On Prayer

During this season of spiritual dryness, one spiritual discipline has experienced the worst indifference: prayer. I want to pray, I intend to pray, I think about thinking about praying, but the words seem to get stuck in my throat and I find myself increasingly distracted from this privilege of prayer, which has become to feel like a duty rather than a relationship.

I seized upon Philip Yancey's book, titled Prayer, as a place for help. I bought the book when I read this on the flap: "If prayer stands as the place where God and human beings meet, then I must learn about prayer. Most of my struggles in the Christian life circle around two themes: why God doesn't act the way we want God to, and why I don't act the way God wants me to. Prayer is the precise point where these themes converge." Bingo. I'm mad because I can't get my act together, and I wonder why He won't intervene in my friend's marriage that has fallen apart, or cured another friend's mother of brain cancer, or healed all the brokenness I see around and in me. And yet I know that I must trust God--in prayer--with what God already knows.

This book has been a breath of fresh air and feels like God's mercy poured in living streams into dying places. Please, please read it.

And finally: from Karl Rahner, in The Need and Blessing of Prayer, on those daily, sometimes monotonous, one-sided prayers we offer:

Oh, everyday prayer! You are poor and a little tattered and the worse for wear like the everyday itself. August thoughts and exalted feelings are difficult for you. You are not an exalted symphony in a great cathedral, but more like a devout song, well-intended and coming from the heart, a little monotonous and naive. But, prayer of the everyday, you are the prayer of loyalty and reliability, the prayer of selfless, unrewarded service to the divine majesty, you are the dedication which makes the gray hours light and the trivial moments great. You don't ask about the experience of the one praying, but about the honor of God. You don't want to experience something; you want to believe. Your gait may sometimes be weary, but you still walk. Sometimes you may appear to come just from the lips and not from the heart. But isn't it better that at least the lips are blessing God than when the entire human being becomes mute? And isn't there more hope then that the sound from the lips will find an echo in the heart than when everything in man remains mute? And in our prayer-poor times, what one chides oneself or others for as lip-prayer is most often in reality the prayer of a poor but loyal heart that honestly, in spite of all weakness, weariness, and inner discontent, is at least continuing to dig a small shaft through which a small ray of the eternal light falls into the heart that is buried by the everyday."

Jana