Praying Like Monks Quotes

A maturing community is a confessing community - not a church without sin, but a church without secrets.

I want to have a lasting experience of God', I told him. 'Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears. I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God.

The assumption of biblical prayer is that God's action always precedes my request The aim is not to get God in on what I think he should be doing. Rather, the aim of prayer is to get us in on what God is doing, become aware of it, join it, and enjoy the fruit of participation.

Prayer can’t be mastered. Prayer always means submission. To pray is to willingly put ourselves in the unguarded, exposed position. There is no climb. There is no control. There is no mastery. There is only humility and hope. To pray is to risk being naive, to risk believing, to risk playing the fool. To pray is to risk trusting someone who might let

Jesus hasn’t revealed a God we can perfectly understand, but he has revealed a God we can perfectly trust. Trust is the certainty that the listening God hears and cares.

God didn’t lower the standard of holiness. He found a way to make us holy that isn’t dependent on our performance. Grace wins.

Prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God’s gift of himself. Ask and seek, and your heart will grow big enough to receive him and keep him as your own,” writes Mother Teresa.

Prayer means the risk of facing silence where we’re addicted to noise. It’s the risk of facing a God we’ve mastered talking about, singing about, reading about, and learning about. It means risking real interaction with that God, and the longer we’ve gotten used to settling for the noise around God, the higher the stakes. What if it’s awkward or disappointing or boring, or what if God stands me up altogether?

It has been said that, in times of chaos, we do not rise to the occasion; we fall to the level of our training.

Scripture makes it clear that God collects two things—prayers and tears. This world in its current form is passing away, but our prayers and tears are eternal.

I trust God to be God. I believe—really believe—that those who seek him will surely find him.

The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in the hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without hope, faith, and love.”16

Hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life. Why? Because hurry kills love. Hurry hides behind anger, agitation, and self-centeredness, blinding our eyes to the truth that we are God's beloved and she is sister, he is brother.

Those who prioritize a loving relationship with God, meeting with him in prayer through stolen moments throughout the day, long stretches of disciplined contemplation, and fiery pleas of intercession, are those with whom he shares his divine power.

Pray as you can, and somewhere along the way, you will make the most important discovery of your life—the love the Father has for you. That discovery is God’s end of the deal. Your part is just to show up honestly. Show up, and keep showing up. That’s the one nonnegotiable when it comes to prayer.

A maturing community is a confessing community—not a church without sin, but a church without secrets.

By praying we learn to pray.

God is looking for relationship, not well-prepared speeches spoken from perfect motives.

God doesn't need intercessors; God chooses intercessors.

Prayer - in any form, by anybody - is God's invitation to pull up a chair to the table and enjoy restful, intimate, unbroken conversation with the triune God.

C. S. Lewis said of prayer, “We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.”14

Adoration given to God is always given back to us. As we lift our eyes, recovering a true view of God’s identity, we also recover his view of us.

The Swiss theologian Karl Barth once said, “To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.

Renew in me a little of love and faith, and a sense of confidence, and a vision of what it might mean to live as though you were real, and I mattered, and everyone was sister and brother.

Will the pain, suffering, and needs that intrude on our own stories harden our hearts, or will they soften our souls? How does the very pain that is eating us alive become an agent of deep transformation? We have to invite God—the very One who broke our trust—into the muck with us. We invite the One we are labeling “perpetrator” to be our healer. It’s the most courageous of all choices.

Constantly overwhelmed lives should drive us to prayer at its purest and rawest, but the tendency for many of us is to pray safe, calculated prayers that insulate us from both disappointment and freedom.

Most of us get about knee-deep in the Christian life, discover that the water feels fine, and stop there. We never swim in the depths of the divine intimacy Jesus won for us. This book is an invitation to swim.

Larry smiled a trifle ruefully. "Like Rolla [who is?], I've come too late into a world too old. I should have been born in the Middle Ages when faith was a matter of course; then my way would have been clear to me and I'd have sought to enter the order. I couldn't believe. I wanted to believe, but I couldn't believe in a God who wasn't better than the ordinary decent man. The monks told me that God had created the world for his glorification. That didn't seem to me a very worthy object. Did Beethoven create his symphonies for his glorification? I don't believe it. I believe he created them because the music in his soul demanded expression and then all he tried to do was to make them as perfect as he knew how. I used to listen to the monks repeating the Lord's Prayer; I wondered how they could continue to pray without misgiving to their heavenly father to give them their daily bread. Do children beseech their earthly father to give them sustenance? They expect him to do it, they neither feel gratitude to him for doing so nor need to, and we have only blame for a man who brings children into the world that he can't or won't provide for. It seemed to me that if an omnipotent creator was not prepared to provide his creatures with the necessities, material and spiritual, of existence he'd have done better not to create them." "Dear Larry," I said, "I think it's just as well you weren't born in the Middle ages. You'd undoubtedly have perished at the stake." He smiled. "You've had a great deal of success," he went on. "Do you want to be praised to your face?" "It only embarrasses me." "That's what I should have thought. I couldn't believe that God wanted it either. We didn't think much in the air corps of a fellow who wangled a cushy job out of his C.O. By buttering him up. It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights.

