The Spirit In Prayer

In a way, people pray to each other. The way I say “you” to another, respectfully, hopefully, intimately, in desperation, or expectantly: all this is a way of praying. Could it be that praying to God grew out of this human experience of speaking to and communicating with one another?

It’s hard to pinpoint the origins of what we call prayer. Praying is simply there in the holy books of all the religions of humankind. The Bible takes prayer for granted. So much so, that the Hebrews really had no technical phrase for “to pray”. They used words like entreat, rejoice, pour out one’s heart, cry aloud, praise, bless, according to however a person felt in relation to the Divine. The Hebrews prayed to their own God, Yahweh, the only One who could help. Other gods -- and the people of Israel were surrounded by many -- were helpless. Psalm 115:5 proclaims: “Our God is in heaven, and whatever God wills to do comes to pass. Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands... Those who make them are like them, and so are all who put their trust in them...” 

The Holy God revealed God’s presence, Godself, to Israel. The Hebrew word for God = Yahweh means something like “I am who I am”, but with the added idea of presence, of being with. The unique thing about the God of the Hebrews is that what God says God also does.

God’s covenant with Israel through Abraham is renewed down through history. Each time God remakes the Covenant, God is revealed to the people as a Father with two qualities: 1) lovingkindness, mercy (hesed), and 2) faithfulness, reliability, loyalty, dependability (emeth). Implicit in Hebrew prayer to such a God was a request for life, i.e., total blessing, a filling of all of one’s needs, personal, earthly and spiritual, both for the individual and for the nation, the community.

Everything was allowable for the people of God in prayer. No word was too bold or too spontaneous to be used before God. This was, after all, the same God who walked through the garden with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening (Genesis 3:8); the God whom Abraham, father of the chosen people, tried to “fast-talk” in today’s first reading (Genesis 18:20-32); the God whom Jacob wrestled in fierce competition so as to claim God’s blessing. (Genesis 32:24; 26-28) It’s against this background and within this understanding of prayer that Jesus of Nazareth was formed and lived and taught.

Luke’s Gospel reading (11:1-13) today reminds us of our need to turn back again and again to the words and actions of Jesus in order to learn how to pray. Jesus’ disciples, feeling that their own prayer lacked something, approached him and asked, “Teach us to pray.” They’d seen Jesus pray many times, and knew that it was something important to him. They also noticed that John the Baptizer taught his followers to pray, as rabbis often did. Jesus, a master teacher, offers them a simple and direct way of praying. Only one other text, Matthew 6:9-13, records this prayer. Luke’s form seems to be the original one in Greek. Translated literally, Jesus says something like this: “When you express your wish toward God, say this: ‘Father, may your name be held holy. May your reign come. Give us continually, every day, the bread sufficient to sustain us through tomorrow. And let go, don’t keep any longer, forgive our going wrong. For even we ourselves pass over the dues owed to us by others. And do not bring us to the test, the proving.’”

What Jesus hands on to us here is far more than a mere formula: much more than a treasured “Lord’s Prayer” to pass on to posterity, to record in our books of worship and to preserve like some ancient museum piece. What Jesus gives us in these six short lines is a way of touching God’s very Presence. For Jesus, praying means bringing to a personal, loving Father our deepest needs, and then letting go, yielding ourselves to God so that those needs might be in harmony with God’s purpose.

Praying means asking God, as Jacob did, “What is your name?”, i.e., “Tell me who you really are.” To pray is to turn that little word “God” into a name which means something to you and me. Biblically, the name stands for the person. It’s never just a word or a label. A person’s name is full of personal history. Biblical names, especially, speak of the person’s mission or purpose: Abraham, father of a multitude; Isaac, he laughs; Jacob, God protects; David, beloved; Jeshua or Jesus, God is salvation. 

Speaking someone’s name reminds us of all that we share in common and of our whole relationship with that person. Calling someone by name enables the person to be him/herself. It shows that we take them seriously as a person. When a loved one dies, the name spoken recalls his/her presence. By deliberately not using someone’s name, never addressing a person by their first name or always making do with a surname or a nickname, or simply by calling out to someone “Hey, you”, in some way lessens that one’s status as a person. In praying to God by name as “Father” or “Mother”, since God is beyond human designations or categories, and the precedent for which many saints have historically set, we let God be Godself: the Holy One who is with us, the faithful and lovingly merciful God. We show that we take God seriously.

