Prayer is a dilemma for many Christians, if not utterly frustrating. Like other aspects of life, it is also ultimately paradoxical.

Paradoxes

The paradoxes are many. While it is true that prayer is a universal human response to life's challenges and dangers, many are uncomfortable with or intimidated by the exercise. When we pray we tacitly acknowledge our creaturehood, while at the same time seeking to control, through prayer, not only our environment, but God. While we come as petitioners, our aim is often to magically manipulate God into fulfilling our desires. There are even times when we are emboldened enough to suggest to God what should be done. Furthermore, while we recognize that the most honest prayer is free and spontaneous, we also acknowledge that it is a state of being that is sustained by the duty of regular practice.

A Verbal-Rational Exercise

Among Protestants, in the West, at least up until we opened ourselves to the rich, historical traditions of the church, preserved in an array of Catholic spiritualities, prayer was almost exclusively a rational, verbal exercise. This was evident, among other things, in the enumeration of what were considered the classic elements of prayer--invocation, adoration, thanksgiving, confession, petition and intercession. In each of these there was a pre-eminent focus on mind and mouth.

Conquest

At an even deeper level, there was a preference for conquest, a conquest of God and of circumstances, over receptivity. What motivated the conquest, at a subliminal level, was a fear-driven crusade for security and success. The extent of unconscious motivations, like the root systems of trees, are always beyond our capacity to untangle and are often only discerned in retrospect.

I remember praying with great earnestness for the effectiveness of the ministry into which I had been inducted following graduation. The intensity and consistency of my prayer, together with the fact that I was burning the candle at both ends, led to a breakdown. In retrospect, I can see that what was happening was that I was imploring God to make this ministry effective so that I could prove myself to my mother, who had been unhappy with my decision to relinquish a career in law to become a minister. [86]

Changing Our Circumstances or Ourselves?

We have, in the West, tended to imagine that prayer was a question of effecting a change in circumstances, rather than placing ourselves in God's hands so that we could be changed. In one sense, prayer is our opening of ourselves so that God can suffuse, transform, guide and use us. While verbal prayer is an aspect of our communication with God, there are times when it is appropriate for us to heed the advice of the medieval Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, who quipped--Quit flapping your gums about God.

The Desert Fathers

The Desert Fathers of the 4th century, escaping what they considered the worldliness of the church of their day, opted for a solitary existence in the lonely vastness of the Egyptian desert. They wanted to be alone with God.

Prayer, for the Desert Fathers, was an encountering of God in the stillness of an empty landscape, free from the excited chatter of convivial conversation.

For many, this experience was shattering. It was often difficult to retain one's sanity. What precipitated the tension was that the exile was confronted by the demons of the unconscious. In the absence of convenient distractions, they were forced to encounter and confront aspects of themselves that they had been previously able to pretend did not exist. Those who endured the confrontation, and were able to own the alter ego, underwent a fiery transformation that developed in them an increased capacity for self-awareness, discernment, humility and wisdom.

Henry Nouwen, in The Way of the Heart, argues that ministers in today's society, seduced by busyness and pre-occupied by activism, are in desperate need of an experience analogous to that of the Desert Fathers.¹ While the desert to which we retreat may be an inner desert, it is, nevertheless, the experience of solitude that God uses to effect the transformation.

Prayer and Maturation

That prayer can be a means of human, Christian maturation is pointed up by John Welsh in Spiritual Pilgrims: Carl Jung and Teresa of Avila.² Welsh argued that the process of individuation, which was the term Jung used to describe human maturation, is beautifully illustrated in Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle, which was Teresa's description of her progression in the practice of prayer.³ It was through prayer that the growth of this Medieval, Spanish, Christian mystic was effected.

There are times when what is happening to us when we are being internally refitted by confronting our deficiencies leaves us with neither the inclination nor the energy to sustain a structured prayer life. However, the fact of our intentional participation, or merely our awareness of our participation, in such a process, where we flow with what God is effecting in the psyche, is the most effective prayer we are capable of at the time. [87]

This was my experience when I was forced to confront personal fractures and failures that contributed to the breakdown of my first marriage. The identification of unconscious motives and behavioural repertoires, and the embracing of these dysfunctional elements as part of the self that God had unconditionally accepted in Christ, can be seen, in retrospect, to have been one of the most important and transforming experiences of my life. It led to healing, insight and compassion. At the time, as I was being sucked into the maelstrom of my pain, I felt I had little control over what was happening. This experience was an unspoken prayer of relinquishment and helplessness.

Approaches to Prayer

Approaches to prayer have sometimes been described as either kataphatic and apophatic.

Kataphatic Prayer

Kataphatic forms of prayer are those that use imaging.

The use of candles could be described as a kataphatic form of prayer. The candle images the presence of God. It brings light to the darkness. It is warm and illuminating. There is something pristine and elemental about a candle. The use of candles can evoke in us a sense of the presence of God. No one is pretending that the candle, or the flame, is God, but it can help us recognize and encounter the God whose presence often goes unrecognized in our jaded world.