The stars are still there, but in the city—the lights of our offices that stay on late, bright advertisements vying for our attention, the yellow glow of so many lamps in so many apartment windows—it all works together to drown out the lights that remind us of how small we are. It all works together to convince me that the world from behind my tiny perspective is all there is.

One of the names thrown around for Jesus is the great physician. But a doctor can’t heal you without an accurate diagnosis. If you show up to a great doctor and describe yourself as “generally sick,” they’re not gonna be able to do a lot for you. To confess is to say, “I want to name my symptoms, completely and comprehensively, because I want healing, completely and comprehensively.

Holy One, there is something I wanted to tell you, but there have been errands to run, bills to pay, arrangements to make, meetings to attend, friends to entertain, washing to do . . . and I forget what it is I wanted to say to you, and mostly I forget what I’m about or why. O God, don’t forget me, please, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Eternal One, there is something I wanted to tell you, but my mind races with worrying and watching, with weighing and planning, with rutted slights and pothole grievances, with leaky dreams and leaky plumbing and leaky relationships I keep trying to plug up; and my attention is preoccupied with loneliness, with doubt, and with things I covet; and I forget what it is I want to say to you, and how to say it honestly or how to do much of anything. O God, don’t forget me, please, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Almighty One, there is something I wanted to ask you, but I stumble along the edge of a nameless rage, haunted by a hundred floating fears of terrorists of all kinds, of losing my job, of failing, of getting sick and old, having loved ones die, of dying . . . I forget what the real question is that I wanted to ask, and I forget to listen anyway because you seem unreal and far away, and I forget what it is I have forgotten. O God, don’t forget me, please, for the sake of Jesus Christ . . . O Father . . . in Heaven, perhaps you’ve already heard what I wanted to tell you. What I wanted to ask is forgive me, heal me, increase my courage, please. Renew in me a little of love and faith, and a sense of confidence, and a vision of what it might mean to live as though you were real, and I mattered, and everyone was sister and brother. What I wanted to ask in my blundering way is don’t give up on me, don’t become too sad about me, but laugh with me, and try again with me, and I will with you, too. What I wanted to ask is for peace enough to want and work for more, for joy enough to share, and for awareness that is keen enough to sense your presence here, now, there, then, always.27

What started with Adam and Eve never stopped. The same ancient conspiracy repeats itself in the Tower of Babel, in King Saul, in the Pharisaic priesthood, in the CEO of your company, and in me. We’re all prone to drown out our view of God, to keep moving, to go about our lives as though we are the center. Stillness is the quiet space where God migrates from the periphery back to the center, and prayer pours forth from the life that has God at the center.

Already that morning missus had taken her cane stick to me once cross my backside for falling asleep during her devotions. Every day, all us slaves, everyone but Rosetta, who was old and demented, jammed in the dining room before breakfast to fight off sleep while missus taught us short Bible verses like “Jesus wept” and prayed out loud about God’s favorite subject, obedience. If you nodded off, you got whacked right in the middle of God said this and God said that.

Again, I’ll pose the simplest question: If God gave you everything you’ve prayed for in the last week, what would happen? The only reason I ask is that you are a ruler, a co-heir with Christ, a manager of heavenly resources. What are you doing with all that authority? If we really took Jesus seriously on the invitation to prayer, what would happen? What would happen in you? What would happen to your community? What would happen in your city? Isn’t it worth finding out?

The most important discovery you will ever make is the love the Father has for you,” writes Pete Greig, founder of the 24-7 Prayer Movement. “Your power in prayer will flow from the certainty that the One who made you likes you, he is not scowling at you, he is on your side . . . Unless our mission and our acts of mercy, our intercession, petition, confession, and spiritual warfare begin and end in the knowledge of the Father’s love, we will act and pray out of desperation, determination, and duty instead of revelation, expectation, and joy.”19

It’s always the common places that turn out to be holy, isn’t it? A burning bush in that same familiar field where Moses punched the clock every day for forty years. The sitting room where Esther presented her request to the king. The upstairs windowsill where Daniel rested his elbows while he defiantly prayed against royal law. The depressed old barn of a poor farmer on the outskirts of Bethlehem. The beach that Peter had docked at since he was a boy. The duplex on a seedy street in Jerusalem where the wind started blowing inside. It only takes a moment to turn an everyday place into holy ground.

