16 September 2018

Oremus - Let us pray



Matthew 6:5-13

Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Prayer. It's often described as the gateway to the Christian life. It's essential for a vital faith. And, still, so many of us struggle with the nature of prayer, how to pray, when to pray, where to pray. We question its effectiveness. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus provided wise counsel: go to your room, shut the door, and pray in secret.

There’s a place for praying with others, of course.  There’s a rich liturgical tradition of public prayer within Judaism.  Traditionally, Jews prayed three times a day, morning, late afternoon, and early evening.  Jesus is not rejecting public prayer; he’s condemning those who seek attention by their manner of praying, using empty phrases, words that are hollow and do not come from the heart.  He judges those who like to use lots of words, who try to impress others with their piety or poetry or erudition.  They are the hypocrites, who say one thing but do another.  They’re actors.  They want to be viewed as holy or good or pious or righteous. They pray to convince others, even God, that they are holy or good or pious or righteous. We need to be on guard for false piety in ourselves—others often see it before we do, children and teenagers always see right through the act, and God certainly sees us for who we are.

“When you are praying,” Jesus said, “do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Mt. 6:7).  Why is Jesus picking on the Gentiles or pagans?  Because they liked to use a lot of words to bribe their gods—a little verbal bribery.  Pagan prayers were loaded up with all kinds of names with the hope hitting the right one, getting the right god’s attention to fulfil their wishes. 

So Jesus sends us to our rooms. “Shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you in secret (Mt. 6:6).  Why does Jesus say this to us?

Maybe because, first, we need to remember the real audience for prayer.  When we are in that private place we remember the true object of prayer, that our focus is on God—and God alone. This means we must work to remove all that distracts us.  Go to your room and shut the door.  Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), the French mathematician, writer, Catholic theologian, said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from [our] inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”[1]

Go to your room.  Go to your prayer closet. Create one. Find one. I know people who have actual prayer closets or rooms set aside in their homes reserved for prayer. Jesus spent a lot of time in the crowds, hanging out with all kinds of people, people who made considerable demands on his soul.  But he also spent a lot of time alone, apart, away from the demands of the crowds, away from his disciples, sometimes for days and weeks at a time.  In John’s Gospel we read that after feeding the five thousand, the crowd wanted to “use” him for their own ends.  John says that, “Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself” (Jn. 6:15). Jesus needed to be alone with God. 

My friend Tom Long (Tom was my preaching professor at seminary) summarized Jesus’ words in Matthew this way: “When you pray, go into the deepest part of the loneliest place you know, hide behind the tallest tree where not even the birds and squirrels can see you.  Then, in that secluded and unseen place, you will know that all true prayer—whether it occurs in the quietness of your bedtime, in the middle of rush-hour traffic, or in unison in a vast congregation—is spoken only to the secret depths of God.”[2] 

I suspect there’s another reason why we’ve been sent to our rooms. While the object or direction or focus of prayer might be God, to be in the presence of God, there is always a subjective dimension to prayer, which cannot be ignored but often is. Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) reminds us that “Prayer does not change God, it changes the one who prays.”[3]  You see, there is always a personal, subjective, even psychological dimension to prayer. To be in a room alone with God means that we are also alone with ourselves, and for many this is tough. The French philosopher and Christian mystic Simone Weil (1909-1943) said, “To wish to escape from solitude is cowardice.”[4]  Harsh, perhaps, but true.

With no one to distract us, with no one to impress we are left to ourselves, confronted by ourselves, and we are now free(r) to be ourselves.  If we can approach God without trying to be holy or righteous or perfect, just authentically being who we are, saying what’s on our hearts, voicing our loves and our doubts and fears, this is truly liberating. We are then free to pray from an even deeper, more secret room that we carry around within us wherever we go: the secret room of the heart, the heart of hearts.  When we withdraw for a season to that inner room and pray from there, then the Father who sees in secret will reward you in secret, will reward you there, in that secret place.

We must, therefore, not be afraid of interiority. There’s a way to go to that interior place without being narcissistic or selfish or egocentric. Honest prayer from the inner room is not being narcissistic or egocentric.  The narcissist and the egocentric have considerable difficulty being alone, looking inward, becoming self-conscious; they are often unable to confront and acknowledge the hurting, broken, insecure parts of their souls. A good way to overcome egocentricity is to pray secretly in our innermost room, and that means, as much as we can, see ourselves before the light and presence of a loving, compassionate God.[5]  

Examining our needs, our fears, desires, ambitions in the presence of God, we begin to name our innermost burdens and hopes and confess them to God. When we are free to be authentically ourselves in the presence of the one who looks upon us with compassion, we are gradually changed over time, we become more authentic—and we don’t have to worry about impressing anyone, including God.