Those of us, that are in any way connected with the Reformed tradition, have been taught to look with suspicion on the use of images in worship. This caution, however, has not taken account of the fact that the words we use are symbolic images. The prayers of Bruce Prewer, which evoke the sights, the sounds and the smell of the Australian bush, are powerfully evocative.⁴ Furthermore, the language of faith and theology is burdened with a rich load of metaphors, symbols and models, many of which have their genesis in the Christian Scriptures. The prayer that expresses itself in liturgy, or in our theologizing, accesses this storehouse of linguistic symbols.

Icons play a significant role in the worship of the Eastern Orthodox churches. They are graphic stylizations of central Christian narratives and tenets. The Orthodox appreciate the mystery of God and their worship is conducted in the context of ritual movement that is carefully choreographed.

Where Western churches, particularly those in the Protestant tradition, rely almost exclusively on verbal presentation, Orthodox worship engages a broader range of senses--auditory, visual, kinaesthetic. The use of icons is set in a richly sensuous worship context that helps worshippers more comprehensively, and in a more embodied way, appropriate the presence of the God whom they are worshipping. It is unambiguously recognized that [88] the icons are not to be confused with the realities to which they point. Nevertheless, they are a potent means of helping worshippers access these realities. The use of icons is part of the kataphatic tradition of prayer.

Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises are also part of this tradition. The exercises are a disciplined experience in meditation. The worshipper, or retreatant, is invited to enter into a selected biblical narrative and to experience the drama from the inside. Feeling their way into the responses of the characters, they are encouraged to identify with them and to follow through on the implication of their experiences.⁵

Apophatic Prayer

Apophatic prayer, as distinct from kataphatic prayer, avoids the use of imaging. This form of praying operates from the premise that images distract one's attention from or distort reality. God is beyond images and is to be discovered in the pregnant emptiness of an environment from which visual or other images have been removed. This may be a matter, among other things, of dismissing mental images from our minds. God is experienced as ineffable in an experience of solitude that is either pregnant with the presence of God or heavy with the sense of God's absence.

The author of The Cloud of Unknowing argues that, in our praying, we need to go beyond the experience of a knowable, unconditionally accepting, and, therefore, comfortable God, to discover the fuller reality of a God who is ultimately unknowable and beyond our capacity to either totally embrace or to manipulate.⁶ We need to relinquish our familiar view of God and venture into an eerie void that defies comprehension, and in which God is experienced as absent. This phenomenon, Thomas Merton argues, following John of the Cross, can be described as The Dark Night of the Soul. It involves an experience of dereliction and of disintegration and a reconstitution of the personality, that, as a consequence, comes to be characterized by integration, transparency and simplicity.⁷

Personal Preference

Different sorts of personalities exhibit a preference for either kataphatic or apophatic prayer. Those who are predominantly sensate are drawn to kataphatic prayer. The intuitive, on the other hand, find apophatic forms of prayer more congenial. It has also been argued that "head" people, those in whom thinking predominates, are drawn to structured kataphatic prayer, whereas those who are given to "gut" responses appreciate unstructured, apophatic contemplative prayer. "Heart" people, those concerned with relationships, because of anxiety over how others are perceiving them, are encouraged to descend deep into themselves and to pray through the images that arise spontaneously into consciousness. [89]

Embodied Prayer

Prayer, in the Protestant tradition, has been largely verbal. The implicit assumption underlying this tradition, which, until more recent times, has largely gone unrecognized, is that we are disembodied minds.

The church has been beguiled for almost two thousand years by a Platonic dualism between spirit and matter or mind and body, which was paralleled by a sexist dualism in which men were credited with the god-like capacity for rationality and women were seen as the victims of unruly emotions and voracious sexual appetites. This view of women was a result of men's experiencing of women as different from themselves, of their being sexually attracted to them and of their projection, onto women, of those aspects of themselves that they experienced as out of control.

Maturation, in this context, was seen to involve a freeing of the mind, or reason, from the inhibiting weight of powerful feeling responses, which were repressed into the unconscious. These emotions took up residence in different parts of the body. Prayer, which was almost exclusively verbal-rational, disregarded our essential embodiment, increased the tendency for us to repress our feelings and further alienated and burdened the body with unresolved emotional responses.

Another problem with sheerly rational forms of prayer is that it is our feelings that indicate where we are truly situated. Our feelings tell it like it is, whereas our minds tell it as we want it to be told. They are biased towards preserving our orthodoxy and towards enabling us to keep on-side with the God we are attempting to influence. Authentic prayer comes from the heart. Theophan the Recluse, the Russian Christian mystic, offered superb advice when he suggested that, when we pray, we should descend with the mind into the heart and remain in that posture before God.⁸

We are not disembodied minds, we are body/minds. While thinking is an important function, so too are feeling, intuition and embodied apperception. The connectedness is even deeper than this. Our minds are not separated from our bodies. In a sense we have two minds, one which is located in the cranium and another which is throughout the whole body. When we come before God in prayer we should bring our whole body to the exercise. God will speak to us through our total being.