Jesus is very plainly telling his disciples, “Until now, you’ve never really prayed, not like I designed it. But when I go to the Father, you’ll discover prayer in my name.” The ancient phrase “in my name” means “under my authority.” To pray in Jesus’ name means to pray with recovered authority. He won back on our behalf the authority we were created to carry and lost. “In Jesus’ name” was never meant to become just a fitting tagline at the end of the prayers of experienced Christians. It’s the exercise of Jesus’ victory. To pray is to experience the very same access to God the Father that Jesus has.

Slow down. The Taliban were religious, in the sense that in their opinion a being called Allah really designed and created the world and everything in it, including them. They were also a cultus in that they believed that you should pray five times a day, study the Koran, fast during Ramadan, give a tenth of your income to the poor and visit Mecca at least once in your lifetime. It is a matter of record that they had the ancient statues at Bamyan destroyed. But Professor, who put up the statues? Buddhist monks, that's who. Possibly the monks were not religious, in the sense that they didn't believe in a designer-God but they were certainly part of a cultus and they had lots and lots of supernatural beliefs which you would think were Bad Things. So what you should have said is "Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues. Imagine no ancient statues for the Taliban to blow up." This is absolutely emblematic of your confused attitude. When a religious organisation does something which annoys you, you take it for granted that it was Caused By Religion. But when a religious organisation does something which you quite like you don't think that "religion" had anything to do with it. You hardly spot that there was any religion involved at all.

If you can’t pray with hope and faith, God isn’t bothered. He wants you to tell him about your doubt and disappointment. If you can’t pray in phrases of praise and adoration, don’t fake it. Pray your complaints, your anger, or your confusion. And if you’re more comfortable with cynicism than innocence, unsure about your motives, afraid of silence, afraid of an answer, or pretty confident you aren’t doing it right, you’re in the perfect starting place. Pray as you can, and somewhere along the way, you will make the most important discovery of your life—the love the Father has for you. That discovery is God’s end of the deal. Your part is just to show up honestly. Show up, and keep showing up. That’s the one nonnegotiable when it comes to prayer.

More than once, while staring at the wall, I’d thought of Our Lady. I wanted to talk to her, to say, Where do I go from here? But when I’d seen her earlier, when August and I had first come in, she didn’t look like she could be of service to anybody, bound up with all that chain around her. You want the one you’re praying to at least to look capable. I dragged myself out of bed and went to see her anyway. I decided that even Mary did not need to be one hundred percent capable all the time. The only thing I wanted was for her to understand. Somebody to let out a big sigh and say, You poor thing, I know how you feel. Given a choice, I preferred someone to understand my situation, even though she was helpless to fix it, rather than the other way around. But that’s just me. Right

And a fan. The beauty I see in the arc of a Kareem Abdul-Jabbar skyhook or a Kobe Bryant pull-up jumper with the game on the line. Twenty thousand people in the arena all hoping and praying for the same thing to happen like a giant group meditation, the expansion of time when the lightning-fast sprinting slows down into an infinite second. Like a Jimi Hendrix solo or a realized moment by a hundred-year hermetic Himalayan cave monk, all is in the now as electric happiness surges. With all this evil in our world, the cruel violence and prejudices we bring, I can always count on basketball to lift me up. Nothing more reliable on earth than a box score. The personal travails of my tattered heart rise and fall, but the poetry of movement on the hardwood has never failed me, even in the worst of times.

I live in tranquility and trembling…there is not a guarantee in the world. Oh, your needs are guaranteed, your needs are absolutely guaranteed by the most stringent of warranties, in the plainest, truest words: knock; seek; ask. But you must read the fine print. “Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” That’s the catch. If you can catch it, it will catch you up, aloft, up to any gap at all, and you’ll come back, for you will come back transformed in a way you might not have bargained for-dribbling and crazed. The waters of separation, however lightly sprinkled, leave indelible stains. Did you think, before you were caught, that you needed, say, life? Do you think you will keep your life, or anything else you love? But no. Your needs are all met. But not as the world giveth. You see the needs of your own spirit met whenever you have asked, and you have learned that the outrageous guarantee holds. You see the creatures die, and you know you will die. And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life. Obviously. And then you’re gone. You have finally understood that you’re dealing with a maniac. I think that the dying pray at the last not “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you. Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is.

