Will I Ever Get Good at This?

For all of my life, I have thought that people who have written a book about something are supposed to be good at that thing. If you think that too, and want to continue thinking that, please feel free to skip this post. One of the three ways of praying that I wrote about in Live Prayerfully, and which I am practicing each day as part of my year-long experiment this year, is praying without words. I'm not new to the practice, and had practiced it quite a bit before I wrote anything about it, but also–before taking on this experiment, I had never before practiced it this consistently over a long period of time.

So, back in the days before taking on this experiment, I always thought that if I practiced it more often (more than my pre-experiment norm of 1-3 times per week), I would get better at it (meaning that my mind would be less distracted while practicing it). For example, in those days I wasn't particularly troubled that out of twenty minutes of time set aside for prayer my mind might be able to remain focused on God more than for a total of perhaps... 90 seconds. Okay, 60 seconds. (Maybe 45). Not impressive, I know, but at least I could always attribute it to the fact that I wasn't practicing very often. Surely, I thought, if I ever became regular at it, those 45 seconds would turn into the majority of the twenty minutes.

Perhaps that's the downside of ever becoming regular at something: you might not be as good at it as you assumed when you weren't regular. It's safer to keep thinking I could do something well if only I would put in the effort. Now that I am in my seventh week of practicing it every day, those 45 to 90 seconds seem to be holding very steady. For example, during this evening's time of praying without words, these are just some of the things that I can remember having crossed my mind: socks, my second grade teacher, Elmo, hammers and nails, things I have to get done in the morning, Elmo slippers, how cute my daughter is (I was praying while sitting in her room waiting for her to fall asleep and I realized I forgot to take off her Elmo slippers. She took one off and hugged it while leaving the other on her foot.), books I haven't read, and basketball. Not exactly the stuff of spiritual gurus, I know.

But if that's the downside of ever becoming regular at something, perhaps this is the upside: if you happen to have already written a book about the thing which you're now doing regularly, hopefully–as part of writing that book–you included advice from other people who had already practiced your thing regularly for a really long time. Then, you can go back to the book you've written and see what the people said that you quoted and get some help from it.

So maybe it's not the course of action you might plan for yourself, but I'm enjoying it so far. As it turns out, I did pass on some stuff in the book that's proving helpful to me (the book's author!). Among the things that are helping me while I've noticed my lack of any perceivable progress in my attentiveness to God in these times without words are:

The problem is this: when they have received no pleasure for their devotions, they think they have not accomplished anything. This is a grave error, and it judges God unfairly. For the truth is that the feelings we receive from our devotional life are the least of its benefits. The invisible and unfelt grace of God is much greater, and it is beyond our comprehension. (St. John of the Cross)

This kind of prayer is sometimes quite difficult. If we bear with hardship in prayer and wait patiently for the time of grace, we may well discover that meditation and prayer are very joyful experiences. We should not, however, judge the value of our meditation by ‘how we feel.’ A hard and apparently fruitless meditation may in fact be much more valuable than one that is easy, happy, enlightened, and apparently a big success. (Thomas Merton)

There will certainly be days that we’re more effective at this than others, but along the same line of advice as striving for uneventful prayer experiences, Thomas Keating urges us that if we notice a time of prayer being good, or being bad, that we need to give up those kinds of categories altogether. Praying without words is not an area of our lives where we need to subject ourselves to constant evaluation, because I am absolutely sure that the distractions are a much bigger bother to us than they are to God. (Me)

So, I hope that at least a few folks will find the stuff in this book helpful in their attempts to learn to pray, but if it doesn't happen for many others, I'm still okay with it. Apparently I needed to write it just to have it sink in more deeply to me.

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Something I've prayed this week:

I lift up my eyes to the hills; from where is my help to come? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. (Psalm 121:1)

[This is 15th post from A Year of Living Prayerfully.]