Urban Holmes, in Spirituality for Ministry, has argued that God addresses us through intuitions, echoes that whisper through the corridors of the unconscious.⁹ There are those who argue that they can discern the voice of God as God speaks to them about the need and direction of inner healing through the rich symbolism of their dreams. Peter Campbell and Edwin McMahon, in Biospirituality, argue that we need to listen to the insightful, if painful eloquence of our bodies.¹⁰ The initial problem we need to overcome in this communication is that, as Westerners, we are alienated from our bodies. We need to befriend and intentionally reconnect with them. [90]

Contemplative Prayer

Many Christians sing the virtues of contemplative prayer. What they mean by contemplative prayer, however, is not always the same.

For some, contemplative prayer is a matter of attentiveness to the world around us. It is an experience of living in the present. We put the brakes on our frenetic activity and allow ourselves to be, to observe, to look, to listen, to feel. We pay attention to the ants, the birds, the clouds, the design of a leaf, to animals and to people. It involves a capacity for receptivity, which is not easily attained in our rational, driven, male-oriented world that is convulsed by its fear-driven passion for control. This form of contemplative prayer affords us an awareness of the world around us and brings us into touch with the God whose presence sustains the universe.

Brother Lawrence, Nicholas Herman of Lorraine, was a magnet in his day for Christians seeking to live each moment in the consciousness of the presence of God. This lay brother, or "kitchen" saint, who exuded peacefulness and divine presence, spoke of the need to practice the presence of God. He argued that the awareness of God, in the affairs of daily life, was the consequence of a style of living that could be developed by any Christian. He contended that the procedure was a little like starting and maintaining a fire. Getting it going took considerable effort, and constant attention, but, once the fire had taken, it required much less effort to keep it going. This form of contemplative experience was an illustration of how one could pray without ceasing.¹¹

In the Russian, Christian classic, The Way of the Pilgrim, the advice was given that a helpful way of developing a continuing sense of God's presence was to co-ordinate one's breathing with the prayer, Lord Jesus, have mercy on me. The continuing re-iteration of this prayer, as one went about one's daily tasks, led one to experience an inner resonance of the divine presence.¹²

The use of a Christian mantra has been characteristic of a style of contemplative prayer developed by the Benedictine, John Main. After brief preparatory comment, worshippers are encouraged to repeat the words, maranatha [Our Lord has come]. The purpose of this mantra is twofold, to still the mind by blocking out distracting thoughts and to focus one's gaze on Jesus.¹³

Anthony de Mello, in Sadhana, has outlined a range of exercises to facilitate contemplative prayer. They are gentle and are designed to co-ordinate with the body's rhythms.¹⁴ In the final retreat he took before he died, Tony confessed that, in constantly urging people to change, he had been in error. He had come to realize that to change, to develop, we need to feel accepted. By insisting on change, he had inhibited his retreatants' capacity for change.¹⁵ There is a sense in which, if prayer is to change us, it will only do so to the degree that, to quote Paul Tillich, we have accepted God's acceptance of us. [91]

Thomas Merton, an earthy, human personality, and, perhaps, the best-known Christian mystic of this century, drew a distinction between vocal prayer, meditation and contemplation. Contemplation, for Merton, was a style of prayer that reached beyond both thought and feeling, that is, it was not generated by artfully constructed images or ideas, or consciously channelled feeling. It was being with God in an experience beyond contrived cognition and affect, an experience that was powerfully transformative. He argued that if, in the context of this experience, one withdrew attention from the object of contemplation, and began observing and analysing the experience, the moment of encounter was lost.¹⁶

Contemplation is also a lifestyle. It is living one's life with a form of prayerful intentionality that accepts the ordinariness of the moment, and personal joys and struggles, as the interface with a divine grace that is ubiquitous. It avoids a pietistic restriction of God to some superordinate realm of the "spiritual". Instead, true contemplatives experience themselves as embraced by a world, which, though ethically ambiguous, is suffused, in nature, community and culture, with the presence of God. To live, with centredness, reality and earthiness, is to pray.

Liberation Theologians argue, for their part, that involvement with God in issues of social justice, in a context in which God's preferential option for the poor is acknowledged, is the most effective form of prayer.¹⁷

Prayer as a Way of Being Human

While, in one sense, prayer is as natural as breathing, in another, it is enormously complex and ultimately beggars description. All I have been able to do is to hint at its paradoxical essence. I have taken you on a visit of a range of displays in a giant exhibit. Hopefully, some of the exhibits will have proven helpful and will have encouraged the conviction that prayer, as a way of life, is neither strange or alien, but an enriching way of being human.¹⁸ [92]

[SFM 86-92]