THE BOOK OF A MONK’S LIFE I live my life in circles that grow wide And endlessly unroll, I may not reach the last, but on I glide Strong pinioned toward my goal. About the old tower, dark against the sky, The beat of my wings hums, I circle about God, sweep far and high On through milleniums. Am I a bird that skims the clouds along, Or am I a wild storm, or a great song? Many have painted her. But there was one Who drew his radiant colours from the sun. My God is dark- like woven texture flowing, A hundred drinking roots, all intertwined; I only know that from His warmth I'm growing. More I know not: my roots lie hidden deep My branches only are swayed by the wind. Dost thou not see, before thee stands my soul In silence wrapt my Springtime's prayer to pray? But when thy glance rests on me then my whole Being quickens and blooms like trees in May. When thou art dreaming then I am thy Dream, But when thou art awake I am thy Will Potent with splendour, radiant and sublime, Expanding like far space star-lit and still Into the distant mystic realm of Time. I love my life's dark hours In which my senses quicken and grow deep, While, as from faint incense of faded flowers Or letters old, I magically steep Myself in days gone by: again I give Myself unto the past:- again I live. Out of my dark hours wisdom dawns apace, Infinite Life unrolls its boundless space ... Then I am shaken as a sweeping storm Shakes a ripe tree that grows above a grave ' Round whose cold clay the roots twine fast and warm- And Youth's fair visions that glowed bright and brave, Dreams that were closely cherished and for long, Are lost once more in sadness and in song.

I work as fast as I can. Binah will come soon looking for me. It’s Mother, however, who descends the back steps into the yard. Binah and the other house slaves are clumped behind her, moving with cautious, synchronized steps as if they’re a single creature, a centipede crossing an unprotected space. I sense the shadow that hovers over them in the air, some devouring dread, and I crawl back into the green-black gloom of the tree. The slaves stare at Mother’s back, which is straight and without give. She turns and admonishes them. “You are lagging. Quickly now, let us be done with this.” As she speaks, an older slave, Rosetta, is dragged from the cow house, dragged by a man, a yard slave. She fights, clawing at his face. Mother watches, impassive. He ties Rosetta’s hands to the corner column of the kitchen house porch. She looks over her shoulder and begs. Missus, please. Missus. Missus. Please. She begs even as the man lashes her with his whip. Her dress is cotton, a pale yellow color. I stare transfixed as the back of it sprouts blood, blooms of red that open like petals. I cannot reconcile the savagery of the blows with the mellifluous way she keens or the beauty of the roses coiling along the trellis of her spine. Someone counts the lashes—is it Mother? Six, seven. The scourging continues, but Rosetta stops wailing and sinks against the porch rail. Nine, ten. My eyes look away. They follow a black ant traveling the far reaches beneath the tree—the mountainous roots and forested mosses, the endless perils—and in my head I say the words I fashioned earlier. Boy Run. Girl Jump. Sarah Go. Thirteen. Fourteen . . . I bolt from the shadows, past the man who now coils his whip, job well done, past Rosetta hanging by her hands in a heap. As I bound up the back steps into the house, Mother calls to me, and Binah reaches to scoop me up, but I escape them, thrashing along the main passage, out the front door, where I break blindly for the wharves. I don’t remember the rest with clarity, only that I find myself wandering across the gangplank of a sailing vessel, sobbing, stumbling over a turban of rope. A kind man with a beard and a dark cap asks what I want. I plead with him, Sarah Go. Binah chases me, though I’m unaware of her until she pulls me into her arms and coos, “Poor Miss Sarah, poor Miss Sarah.” Like a decree, a proclamation, a prophecy. When I arrive home, I am a muss of snot, tears, yard dirt, and harbor filth. Mother holds me against her, rears back and gives me an incensed shake, then clasps me again. “You must promise never to run away again. Promise me.” I want to. I try to. The words are on my tongue—the rounded lumps of them, shining like the marbles beneath the tree. “Sarah!” she demands. Nothing comes. Not a sound. I remained mute for a week. My words seemed sucked into the cleft between my collar bones. I rescued them by degrees, by praying, bullying and wooing. I came to speak again, but with an odd and mercurial form of stammer. I’d never been a fluid speaker, even my first spoken words had possessed a certain belligerent quality, but now there were ugly, halting gaps between my sentences, endless seconds when the words cowered against my lips and people averted their eyes. Eventually, these horrid pauses began to come and go according to their own mysterious whims. They might plague me for weeks and then remain away months, only to return again as abruptly as they left.