Prayer and Really Bad Golfing

A couple of years ago, I wrote about my experience playing golf, and how much I stink at that game. I'm still at least as awful a golfer as I was then, as I haven't played since that day, but then again–while most golfers' games would regress if they went a couple of years without playing as I have done–I'm quite sure I haven't regressed past a skill level of zero. So perhaps I'm holding steady. If anyone asks me, I might say I've plateaued. I don't think about golf often, because I suppose that none of us really enjoy thinking of things that are humiliating to us, but it's been on my mind lately. I've concluded that one of the reasons I'm such a bad golfer is because I have no skill set when it comes to correcting the errors I make when I play. From what I can tell, every golfer hits bad shots, but getting better at the game is largely a matter of how well you're able to correct those mistakes and get back on the fairway (or, in my case, even back near the course).

If the golf course was a map of the United States, and a good golfer and I were both starting in a tee box in Texas, trying to get to the green in North Dakota, it's possible that both of us might have bad drives that end up in Arkansas rather than in Nebraska right on the fairway. But the difference between that good golfer and me is that they're likely to get back into South Dakota on the next shot. I'd be more likely to take five more shots and end up in Boston.

I've been thinking about this in connection with my year-long prayer experiment, part of which includes that I have four set times to pray each day. I've realized that for much of my life before experimenting with this kind of rhythm of prayer, many days went along like my experiences on the golf course. Even though I had every intention of living the day in a loving way toward God and others, it might not have taken long for me to get off-course. Then, even though I may have been painfully aware that things weren't going well, I would just keep whacking away at the day–on through the Ozarks and toward the East Coast–just hoping that the next time would go better.

Thankfully, though, praying in these ways seems to be something like being given the ability to get the ball back on the fairway. Again, beginning with the same good intentions as before, I might still get off track early in the day, but rather than crawling into bed at night and finding myself somewhere around Rhode Island, I have four chances each day–in the morning, at midday, in the evening, and again before going to bed–to pause, catch my breath, and head toward my goal again.

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Something I've prayed this week:

Father in heaven, who at the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan proclaimed him your beloved Son and anointed him with the Holy Spirit: Grant that all who are baptized into his Name may keep the covenant they have made, and boldly confess him as Lord and Savior; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen. (A Prayer for the First Sunday After the Epiphany: The Baptism of our Lord, from The Book of Common Prayer)

[This is 14th post from A Year of Living Prayerfully.]

An Old Way to Begin a New Year

One of the things that has come to mean the most to me about praying with other people's words is that I realize these words which are given to me to pray have been prayed by a lot of other people before me. The written prayers I've been using (from The Book of Common Prayer) and those passed along in Live Prayerfully mainly consist of psalms, the Lord's Prayer, and other traditional Christian prayers. When considering the psalms and the Lord's Prayer, it's staggering to think of how many others have prayed them before me, and who some of those others would be, tracing all the way back through history to Jesus himself (and even beyond him with the psalms). Since I have my feet firmly planted not just within Christianity, but also within the stream of Christianity called Methodism, it's also a profound thing to me to pray these prayers that have been prayed by the heroes of my tradition of Christianity. One of the reasons I've chosen The Book of Common Prayer as my guide for the year is because, though it has changed over time, The Book of Common Prayer of John and Charles Wesley's day also provided the framework for their efforts to live prayerfully in Methodism's beginnings.

Because today is the first Sunday of the year, I was glad this morning to be able to share an opportunity with a group of friends at our church to join in an old Methodist way of praying with other people's words in connection to beginning a new year together. The early Methodists had the practice of annually meeting to renew their covenants with God together, most often either on New Year's Eve or on the first Sunday of the year. My first experiences with doing this were... well, very boring. Over the years, though, I've come to learn more of its background and context and therefore now have a deep appreciation for these old words that we prayed together. Now I look forward each year to an opportunity to pray them again with others.

Among other things, these words are an annual challenge to put ourselves completely into God's hands. That can be a phrase which gets used but to which it's difficult for us to attach any real meaning. The prayers of this covenant renewal don't leave things vague for us: they speak of entrusting God with our reputations, renouncing our tendencies to give other things higher priority than our love of God, and relinquishing our constant efforts to maintain a sense of control over our own lives rather than allowing God to direct us and use us as he desires.