In the Gospel Jesus uses an illustration to make two points about prayer:

1. To pray takes persistence, work, and trust. Jesus uses the parable of the persistent friend. His point is that we approach God on God’s terms, without giving up, and, above all, with faith. There’s no need to plead with God as with a hostile judge or an insensitive neighbor. God inevitably recognizes our need. Jesus‘ advice is to ask, to search, to knock. The Greek text gives the idea of a continuing action. We’re to pray continually, in all situations of our life, not only on selected occasions of crisis or depression.
2. A parent listens to the “prayer” of a child. Jesus speaks of a child asking the father for basic food (bread, fish, egg). He tells us that if we can trust a human parent to respond, how much more God. “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask!”

In Chapter 8 of his letter to the Romans, and elsewhere, Paul speaks of  “the Spirit of Christ”, the presence or closeness of God personified in the Holy Spirit. It’s that Spirit, active in the life of Jesus, he says, which brings you and me freedom, life and peace. “...you are not of the flesh; you are of the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you...” That contrasts vividly with what Paul calls, in today’s Epistle, “the elemental spirits of the universe... not according to Christ”. For Paul, the Holy Spirit is intrinsic to prayer: “...the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” (Romans 8:26-27) Julian of Norwich records a delightful dialogue with Jesus in her Revelations which always greatly reassures my own personal prayer: “And all this brought our Lord suddenly to my mind and He showed these words and said: ‘I am the ground of your praying -- first, it is my will that you have something, and next I make you to want it, and afterwards I cause you to pray for it. If you pray for it, how, then, could it be that you would not get what you ask for?” This, in essence, is what Paul means in referring to the Spirit’s intercession.

What can we conclude from all this?

• Prayer requires discipline. It’s an art developed through intention, effort and practice. One learns to pray by praying: not merely by reciting prayers or repeating words. There’s a “holy monotony” in prayer. And there are inescapable distractions. But if your prayer life only repeats someone else’s words, where is the “closeness of the Lord”, the communication, the presence?
• Addressing God as “Father”, as Jesus taught us, involves an awesome responsibility, viz., addressing one another as “sister” and “brother”. There’s no such thing as “just me and Jesus”. In Baptism, where we become part of the Communion of Saints, we accept the whole Christ. We’re one with him and with one another.
• Prayer isn’t an application for spiritual welfare assistance! The prayer which Jesus taught us first and foremost asks that God be honored and that God’s reign, God’s presence, be shared universally. Only then do we ask for ourselves, and even then, only for what God knows we need most.
• In a “Ziggy” cartoon I once saw, Ziggy is standing all alone in darkness on a high hill. Looking up into the clouds he wonders, “Have I been put on hold for the rest of my life?!” We’ve all felt that way. God always answers prayer, but it’s on God’s terms and in God’s time. And in this God is always full of surprises! There’s no way to barter with God, or to try to be a wheeler-dealer or con-artist, as Abraham attempts to do in today’s first reading. Notice the last line of that story: “And the Lord went his way, when he had finished speaking to Abraham.”
• The best pray-ers are the man, the woman, the child or the congregation who is willing to trust. “...don’t be anxious about your life...Instead, set your hearts first on God’s reign, and these things will be given you as well.” (Luke 12:22; 31) In prayer we seek not the consolations of God, but the God of consolation.
• Finally, the fundamental place where you and I meet the Father, Jesus and the Spirit in prayer is here in the breaking of the Bread and the sharing of the Cup. The Book of Common Prayer calls this word and action “the principal act of Christian worship”. We, the praying community, ask for the revelation of God’s name, the revelation of who God is, so that we may come to know who we are. Artist Corita Kent says that “to celebrate is to explain who we are and to say ‘yes’ ceremonially...” 

There’s an old Hasidic story about an ignorant villager who, having heard that it’s a good religious deed to eat and drink on the day before Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, drank himself into a stupor. He awakes late at night, too late for the opening service. Not knowing the prayers by heart, he devises a plan. He repeats the letters of the alphabet over and over, asking the Almighty to rearrange them into the appropriate words of the prayers. The following day, after the closing service, the rabbi asks him about his absence the previous evening. The villager confesses his failing and asks whether his way of reciting the prayers can be pardoned. The rabbi replies: “Your prayer was more acceptable than mine because you uttered it with the entire devotion of your heart.” 

Our praying together is like gathering up all the scrambled letters of our lives in the week just past; our hopes, mistakes, good intentions, heroic moments and our failures. Together we hold them in our outstretched hands, particularly when we receive Christ’s Body and Blood in Communion, and repeat them over and over to our Father, with and through Jesus, in the closeness of God’s Holy Spirit...with the entire devotion of our hearts.  