For centuries the church, while affirming Genesis 2 and the goodness of marriage, conceded the distractions of domestic life. One medieval solution proposed to divide the “housekeeping” among the people of God. Married people would tend to “earth” while monks and nuns, who renounced marriage, would do the work of heaven, praying “for the world, in the world’s stead.”7 During the Reformation, theologians like John Calvin and Martin Luther abolished what had become a sacrosanct division between celibates and married. By developing the concept of vocation, they taught that domestic obligation could be rendered as service to God, just as prayer and fasting were forms of worship: “Everyone [was] now expected to live all their lives coram Deo; before the face of God.”8 At the most fundamental level, vocation became a Christological category—a way of baptizing the housekeeping as sacred duty performed to God in the service of one’s neighbor.

St Cuthbert was called to be a hermit on Lindis­farne. This was more than a thousand years ago. There were only small wooden huts there then, and the wind and the wild sea and everything that lived in the wild sea. Cuthbert went out there to the mon­astery, but the monastery was not far enough and he was called out further. He rowed to an empty island, where he ate onions and the eggs of seabirds and stood in the sea and prayed while sea otters played around his ankles. He lived there alone for years, but then he was called back. The King of Northumbria came to him with some churchmen, and they told him he had been elected Bishop of Lindisfarne and they asked him to come back and serve. There’s a Victorian painting of the king and the her­mit. Cuthbert wears a dirty brown robe and has one calloused hand on a spade. The king is offering him a bishop’s crosier. Behind him, monks kneel on the sands and pray he will accept it. Behind them are the beached sailboats that brought them to the island. The air is filled with swallows. Cuthbert’s head is turned away from the king, he looks down at the ground and his left hand is held up in a gesture of refusal. But he didn’t refuse, in the end. He didn’t refuse the call. He went back. We head out because the emptiness negates us. We leave the cities and we go to the wild high places to be dissolved and to be small. We live and die at once, the topsoil is washed away and the rock is exposed and it is not possible to play the games anymore. Now I am exposed rock. Like Cuthbert, I have been washed clean. What do I see?

everyone inside the church. “Bid the devil.” Commotion broke out and the occupants of the church parted like the Red Sea. The nuns huddled together in a hurry, quickly blessing themselves and praying aloud in the process. The monks gathered together at the other side of the church in hushed whispers.

King Edmund of East Anglia is now remembered as a saint, as one of those blessed souls who live forever in the shadow of God. Or so the priests tell me. In heaven, they say, the saints occupy a privileged place, living on the high platform of God’s great hall where they spend their time singing God’s praises. Forever. Just singing. Beocca always told me that it would be an ecstatic existence, but to me it seems very dull. The Danes reckon their dead warriors are carried to Valhalla, the corpse hall of Odin, where they spend their days fighting and their nights feasting and swiving, and I dare not tell the priests that this seems a far better way to endure the afterlife than singing to the sound of golden harps. I once asked a bishop whether there were any women in heaven. “Of course there are, my lord,” he answered, happy that I was taking an interest in doctrine. “Many of the most blessed saints are women.” “I mean women we can hump, bishop.” He said he would pray for me. Perhaps he did.” ― Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom 42 likes Like “The bards sing of love, they celebrate slaughter, they extol kings and flatter queens, but were I a poet I would write in praise of friendship.” ― Bernard Cornwell, The Winter King tags: friendship 40 likes Like “The preachers tell us that pride is a great sin, but the preachers are wrong. Pride makes a man, it drives him, it is the shield wall around his reputation... Men die, they said, but reputation does not die.” ― Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom tags: preachers, pride, reputation, shield-wall 39 likes Like “I am no Christian. These days it does no good to confess that, for the bishops and abbots have too much influence and it is easier to pretend to a faith than to fight angry ideas. I was raised a Christian, but at ten years old, when I was taken into Ragnar’s family, I discovered the old Saxon gods who were also the gods of the Danes and of the Norsemen, and their worship has always made more sense to me than bowing down to a god who belongs to a country so far away that I have met no one who has ever been there. Thor and Odin walked our hills, slept in our valleys, loved our women and drank from our streams, and that makes them seem like neighbours. The other thing I like about our gods is that they are not obsessed with us. They have their own squabbles and love affairs and seem to ignore us much of the time, but the Christian god has nothing better to do than to make rules for us. He makes rules, more rules, prohibitions and commandments, and he needs hundreds of black-robed priests and monks to make sure we obey those laws. He strikes me as a very grumpy god, that one, even though his priests are forever claiming that he loves us. I have never been so stupid as to think that Thor or Odin or Hoder loved me, though I hope at times they have thought me worthy of them.” ― Bernard Cornwell, Lords of the North

The weapon was a showpiece with a blade that was only five inches long and a handle made of carved bone. The carving was a depiction of a one-sided battle in which men with knives and arrows and axes slaughtered unarmed men who appeared to be praying instead of fighting. Bosch assumed this was the massacre of the Shaolin monks that Chu had told him was the origin of the triads. The shape of the knife was very much like the shape of the tattoo on the inside of Chang's arm.

