Prayer seems simple enough. Yet doesn’t it sometimes elude us in that simplicity? It isn’t meant to deceive us, though. The fact that we sometimes find ourselves confused, back where we started, and unsure of what progress was made says more about our frailty and our expectations of what success looks and feels like than it does about prayer itself.
Most of us grasp that prayer is speaking with God, and this strikes us as straightforward. And in a way, a crucially important way, owing to the grace of the God of the gospel, it is. Yet are we not often brought up short as we feel uncertain of ourselves in the act of prayer? We feel we have run out of words to say or become self-conscious over our requests; we feel stuck in the same petitions time after time or fear we’re wasting God’s time with the way we feel. We become distracted or get bored; we fall asleep … and the guilt of our “defeats” gets in the way of our trying again.
But what if prayer is first and foremost something that takes place between the Father and the Son in the Spirit? What if our role is always ever found within that back-and-forth movement. What if we ourselves are found in it? Discovered, that is, as we participate in the primordial prayer of God?
Prayer would seem much less like a work to be carried out and more a constant, continual time and space in the event that is God’s life. An event in which, strangely and wonderfully, the selves we hope to become can begin to be arrived at.
This isn’t a sweet “What if?” we can only fantasize.
For the God who already is seeks us out and envelopes us within his eternal speaking, in the dialogue between the God who never began and the God who took upon himself creaturehood.
The Word that God is, that went out before the beginning, is the speech in which God knows himself. This Word is God but is differentiated from that first speaker; it is in this way that we can distinguish the Father from the Son (Jn 1:1–2). God speaks, and God answers, and God listens, and there is a receptivity and creativity to this interaction that makes up the life of God, bound together in love by the Spirit who frees Father and Son to be distinct from one another in their unity and love.
The event of human becoming is already in this divine dialogue, and we find ourselves swept up into it as an ongoing bestowal of grace — because this Word that is God is also a man and has always determined to be the God-Man. His prayer in John 17 to the Father is the paradigmatic example of the dialogue that has always been between Father and Son happening in time, in the sight and hearing of other human beings. And this prayer incorporates them!
The English theologian Austin Farrer implored us to come to prayer expectantly, but also to check our specific expectations at the door. Clinging to such a list can impede our reception of the gift of God’s self. He writes that we are sometimes “deeply concerned to have what is not ready set out for us to carry away.” This shouldn’t discourage us from asking for what seems expedient or best to request, but we shouldn’t be so preoccupied with them that we overlook what else is happening or beginning to take place. He continues:
Here it is a matter of discovering what God has given us to carry off: we begin with what we want, but in praying, and not perhaps the first time, discover what God has designed to give. And, in the end, this is never worse, for through all his gifts rightly taken, he gives himself at last. (The Brink of Mystery, p. 170)
This is blown along by the same winds of Spirit as Herb McCabe’s guidance concerning prayer, a wise recommendation that is dear to my heart, words that deflate the self-importance I too often bring to the endeavor that gets in the way of genuinely hearing from God. Astonishingly, it is only in bringing to God my disappointing self can I arrive at anything other than what I already am.
Prayer is a bit of a risk. If you pray and acknowledge your most infantile desires, there is every danger that you may grow up a bit, that God will grow you up. When (as honestly as you can) you speak to God of your desires, very gently and tactfully he will often reveal to you that in fact you have deeper and more mature desires. But there is only one way to find this out: to start from where you are. It is no good pretending to yourself that you are full of high-minded aspirations. You have to wait until you are. If a child is treated as though she were already an adult, she will never become an adult. Prayer is the way in which our Father in heaven leads each of us by different paths to be saints, that is to say, with him. (God, Christ, and Us, p. 105)
We meet God as we are because there is no other genuine way to meet him. But we do this because we long for a more substantive way to be, one that is more real than the frailties we know ourselves (in our most honest moments) to be.
Prayer really is not only a posture of giving up control, but a genuine relinquishing of it. The encounter with God in prayer is one in which the active agent is God rather than the worshiper. The crux of it isn’t a wild abandon we are to descend into. Rather, this will amount more to a receptivity and quiet attending to God who takes the lead. It takes a certain courage to sit and wait in stillness for this, and this doesn’t come naturally.
But it is the same Spirit who is the living bond between Father and Son who leads and helps us do so, as Paul encourages us in Romans 8:26–27. God swoops down and swells up within us to aid us in our speaking to God. This is the will of God, Paul testifies, to incorporate our words into the Son’s dialogue with the Father. This is fitting in the most harmonious way because our part as speakers in this dialogue is anticipated by the One who would share our humanity. Our prayers are harmonic overtones and counterpoints to the prayers of the Son. We have always been meant to cast our words to God because the Word includes us within his address and song.
Prayer, then, is one of those mirrors in time in which our salvation is both reflected and enacted. For here you are, a part of the Son’s speech to and from the Father, united in the humanity he chose not out of need but of love. You will never construct an identity worthy of eternity. None of us can manufacture something so pristine or lasting. But take heart knowing this, that prayer mysteriously summons into being what was never there through the intertwining of divine and human speech.
The quiet of this gifting contrasts with the clamor of our trying to create ourselves and our significance. We will not fight and claw our way to value and love. We will find this strange new thing, the ones we were created to be, sown and nurtured and ripening as the Word that God is takes root in the soil of our present disappointing selves. We participate simply by saying what is the case and then listening. And in listening and attending, we discover something we have not fashioned. We arrive at ourselves in this eternal arrival of God.
Lovely piece, Ian. Thanks!