The text of the prayer we used this morning, which is a very trimmed-down version of what Wesley used with his early Methodists, is here. Also, though it is from last year, here is a video of my explanation of the service to our church, as well as the congregation's participation in it using the same words.

Something I've prayed this week:

O God, by the leading of a star you manifested your only Son to the Peoples of the earth: Lead us, who know you now by faith, to your presence, where we may see your glory face to face; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. (A Prayer for Epiphany from The Book of Common Prayer)

[This is 13th post from A Year of Living Prayerfully.]

The Look on My Face

I can literally still feel the look on my face from these two moments, even though each of them were years ago:

The top picture is of the first time I held our son, our firstborn. The bottom picture is of the first time I held our daughter. I can still feel the smile on my face holding her for the first time. Her birth was a real celebration for us. Everything went pretty smoothly with her, and we were ready for her. We had three years of practice at parenthood under our belts, a bedroom in our house ready for her to live in, and it was all smiles when she came.

Holding my son for the first time was no less joyous, but it was very different, and the look on my face with him was less about big smiles and more about trying not to completely lose it. Things didn’t go as smoothly with him, and so the fact that he was there, alive, healthy... I can’t put it into words.

And there were other factors that went into the expression on my face at that moment. We weren’t nearly as ready for him, having just moved back to the U.S. when my wife was eight months pregnant. When he came, we didn't yet have our own place to live, or even clothes that would fit a newborn.

The emotions behind my facial expression when I held him that first time went back farther than that. Before moving back from Guatemala, my wife spent more than a month on bed rest during her pregnancy, and there were times we doubted whether we would ever see him. Back farther: we found out she was expecting when she was in an ER with pneumonia, so he had a rough start from the beginning.

And back even farther: We had been married for six years before my wife became pregnant. We waited a long time, and we were more excited than we ever had been before when we found out she was expecting. But neither of us ever held that baby as the pregnancy ended early in a miscarriage, and our hopes that had built over the years and went through the roof when she was expecting came crashing down with one visit to her doctor when all of the sudden there was no heartbeat. We were crushed, and the waiting continued.

All of that and more went into the look on my face when I held my son for the first time. I had waited- painfully waited- for that boy... until finally the day came, and I held him in my arms. The expression on my face when I did so was full of a lot of waiting, a lot of hope, and a lot of joy.

 —

As I look back to those moments when I first held my kids, and how I can still feel the expressions that were on my face with each of them, I've wondered what Simeon's face looked like when he held in his arms the baby boy of a peasant couple from Nazareth. The eyes that stared at that baby boy had seen plenty of suffering during Simeon's long lifetime. Simeon is described as "waiting for the consolation of Israel," and he had waited through a lot. His lifetime in Jerusalem likely included Israel's suffering under the brutal rules of the Hasmoneans, then the Romans, then through them, Herod.

And back even farther: Simeon's people had been desperate for God to intervene and make things right ever since they were carried off to Babylon as captives around 600 years before the day that Simeon held that baby boy in his arms. We don't know a lot about Simeon, but from the way that Luke tells his story, we can tell that he soaked in the writings of the book of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah from around the time of that exile. The few words that we have recorded from Simeon drip with Isaiah 40-55's prophecies which spoke of God’s return to Israel, and Israel’s return to God. They told of the suffering servant who would take God’s people’s punishment upon himself and bring about their healing. They spoke of God’s promise coming to fulfillment of blessing all the nations of the world through Israel.

So when I wonder what the expression on Simeon’s face was at that moment, I think about how deeply Simeon had soaked Isaiah's message into his soul, and then added his own lifetime of waiting on to the centuries of waiting that had preceded him. At that moment, when he saw that baby- the baby who by some means God had told him was to be the King of Israel, the King of the world, his knowledge of those Scriptures bubbled up and poured out, combined with his faith that they would be fulfilled, and his joy that right there- in that baby whom he held and at whom he surely stared... it was all reaching its climax, it was all coming to pass, it was all going to happen. In that peasant baby boy.

Simeon had waited- painfully waited- for that boy... until finally the day came, and he held the long-expected Messiah in his arms. The expression on his face when he did so surely showed a lot of waiting, a lot of hope, and a lot of joy, as well as a lot of pain, since the Isaiah prophecies he knew so well also spoke of the suffering that surely awaited the child.

