sitive
way they also love others. There
general
disposition
towards all is one of concern and love.
And
there
are individuals in their lives who are so dear to
them
that the happiness, success and security of these
loved
ones are as real to them as their own.
They are
committed
and faithful to those they love in this
special
way.
For
such people life has the color of joy and the sound
of
celebration. Their lives are not a
perennial funeral
procession. Each tomorrow is a new opportunity
which
is
eagerly anticipated. There is a
reason to live and
a
reason to die. And when such
people come to die their
hearts
will be filled with gratitude for all that has
been,
for 'the way we were', for a beautiful and full
experience. A smile will spread throughout their
whole
being
as their lives pass in review. And
the world will
always
be a better place, a happier place, a more human
place
because they lived and laughed and loved here.
The
fullness of life must not be misrepresented as the
proverbial
'bowl of cherries'. Fully alive
people,
precisely
because they are fully alive, obviously
experience
failure as well as success. They
are open
to
both pain and pleasure. They have
many questions
and
some answers. They cry and they
laugh. They
dream
and they hope. The only things
that remain alien
to
their experience of life are passivity and apathy.
They
say as strong 'yes' to life and a resounding 'amen'
to
love. They feel the strong stings
of growing - of
going
from the old into the new - but their sleeves are
always
rolled up, their minds are whirring, and their
hearts
are ablaze. They are always
moving, growing,
beings-in-process,
creatures of continual evolution."[ii]
To be a person full alive is
to be engaged by mystery, to surrender to God with a resounding
"yes", to recognize that life is a gift and rejoice in living
it. Fully alive people are
motivated and are motivators. They
are aware of life, are free to be what God created them to be, and are thankful
for it.
SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS
ABOUT PRAYER:
u PRAYER
is a commitment to HEALING (personal prayer)
and
REJOICING (communal prayer).
u PRAYER
is not an EVENT (something we do), but is
rather
a PROCESS (a way of being).
u PRAYER
is an attempt to come to terms with more
than
our everydays and to address ourselves to
life
as a totality.
u PRAYER
is not something we measure in terms of
ADEQUACY
(amount of time spent/given to it;
words
used, style, etc.), but rather in terms
of
INTENSITY (quality of life derived from it).
u PRAYER
is intimately joined to one's attitudes
and
values of life. One does not pray
when he
or
she says the right words, but when he or she
LIVES
FOR THE RIGHT REASONS.
u PRAYER,
then, is built upon a spirituality of
attitudes
and values, rather than on functions
or
exercises - and as such prayer becomes
spontaneous
and irrepressible, just as joy or
pain
or any other human feeling.
TRANSFORMATION THROUGH
PRAYER MAKING
From what has been said, you
can see that prayer is more of an attitude and life style than it is a
"thing" that you do. As
such it is a major, if not the
major transformation experience of the person of faith.
In this context it is
difficult to prescribe any formulas for Prayer Making. However here are some simple guides:
1. For
the kind of prayer-life style described above
to
be effective it is necessary to begin each day
by
placing yourself in a "prayer stance", a sort
of
"compass orientation" before journeying out.
For
each person this will probably be different.
For
some it may be through using the Liturgy of
the
Hours each day; for others it may be through
Eucharist;
for still others it may be through
beginning
each day by reflectively reading some
scripture.
Find what works for you and faithfully follow it
each
day.
2. Be
willing to prayer for and with others when
invited
to; or to ask others to pray for and
with
you. Pray for one another each
day.