Adoration is not always the overflow of our hearts. In fact, it rarely is. It is an act of rebellion against the empty promises of this world and of defiance in the face of circumstances. (p. 63)

It's defiant adoration. And that's the most potent kind. "It is relatively easy to meet God in moments of joy or bliss. In these situations we correctly count ourselves blessed by God," observes psychologist David Benner. "The challenge is to believe that this is also true - and to know God's presence - in the midst of doubt, depression, anxiety, conflict, or failure. But the God who is Immanuel is equally in those moments we would never choose as in those we would always gladly choose." "Hallowed be your name" is always most powerful in the most unlikely places. (p. 65)

To pray is to be led by the hand to broken places, broken people, and broken parts within yourself. Jesus feels at home in the company of the misfits, marginalized, oppressed, and outcast, so if you spend time in conversation with Jesus, you better believe he’ll invite you to come with him where he’s going.

The most important discovery you will ever make is the love the Father has for you,” writes Pete Greig, founder of the 24-7 Prayer Movement. “Your power in prayer will flow from the certainty that the One who made you likes you, he is not scowling at you, he is on your side . . . Unless our mission and our acts of mercy, our intercession, petition, confession, and spiritual warfare begin and end in the knowledge of the Father’s love, we will act and pray out of desperation, determination, and duty instead of revelation, expectation, and joy.

The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.3

Prayer, properly understood and practiced, is the seed from which fruitfulness grows.

Let your marriage sustain your love.

This Presence is so immense, yet so humble; awe-inspiring, yet so gentle; limitless, yet so intimate, tender and personal. I know that I am known. Everything in my life is transparent in this Presence. It knows everything about me—all my weaknesses, brokenness, sinfulness—and still loves me infinitely. This Presence is healing, strengthening, refreshing—just by its Presence . . . It is like coming home to a place I should never have left, to an awareness that was somehow always there, but which I did not recognize.

Prayer invites you to learn to listen to God before speaking, to ask like a child in your old age, to scream your questions in an angry tirade, to undress yourself in vulnerable confession, and to be loved—completely and totally loved, in spite of everything.

We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.

Prayer is about presence before it’s about anything else. Prayer doesn’t begin with outcomes. Prayer is the free choice to be with the Father, to prefer his company.

As Brennan Manning said so pointedly, “If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others.

Solitude is the furnace of transformation,” says Henri Nouwen. “Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self . . . Solitude is the place of the great struggle and the great encounter—the struggle against the compulsions of the false self, and the encounter with the loving God who offers himself as the substance of the new self.”27

Jesus was intentional and interruptible. There’s a word for that posture: unhurried. Hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life. Why? Because hurry kills love. Hurry hides behind anger, agitation, and self-centeredness, blinding our eyes to the truth that we are God’s beloved and she is sister, he is brother.

On the contrary, when, by stillness, we remember our mortality, we recover who we are. “Solitude is the furnace of transformation,” says Henri Nouwen. “Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self . . . Solitude is the place of the great struggle and the great encounter—the struggle against the compulsions of the false self, and the encounter with the loving God who offers himself as the substance of the new self.”27

Lay down your burden. Take a rest for your soul. And then, “I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”30 That’s the destination of this prayer, the promise we become aware of in holy stillness. “Exalted in the earth” means God’s presence becomes reality, plainly visible. It means love breaks out everywhere there is hate. Kindness floods competition and sweeps it away. Peace swallows up fear. Joy washes over jealousy. Self-control calms rage. Here’s the way God promises to get all that done: “Be still, and know that I am God.

Search me, LORD, and know me.” Wait. Pay attention to what may come up. Note how God begins to reveal you to yourself. Confess.

Be still.” The Latin term is vacate, from which we get the English word vacation. The invitation of prayer anytime, anywhere is this: Take a vacation. Stop playing God over your own life for a moment. Release control. Return to the created order. Be still. Prayer begins there. But that’s only the beginning.

Some of us are kept from praying because we listen to everyone else’s prayers and it makes us feel like we’re next up after Winston Churchill in high school speech class.

When we engage in intercessory prayer, we are loving others on the basis of heaven’s resources.

Prayer can’t be mastered. Prayer always means submission. To pray is to willingly put ourselves in the unguarded, exposed position. There is no climb. There is no control. There is no mastery. There is only humility and hope.

C. S. Lewis said of prayer, “We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.

The most important discovery you will ever make is the Father’s love,

That’s because the biblical use of the word saint has nothing to do with human competence and everything to do with divine grace.

