3 minute read
Many people in the deconstruction crowd have religious trauma around prayer. The sources are many. It seemed pointless when God already knew everything. Militaristic “prayer warrior” language didn’t sit well with latent nonviolent tendencies. A prayer service where people screamed, “Boughta-Honda-shoulda-boughta-Hyundai!” gibberish at the top of their lungs was freaky.1 Dead ritualism felt dull and forced. Initial confusion about “pray without ceasing,” then guilt for failing to do so… Whatever the reason, this form of religious trauma is pervasive.
I’ve become fairly convinced the problem is that most Jesus followers have a poor understanding of prayer leading to unhealthy expectations. The most common view is that prayer’s purpose is straight-up petition.2 Those who get deeper than that start describing it as talking with God. I’ve had people encourage me to sit with Jesus or have coffee with Jesus, which seems to mean employing one’s imagination for a friendly conversation. Prayer isn’t intended to be pragmatic, so I feel rather uncomfortable putting it this way, but neither of those outlooks clicked for me.
Far be it for me to declare what anyone else’s prayer life or prayer experiences should be. All I can do is share five pivots that have been game-changers for me. First, I adopted a more Jewish style of confrontational vulnerability.3 Second, I broadened out the scope of what prayer entails.4 Third, I rejected the view that prayer must flow from “the overflow of your heart.”5 Fourth, I completely stopped looking for prayer to “work” or be effective.6 Fifth, I decided prayer is less about overt, back-and-forth communication and more about being subtly centered in the Spirit.
I love how Richard Rohr put it: “Prayer is not primarily saying words or thinking thoughts. It is, rather, a stance. It’s a way of living in the Presence, living in awareness of the Presence, and even of enjoying the Presence.” While my prayer life includes both liturgical and spontaneous prayer, the traumatizing pressure from Christian culture largely fell away as prayer evolved from Doing to Being. It feels like a metamorphosis from focusing on achievement or discipline to cultivating a posture of living with emotional openness, intellectual creativity, and spiritual receptivity.7
The original beatniks dabbled with many spiritual expressions and had eclectic religious sensibilities. It was a constant source of ongoing dialogue. At times it almost feels like I’m reliving the spiritual echoes of that conversation, only it’s primarily inside my own head since most of the Jesus followers I know are highly uncomfortable with these avenues of exploration. As for the art of prayer, my spirituality remains overtly centered around The Way of Jesus but, if I’m being candid, I feel it’s both myopic and foolish for us to think Christianity in isolation has mastered it.
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Try saying it fast. It really does sound like “tongues.”↩
It’s about asking for divine help with things.↩
Christians often feel they’re supposed to be reverential and worshipful in their prayer lives, but the Jewish tradition has always valued wrestling with God. I don’t hold back or pull punches, and I think God wants it that way.↩
Whenever I invite a group to offer informal prayer now, I reset expectations by prefacing it with something like, “Let us come before the Lord with our thanksgivings and lament, petitions and praise, for ourselves and for others.”↩
That’s the language they used all the time in the Pentecostal circles in which I was raised. Anyway, maybe it reflects my naturally more melancholy disposition, but there’s seldom overflow. More often it’s spiritual drought conditions, so I now use pre-written, liturgical prayers like a spiritual irrigation system.↩
The theologians call this the “efficacy of prayer.” I realized that prayer, at least for me, is less about changing the outward world and more about forming my interior life of heart, mind, and spirit.↩
I used to think it was weird that I felt more prayerful slowly getting my bubble re-centered while quietly staring into a camp fire than anything I ever did at church. Now I’ve embraced this spiritual reality. It’s the most authentic form of prayer I know.↩