All of that has helped me to understand more of why this prayer of Simeon, which he spoke when he held the infant Jesus in his arms, is included every day in the prayers that I am reading throughout this year when I pray with other people's words:

Lord, you now have set your servant free to go in peace as you have promised. For these eyes of mine have seen the Savior, whom you have prepared for the world to see: a Light to enlighten the nations, and the glory of your people Israel.

I want to live like Simeon. I want to wait on God, and wait on God, and wait on God, and soak in the Scriptures, and listen, and I want to do so for the entirety of the rest of my life until I too can go in peace just as God had promised Simeon.

(Read Simeon's story in Luke 2:22-35.)

Something I've prayed this week:

Almighty God, you have poured upon us the new light of your incarnate Word: Grant that this light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (A Prayer for the First Sunday after Christmas Day from The Book of Common Prayer)

[This is 12th post from A Year of Living Prayerfully.]

My Bad Christmas Prayer Idea

Any year-long experiment is bound not to go smoothly through its entirety. At least I hope that's true, since this one was sailing along until my wife said these words to me on Christmas night: I don't want to be married to a monk, I want to be married to you!...Your experiment is getting on my nerves.

And I admit, she said that for good reason. It turns out that having my prayer book open on the table next to me and trying to discretely turn pages while my family was digging into their stockings on Christmas morning in order to squeeze my morning prayer in was a bad idea. Really bad. It might go down with some of my worst.

I quickly realized it was a bad idea when she gave me a look after she saw me doing it, not because she gave me a look, but because I knew it was missing the point. Much of the reason I'm doing this experiment is because of my conviction that praying in these ways will help me be more attentive to God and to those around me- especially my family- in every kind of moment in our lives. Yet there I was on Christmas morning flipping pages rather than paying full attention to my family. (I knew it had been a really bad idea that night when she admitted she's fantasized about ways to go about hiding my prayer book from me. If things ever get to that point, this experiment will come to a crashing end.)

Family is where the rubber meets the road in this project for me. I hope to be doing this ultimately for the benefit of others- hoping that these are means of planting me more firmly in God's kingdom, and that it will therefore make my existence in this world more beneficial for others-  most of all these others who live under this roof with me. If I come to the end of this year and my wife isn't glad that I've done this experiment (or before then, if I ever have to go out and buy another copy of my prayer book because she's followed through on her fantasy and hidden my current one), if it doesn't help me become a better, more loving and attentive husband and father, this experiment of testing my own advice to its farthest reasonable limits will clearly not have been successful. (But in the book's defense, nowhere in Live Prayerfully do I offer advice that comes anywhere close to flipping through a prayer book while your family is opening Christmas presents. That isn't even included in the "farthest reasonable limits" of what I recommend. That's just an example of the centuries-old practice of engaging in something "spiritual" while completely missing the point of why we do so.)

So, thankfully, my wife was very gracious to me in my foolishness. And, thankfully, it gave me a humiliating story to post about myself as part of this project. But I hope that whatever I post at the end of this year will be very different- both in my family's feelings about it and in my discretion in how to go about trying to pray in these ways throughout this year.

[This is 11th post from A Year of Living Prayerfully.]

Something I prayed on Christmas Day (after the stockings, at a more appropriate time, while my wife wasn't looking):

O God, you make us glad by the yearly festival of the birth of your only Son Jesus Christ: Grant that we, who joyfully receive him as our Redeemer, may with sure confidence behold him when he comes to be our Judge; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen (A prayer for Christmas Day from The Book of Common Prayer)

Advent and Waiting Without Words

Something I've prayed this week:

Our King and Savior now draws near: Come, let us adore him.

Advent is drawing to a close and Christmas is four days away. It seems like every year once Christmas comes and then is gone, I have some sense that, yet again, I missed it. Sure, each year I enjoy the time with family whom I love and the different things we get to be a part of, different celebrations and opportunities to so good for others. Yet still, I am well acquainted with the post-Christmas Day sense of having thrown a party for someone and not paid much real attention to them while we were both there. Years ago, I occasionally played around with writing songs and one line that stuck in my mind from a song I never finished was, "Sorry I missed you at the party I threw for you last week." Christmas has often been like that for me, and my guess is, for many of us.