I want to have a lasting experience of God,” I told him. “Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears. I want to be with God all the time. But I don’t want to be a monk, or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God.

I’m like a praying mantis, except not so devout. And I make love like a monk in meditation, which can often be confused with being asleep.

down instead of from Twenty-Third Street looking up—things look quite a bit different. From that angle, the annoyed, hustling and bustling, highly important people angling their way through the obstacle course of onlookers seem insignificant. Our sun and moon and eight planets are just one little neighborhood among an estimated 200 billion neighborhoods that make up our universe.19 If we think of the Milky Way galaxy as being the size of the entire continent of North America, our solar system would fit into a coffee cup.20 Two Voyager spacecrafts are cruising toward the edge of the solar system at a rate of more than 35,000 miles per hour. They’ve been doing that for more than forty years and have traveled more than 11 billion miles, with no end in sight.21 When NASA sends communication to one of those Voyagers traveling at that velocity, it takes about seventeen hours to get there.22 That data has led scientists to estimate that to send a “speed of light” message to the edge of the universe would take more than 15 billion years to arrive.23 “So, yes, Chelsea art dealer, you are very important. But when we think about what we’re all gazing at while you make your agitation known through grunts and mumbles, you’re also impossibly young, urgently expiring, and unbelievably small.” You and I see the world with our own two eyes, and from that minuscule perspective, we tend to convince ourselves that we are (or at least should be) in control, directing our own lives, and scripting our future. We come back again to the truth that Philip Yancey reminded us of earlier in the chapter: “Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God’s point of view.” God is the one who calls us to “be still, and know that I am God.” Psalm 8 marvels at this very wonder:

Prayer pours forth when God‘s at the center

Plenty of those in today’s church would say, “I want to be there when the fire falls! I want to see revival! Bring on the signs and wonders!” Far fewer are ready to labor in secret prayer. It’s not glamorous. But it is powerful and effective.

But the modern church’s best-kept secret is this: we believe in productivity, not prayer. We believe in solid programs, above-average teaching, and yet another worship album release. That’s success right? The church’s underground atheism in our time is that we will busy ourselves with almost anything except prayer.

There is a prevailing bias among many American Christians against rote prayers, repeated prayers, “book” prayers—even when they are lifted directly from the “Jesus book.” This is a mistake. Spontaneities offer one kind of pleasure and taste of sanctity, repetitions another, equally pleasurable and holy. We don’t have to choose between them. We must not choose between them. They are the polarities of prayer. The repetitions of our Lord’s prayers (and David’s) give us firm groundings for the spontaneities, the flights, the explorations, the meditations, the sighs, and the groans that go into the “prayer without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17 KJV) toward which Paul urges us.

To turn our fast lives into stillness and our busy minds into solitude is an act of rebellion against the curse that runs through our veins.

Show her that you value her company and prefer being at home to being out. Esteem her in the presence of your friends and children. Praise and show admiration for her good acts; and if she ever does anything foolish, advise her patiently. Pray together at home and go to church; when you come back home, let each ask the other the meaning of the readings and the prayers. If you are overtaken by poverty, remember Peter and Paul, who were more honored than kings or rich men, though they spent their lives in hunger and thirst. Remind one another that nothing in life is to be feared, except offending God. If your marriage is like this, your perfection will rival the holiest of monks.

Prayer is like jazz. Jazz music is improvisational. Jazz bands don’t stare at sheet music; they get lost in the music and let it carry them. A saxophonist in an orchestra sits with perfect posture in a refined, formal opera house. A saxophonist in a jazz trio plays with their back arched, their eyes closed, and an expression of deep satisfaction spread across their face inside a smoky, loud club. He is “feeling” the music, not reading it. The interesting thing about jazz, though, is that it requires a firm understanding of the instrument. A wealth of knowledge and hours of practice makes improvisation not only possible but enjoyable. In short, if you want to play jazz, you’ve got to learn the sheet music first. And if you want to pray with passion, spontaneity, and freedom, you’ve got to learn the sheet music.

Loss of control comes in an endless variety of forms—a car accident, a phone call, a financial hole we can’t climb out of, a relationship we’re unable to repair, or a global pandemic. Whatever its origin, it all leads to the same place: a search for help outside of the self.

The desperate need of our time is not for successful Christians, popular Christians, or winsome Christians; it’s for deep Christians.

Walter Wink confidently exclaims, “History belongs to the intercessors, who believe the future into being.

Brennan Manning wrote, “Anyone God uses significantly is always deeply wounded . . . We are, each and every one of us, insignificant people whom God has called and graced to use in a significant way . . . On the last day, Jesus will look us over not for medals, diplomas, or honors, but for scars.

