 January/February 2000 (XXXVIII 1) |
his fall in my Meeting there were many messages in the vocal ministry about prayer. Through this ministry many varied understandings and experiences of what prayer is and how it works were articulated. As one who struggles to maintain some depth and consistency in the practice of prayer, I found much cause for reflection from this ministry.
For most Friends in the unprogrammed tradition prayer is a private and most often a silent practice. Many of us certainly pray in meetings for worship, but very few of us pray out loud. Among other things, the messages in my Meeting caused me to think about what prayers feel most powerful to me. They caused me to reflect on what words I have seen or heard offered as prayers that moved me deeply, felt like they brought me into the presence of the Divine, or helped me understand better the dynamic of prayer as a living practice.
As one brought up in a liturgical tradition, I may have more memories of such prayers than many Quakers. Certainly the “general confession” that is found in the old Episcopal Book of Common Prayer is one such prayer for me. Reading and hearing it every week for many years brought me into a vital sense of my relationship with God. Prayers of thanksgiving at some weddings and memorials have, in the depth of their sentiment and beauty of their words, made me powerfully aware of God’s grace. I also still recall the stunning sense of the Divine Presence I felt after an “invocation” sung by a Hasidic rabbi at a retreat I attended in college.
Still, the prayer that remains most powerful for me is found in the gospels. It is uttered by one who comes to Jesus asking for the healing of his son. When Jesus tells the father of this boy that his son can be changed — healed — only if the father can affirm the healing power of the Divine present in Jesus, the father says simply, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24).
Whatever prayer may be, it seems to me that the essence of prayer has something to do with seeking, affirming, evoking, or trying to place oneself consciously in the Presence of the Divine, with the possibility, and perhaps hope and expectation, that something will change as a result.
When we offer a prayer of thanksgiving we may not be looking for anything to change. Still, the change that may occur is a deepening of our relationship with God; a deepening of the sort that occurs in any relationship any time gratitude is expressed and accepted, and (so) a bond of mutual care affirmed.
When our prayers take the form of contemplation, simply seeking to grow closer to and more aware of the Divine Spirit, or the form of petition, seeking God’s assistance that something might be made different in our lives or others, then the change we seek (and need) is probably harder to realize.
So, for instance, when we pray for someone else’s healing, or for the alleviation of stress in someone else’s family, or for the resolution of conflict in a community, we do so knowing we cannot make that happen. I do not have any overarching (or detailed) sense of how this kind of prayer (intercessory prayer) “works.” Still, I am convinced it does. Moreover, I believe that one of the ways it works is by changing our relationship to the situations we pray about, and perhaps by changing us, so that we can somehow become better channels of God’s love and power ourselves.
To be present to God in such a way that it is possible to be changed for the better ourselves — or to be made an agent of change for the better for others — I think requires us to place ourselves in the Divine Presence in the way the prayer in the gospel demonstrates. It requires us to both affirm our acceptance of the reality of the Divine, of God’s love and power at work in the universe, and acknowledge and seek help with the limits of our belief.
In this it requires us to take the stance that I suspect most of us have to take every day as people of faith. It requires us to hold in tension our desire to affirm and respond to the reality of the Divine — an invisible and immeasurable reality that we often have only a memory or an inkling of at any given moment — and our experience of a society that tells us nothing matters if it cannot be seen and measured. It requires us to act on the belief and hope that there is a power at work in the world that can help us — and we can cooperate with — to make things better, while acknowledging honestly our own doubts about that power and whether the things that trouble us can ever be changed.
If we are going to make our lives better lives, our relationships with others better relationships, our world a better world, then surely we are going to need Divine assistance. To connect with that Divine love and power that can assist us requires that we affirm its reality even if we cannot feel it at every moment. For me this sometimes means admitting my doubts, and then acting as if they don’t matter.
So it means saying, “I believe, Lord, help me overcome my unbelief.” With the hope that humankind can make the world a better place — and I can do my part — as we enter a new millennium, this is my first prayer. There will be, I am sure, many other prayers I need to say as well, but this is where I will need to begin. And not only upon entering the new millennium, but probably each new day.
Last modified: Wednesday, February 18, 2004 at 08:18 AM