Taking on this experiment this year, though, has helped me to linger more attentively in these weeks that the church has traditionally called Advent, and my hope is that when the big day comes next week, I will be able to notice a difference and have a sense of having been more attentive to the one for whom most of the world throws this party each year. I like the way that the prayer for this last Sunday of Advent says it:

Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion prepared for himself...

That would surely be quite a different experience from my normal, less attentive Christmases, both from my perspective and God's.

As the rhythms which this experiment have imposed on me this Advent season have had time to sink in, I've noticed a meaningful connection between Advent and the practice of praying without words. Advent is about waiting- about remembering Israel's long, desperate waiting for the coming of the Messiah; about them waiting for God's address to and deliverance of them as the prophets had seemingly disappeared and the oppressors continued to succeed one another; about Zechariah and Elizabeth's waiting childless for so many years- then after Gabriel's promise, waiting for the birth of their son, John; and about Mary's waiting after another promise for the birth of her son, Jesus. Apparently, through these two boys, Israel's centuries of waiting would be brought to completion.

Advent is also about our waiting- about our waiting for the day when Jesus' royal coming will finally take place and the prayer he taught that so many have uttered for so long ("may your kingdom come and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven") would finally and fully be fulfilled. It's about our waiting for God to make things right in the midst of a world full of the strange mix of compassion and beauty with pain and school shootings. We wait for the day when King Jesus will reappear, all of our little kingdoms will submit in full loving devotion to his, and everything will be made new, with sin and death's defeat being completed forever.

And maybe there's no better way to practice the waiting that Advent is about than by praying without words. We wait on our minds and hearts to settle down and trust in God, for God to address us whenever and however he sees fit, and for God's slow work of transforming us into the likeness of Jesus to be brought to its completion.

[This is 10th post from A Year of Living Prayerfully.]

Forgetting God and Learning How to Avoid it

Something I've prayed this week:

Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion prepared for himself; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (Prayer for the Fourth Sunday of Advent from The Book of Common Prayer)

Yesterday I was supposed to deliver a check for my wife. When I was pushing our kids in the swing before supper (yes, less fortunate ones in other places, it was 75 degrees here in Mid-December), I reached in my pocket and found the check I had forgotten about. I told her, and it didn't surprise her for one obvious reason: I forget stuff. A lot.

As I've embarked on this project of living prayerfully throughout this year (part of which involves using guides for prayer), I've been surprised to notice how often forgetting comes up in these prayers that I'm following. Just in the last couple of weeks, the prayers have included:

"We humbly pray you so to guide and govern us by your Holy Spirit, that in all the cares and occupations of our life we may not forget you..."

"... yet I do not forget your law..."

"...grant that we may never forget that our common life depends upon each other's toil..."

It's humbling to the extreme to pause and think about how often I forget God. I guess that takes some definition, because not forgetting God certainly has to mean something other than to have every thought of every moment be, "GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD."

Perhaps the best description I know of what it means to not forget God is in part of another prayer to which I've been taken often in this experiment:

...And, we pray, give us such an awareness of your mercies, that with truly thankful hearts we may show forth your praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up our selves to your service, and by walking before you in holiness and righteousness all our days...

Reflecting on how well I live that is not only humbling to the extreme, but even makes my eyes feel a bit watery. Using the language of the prayer, God's mercies to me are immense and never-ending. My awareness of them, gratitude for them, and the resulting kind of life that I live falls far short of what I would like for it to be.

But I don't say that to beat myself up about it. Rather, I just don't want to forget. I want to learn to forget God less and less and live ever more aware of his mercies toward me and toward all of us.

In the beginning of this project, I was a bit apprehensive about what it would be like to keep up with these commitments of praying four times per day, and including three kinds of prayer each day. In my fourth week of doing so, it's the greatest anti-forgetting practice I've ever tried.

[This is the 9th post from A Year of Living Prayerfully.]