Our intuitive assumption is that we are closest to God when things are going well. Jesus is by my side, present and helping, when I’m living wisely and virtuously, keeping in step with his mission in me and in the world. The author of Hebrews says the exact opposite. Jesus is nearest to us in “our weaknesses,” not our strengths. Our hearts, corrupted by sin, are like the poles of a magnet that push away, ever resistant to grace.

Adoration given to God is always given back to us. As we lift our eyes, recovering a true view of God’s identity, we also recover his view of us. The biblical letters do not call the earliest Christ followers “Christians”; they had another title: “saints.” Today, we tend to reserve that title for the most pious spiritual elite. But in the early church, it was commonplace, the everyday name for the everyday Jesus follower. That’s because the biblical use of the word saint has nothing to do with human competence and everything to do with divine grace. To call someone a saint is not to necessarily call them good; it is only to name them as someone who has experienced the goodness of God.11 We recover our sainthood simply through adoration. When we remember who God is, when we experience his goodness, we recover our own identity as well. I

You can read the description of every entrée on the menu, listen to the server’s eloquent description of the few that draw your attention, and carefully watch the plates coming out, eyeing the reactions of restaurant patrons as they take the first bite. But none of it will satisfy your hunger. Until you pick up a fork and knife and taste for yourself, it’s all just hearsay.

Prayer is more practice than theory, so let me offer a starting place, with a phrase borrowed from Dom John Chapman: “Pray as you can, and don’t try to pray as you can’t.

The most important discovery you will ever make is the Father’s love, and it’s just that—a discovery. It cannot be taught. It has to be discovered, and everything else flows from that discovery.

Unless our mission and our acts of mercy, our intercession, petition, confession, and spiritual warfare begin and end in the knowledge of the Father’s love, we will act and pray out of desperation, determination, and duty instead of revelation, expectation, and joy.

What do you think God would do in the lives of your unbelieving friends if you spent every day this summer walking a circle around your school in prayer for them?” “I have no idea.” “Why don’t you find out?” I liked that idea.

Remember Who God Is Calling God “Father” is dismissible today. It rolls off the tongue as unconsciously as the lyrics of “Happy Birthday” as you carry a candlelit cake to the dinner table. It’s become just cheesy enough to edge past in search of some more sophisticated insight from Jesus in the lines that follow. Worse yet, for some its use is grouped in with a centuries-long patriarchal history of male superiority and female oppression. But the disciples likely gasped when Jesus said it. The temple that served as the training ground for their prayers had taught them to pray with supreme reverence. The grounding text for the Jewish people’s understanding of God was the book of Exodus—when the Lord appeared to the people in the form of a cloud by day and fire by night.6 The big question in ancient days wasn’t, “Does God exist?” It would be foolish to ask such a question. “Of course God exists! Open your eyes, man! He’s the cylindrical pillar of fire stretching from the desert floor into the night sky and serves as our trail guide!” Instead, the existential question in ancient days was, “Is God knowable?” Because a pillar of fire doesn’t provoke doubt, but neither does it provide intimacy. These disciples knew a God of cleansing rituals and animal sacrifices, a God of ten plagues and blood on the doorpost, a God who parts seas and floods the earth, a God with a heavy hand of deliverance and a heavy hand of judgment—awesome in power but hard to get to know. Jesus did nothing to diminish the reverence, nothing to minimize the power of God. Jesus made that powerful God knowable.

Why? Because in spite of everything, I still prefer God’s presence to anything else. It’s not the gritting your teeth, “come on God, you owe me this” kind of prayer. It’s being present to the One who chose me first and chooses me again today. It’s the joy of my life.

Michael Zigarelli of Messiah University did a five-year study of twenty thousand Christians in the United States and identified “busyness” as the number one distraction from life with God. He summarizes his own research with this great conclusion: It may be the case that (1) Christians are assimilating to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload, which leads to (2) God becoming more marginalized in Christians’ lives, which leads to (3) a deteriorating relationship with God, which leads to (4) Christians becoming even more vulnerable to adopting secular assumptions about how to live, which leads to (5) more conformity to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload. And then the cycle begins again.

The Christian philosopher Dallas Willard was once asked, “What do I need to do to be spiritually healthy?” After a long pause, he offered this (now famous) response: “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”10 According to Willard, hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day.

Technology has continued to advance and save us time. They got that part right. What they misjudged was how we’d use it. We’ve spent that time on things other than deep rest.

Prayer doesn’t begin with us; it begins with God. It doesn’t start with speaking; it starts with seeing. As Philip Yancey writes, “Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God’s point of view.”1