musings.from.the.porch

What are your early impressions about praying? What images stick in your mind? Here are some that come to me:

• The pastor who gave really beautiful, well-crafted, poetic “Congregational Prayers” on Sunday. I knew I could never pray like that. I felt so lame that I wondered what was the point in me praying?
• The pastor who stood up one Sunday morning and said, “the most genuine prayer there is is, ‘God, HELP!’”. He might be right: it is certainly heartfelt, but that seems just a bit insufficient. Is God just interested in hearing from me when I need help?
• Going to a Sunday mass. I heard the congregation reciting lots of formal prayers in unison (I didn’t know them, so I could only listen). There was something beautiful about listening to them, smelling the incense, watching them bow in unison. There was a community feel to this. But I was on the outside and my friend said that sometimes, he just checked out during these recitations - his mind not engaged with what his body was doing.
• Driving down the streets of Erbil, Iraq on a Friday. We turned a corner and came to a halt. The street outside the mosque was jammed with men kneeling and standing and praying in common, following the lead of the imam. Again, it was a powerful example of community life through prayer.
• In Uzbekistan, my taxi driver stopped the car at dusk to get out to go pray. 5 minutes later, he was back and we were going, he was swearing and laughing. “Something I do”
• The GI in the foxhole or the man at the lotto booth who send up the bribe prayer, “God, if you let me live, if you let me win, I will do XYZ for you”
• Some evangelists in Tulsa who shouted their prayers, making sure God and the Devil could hear them. It almost seemed that they were yelling at God so that he would act, would answer the prayer, or got themselves worked up so that they could believe that prayer.
• A scene from the 1944 movie, “I’ll Be Seeing You” which I watched last night. Ginger Rogers, Joseph Cotten, and Shirley Temple are at the dinner table listening to the Dad give a little grace. Shirley says to Joe, who is obviously uncomfortable, “You aren’t used to praying at dinner, are you? Didn’t you pray when you were a kid?” “Yes, but it didn’t mean much. But (turning to Dad), when you pray, it sounds like a natural conversation. You sound like you mean it.” Dad simply replies, “I do!”

These are really different images in my mind about this thing called prayer, that most audacious of actions whereby a puny human being dares to talk with that Completely Other being we call God. And the amazing thing is that, according to the Bible, God wants us to do so! He wants us to be communicating with him.

During his three years of public teaching, Jesus had a fair amount to say about prayer. But here, in his first public sermon, he starts off talking about what prayer is not. It seems that humans have a knack for turning things around, to twist things so that it becomes another way to gain benefit for ME. “It is all about me” is a deep part of the human condition. That is what he did in his comments on money and sex and anger and revenge and tribalism and cheating. You cannot begin to understand until you come right in your thinking.

So, this week, we are looking at the starting point of prayer. The next few weeks, we will look at the basic guideline for prayer that Jesus gave his disciples (this is usually called “The Lord’s Prayer” but is probably better called “The Disciple’s Prayer” because it is really a guideline for us!).

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