The Apostle To The Apostles

To St. Mary Magdalene

You claimed

the false

until you found

the True;

your beauty

wounded

until Beauty

wounded you,

and plunged your soul

into a spring so sweet

your tears

fell as chaste pearls

at Mercy's

feet.

(A. Page, CSC [aka Fr. Gerald Fitzgerald], Paths From Bethlehem)

Solidarity In Suffering

There’s a scene near the beginning of the musical, Fiddler On The Roof, where Lazar comes upon Nachem the Beggar. Nachem cries out: “Alms for the poor, alms for the poor...” “Here, Reb Nachem, is one kopek”, says Lazar. “One kopek!” Nachem yells, “Last week you gave me two kopeks.” Lazar replies, “I had a bad week.” “So,” Nachem whines, “if you had a bad week, why should I suffer?!”

Implicit in that comment is the age-old question in the face of suffering: “Why?” “Why me?” The Hebrew Scriptures tell us that Job grappled with it, as have people ever since. Elie Wiesel, noted author and Holocaust survivor, whom I was privileged to hear speak at the university here in 1994, has spent virtually his entire life trying to understand, to make some sense of that horrific tragedy and of the question “Why?”, in order to bring hope to future generations.

Christians, generally, and the Anglican and Episcopal Churches  particularly, have a long tradition of people who have known suffering: St. Alban, c. the 3rd century, the first English martyr, who sacrificed his own life in place of another; Bishops Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, burned at the stake in the 16th century; Ugandan Archbishop Janani Luwum, shot to death by Idi Amin’s forces in 1977.

Years ago, whenever, as seminarians, we were faced with difficulties or illnesses, I can remember being advised to “offer it up”; to accept it “all for Jesus”; to embrace “self-denial and mortification”. Such advice often didn’t make sense and fostered the danger of ignoring or denying the reality of suffering. For the most part, our surrounding culture looks upon voluntary suffering as an absurdity, offering no useful lesson other than to make us miserable. Suffering is especially hard to comprehend when we see good people go under, while misfortune often seems to pass by those who are uncaring or who cause evil. Again, it’s the age-old story of Job. In recent centuries it seems that many in Western society have become conditioned against all degrees and kinds of suffering, perhaps because it’s so prevalent.  I remember a sad newspaper story some years ago where a young teenage girl up in Auburn, who’d been arrested with her friends for assault, casually commented: “We stabbed an old woman today. We had fun.”

Our society seems to try, with the help of the pharmaceutical industry, to avoid pain and discomfort at all costs. All day long TV ads push “doctor-recommended” tranquilizers, sleep-inducers, painkillers and hemorrhoid-shrinkers, intertwining these commercials with the latest news reports on who’s been beaten, robbed, stabbed, raped and maimed lately. Human life has apparently become that cheap for some. Compassion and pity seem to have become low priorities for many. We’ve almost institutionalized a new kind of barbarism, not least in our movies and video games.

The meaning of suffering in any form is difficult to grasp. We often don’t know what it is because suffering doesn’t seem to be uniform. Starvation in Mali or Haiti, for example, isn’t exactly the same as the hunger of a welfare recipient. Dying in the ovens of Auschwitz isn’t quite the same as dying in the bed of a nursing home. The physical pain of cancer doesn’t necessarily feel the same as the inner pain you feel when your spouse leaves you. Perhaps we understand suffering so variously because how we respond to it largely determines how we experience it. Throughout history men, women, and children suffer and are made to suffer. They accept, submit, and resist. The struggle between life and death is fought out in a thousand ways. We know little about the nature of suffering because it’s hard to measure or systematize how intense it is. For one person, a mental hunger may hurt more than an empty stomach. For another, separation and loss through death may affect a lover or mourner more deeply and lastingly than the loss of a home or property.

Suffering, as it has existed and exists today in our society, is often a cause of depression, even despair. The great Greek epics and elegies narrate and lament the fall of Troy and the death of great heroes. The tragedies offer their spectators a catharsis, a purging, with pity and terror. Those of us participating in the Diocesan Bible Challenge will have just completed reading the Book of Job this past week. The Book of Job outlines our sad plight as human beings, as well as the hope which Wisdom brings. Yet though all of these leave us with some small glimmer of hope, the question “Why?” remains at the forefront of our minds and hearts. For a follower of Jesus, the answer to the question “Why?” is the acknowledgment of suffering as a reality, but a reality which we confront, not alone, but in solidarity with our sisters and brothers. The Christian viewpoint is not fatalism or defeatism. There is a certain kind of escapism, such as that reflected in Psalm 124:7: “We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowler; Our help is in the Name of the Lord…” Escaping, as Ulrich Simon notes, is “...but a first step in resistance [of suffering].  “As we run away from all sorts of prisons and tyranny we meet with comrades and find solidarity. A suffering shared may become a suffering redeemed or at least eased.” 

For a Christian, the answer to the question “Why?” is also the acceptance of suffering shared as redemptive. You’ve heard the old adage: “Misery loves company.” There must be truth to that because, according to the Good News which Jesus preached, through our solidarity in suffering as people of faith we’re somehow able to lessen it and even overcome it. We can’t argue this by way of the world’s logic. It doesn’t seem to make sense, but when we share each other’s burdens, we experience a sustaining love which goes beyond and conquers suffering and evil. God, in Jesus, has been depicted through the centuries as the eternal sharer in our suffering: most notably, in medieval icons, in the music of Bach, etc. 

The Epistle passage today from Paul’s letter to the Colossians (1:15-28) helps us understand this: “...I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church…” Paul certainly isn’t implying that a balanced, mature, normal Christian person enjoys suffering or sets out to be a victim or a martyr. But once one faces inevitable suffering, or even death, that suffering and dying can be transformed through union with Christ crucified. Polish workers back in the 1980‘s had a sense of this in the Solidarnosc (Solidarity) workers’ movement. Solidarity with Jesus has been the hallmark of all those who’ve accepted suffering and dying as the mystery of “Christ in you, the hope of glory”. It’s  never a question of abnormally delighting in pain, but rather of making a conscious choice to bear the reality of our suffering in union with Christ’s Body, in order to go beyond suffering.

Our Christian witness is to share with those suffering and dying all around us, who are part of us, that despite our suffering we and they are in solidarity through the Person of Christ, that their hurts and needs are ours, and that because we are the Communion of Saints, we’re committed to do what we can to minister to their needs.

This message has become an increasing reality for me these past three years especially. During that time I’ve struggled daily with the fact that my closest friend, Fr. Leo Joseph, priest at St. John’s, Lakeport, was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer, and with the reality of his eventual death. It’s hard for me to imagine a time when Leo won’t be around. Our friendship began in September, 1994, when I was Rector here at St. John’s and Leo came as a guest preacher. Two years later, when I was appointed Regional Missioner at Ukiah and Lakeport, we became close colleagues in developing shared ministry in what became the Redwood Episcopal Cluster. I can hardly think of a week, sometimes even days, in a row since then that Leo and I haven’t talked by phone, in addition to our many visits together. As “Roman retreads”, according to Episcopalians, we’ve bantered about the commonalities and quirks of our shared Roman Catholic background: the “in” jokes, the love for good liturgy and theology, and spirituality. As one of the most pastoral priests I’ve ever known, Leo has taught me in so many ways about what it means to genuinely care for others. He consistently represents in his own daily living what the patron of his Order, St. Francis of Assisi, had in mind for his friars. Even in the midst of Leo’s worst suffering over the past three years, his deep spirituality has still enabled him not to lose his devilishly refreshing humor, even his quips about wanting to be remembered as “St. Leo, Virgin & Martyr”! He and I have helped one another over the years through each of our “down” times, thankful for our solidarity in suffering, as we’ve equally rejoiced together in celebrating the good things with which we’ve been blessed.

Through Leo’s incredibly realistic, honest, and wholesome confrontation of his illness, suffering, and eventual death, he continues to convey to me and others what I spoke about earlier: learning hope through the presence and power of Jesus and through solidarity with one another in the face of suffering and death. Leo truly understands Paul’s words: “Christ in you, the hope of glory”. As he told his congregation at St. John’s, and as he’s told me many times, Leo sees his present journey as one of letting go and “going home”. He inspires and witnesses to all who know him by living with such graciousness, “securely established”, as Paul says, “steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel…” Like Mary of Bethany in the Gospel reading, Leo has “chosen the better part”, that is, being “a [true] servant of this gospel...rejoicing in [his] sufferings for [others’] sake...in [his] flesh...completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body...the church”; a true servant commissioned by God “to make the word...fully known, the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages...but has now been revealed to his saints.”

My prayer is that you and I might be given such grace and courage to cope with our suffering together.

   

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