The English word “prayer” comes from the French, prier, meaning “to ask.”  Sadly, this is the extent of what prayer means for many, asking and asking and asking God for a lot. This kind of prayer turns God into a genie or magician tending to our every whim, want, and wish. Yes, there’s a place for asking in prayer.  But sometimes what we wish for is not exactly what we need.  And sometimes our petitions are just giving God a lot of bad advice. I want a castle in the highlands of Scotland—its doesn’t have to be a big one, mind you, I’ll be perfectly happy with a simple tower with several turrets, it doesn’t even have to have a moat. But this doesn’t mean that I’m going to get one. And while I would like a castle (I really would), having a castle might not be a good thing for me.  So, yes, there’s a place for asking, but prayer is so much more than throwing up a long list of petitions. And, no, I’ve never asked God for a castle.

I recently heard the story of a minister who was on a spiritual retreat.  The participants met together for a time, they would talk, and then they would go to their rooms and pray.  Then they talked together again and then go to their rooms to pray. And in his room he was always talking to God.  And at one point, during his long talks to God, he heard a voice say, “Shut up—and let me love you.”[6]

Sometimes, probably often, we just need to be quiet.  Sit in the presence of God and listen and let God love you. Listen with your ears, but also listen with your heart, listen with your body, listen with your gut, listen for what the silence says. Be attentive.  Pay attention.  Listening is a kind of sacrament; we could say that listening is sacramental.[7]  In listening we become attentive to the impressions that touch us, the voice of God that echoes in the silence, the rhythm and movement of the soul as it gradually comes alive in the warmth and light of God’s presence. And sometimes in the quiet, when we are silence, we discover what is being asked of us.

This week I discovered the writings of the Irish poet and Roman Catholic theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama.  He’s also the leader of the Corrymeela Community in Northern Ireland.  Corrymeela was begun in 1965 by Ray Davey (1915-2012), a former chaplain in World War II, and a group of students from Queens University in Belfast. During the war, Ray was captured and incarcerated in a prisoner of war camp in Dresden and there bore witness to the Allied bombing of that city, which was devastating.  This experience profoundly changed him. He returned to work as a chaplain in Belfast and became concerned with the tensions brewing between people of different political, religious and ideological differences in Northern Ireland. Corrymeela grew out of this concern. It became a place of reconciliation and peace for Protestants and Roman Catholics during “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland.  Today, Corrymeela offers space for analysis of the underlying dynamics of conflict, fracture, scapegoating and violence that we see across so many spheres of our world today. It’s a community that knows the importance of language, the essential value of naming fears, naming hates, naming wrongs, naming prejudices, and staying in community.

Ó Tuama remembers, “Once, I was sitting with more zeal than sense in a church, praying with fervour for something like holiness, or righteousness, or some other term I still don’t understand.  All of a sudden, the question came:  What do you actually want? He was “shocked by its clarity. It was a blunt question that demanded truthfulness, not devotion.  I couldn’t answer it,” he said.  “I got up, I walked out.  The prayer came with me. I’m still answering it.”[8]

In a beautiful short essay on prayer, titled Oremus, Ó Tuama reminds us that prayer is essentially giving voice to something; it entails the liberation of our voice, to say what needs to be said, to say what we’ve been reluctant to say, to say what our tongues have been fearful to name, but are crying out to say, whether it’s praise and adoration or pain and anger and disappointment. Oremus, Latin for “Let us pray,” is both an invitation and an imperative.  The Latin word oro, from which we get oremus, is related to an old Sanskrit word for “mouth.”  Let us open our mouths.

What do you actually want? Often it takes going to that secret place to start listening for the answer to a question such as this.  There are times in the life of faith when we are summoned and told exactly what we need to do: go there, do this. But there are also times when God intentionally steps back, and asks this question of us, and then waits—waits for us to step in with an answer, away from distractions and the influence of the crowd, to listen to the heart.  This kind of prayer sends us deep, below the surface of things and impressions. It requires silence and then out of the silence we begin to speak, as we struggle with language, as we try to find words to wrap around the heart. Answering this question requires focus, attention, particularity, exactness. To answer this question requires language, your words from your mouth, not the words of your pastors, your parents, your spouse your church, the society that surrounds you.  Your language, your words, which are always inadequate articulations.  Always inadequate, but they are you inadequate articulations. And, so, nevertheless we strive to name it all. God wants us to say: what do you actually want?

What do you hope for?  What is the deepest desire of your soul? Not the surface stuff of our fearful egos, but soul stuff, core stuff, core desires, what your soul really wants and needs. We can bring—we need to bring—all of this into our prayer.  We wrestle with it all and with God. We bring every aspect our lives into the struggle.  All the joys, all the fears, all the pains, all the burdens, all the things that trip us up and hurt us, all the sorrow that we carry.  They’re all valuable. All of it.  Listen and name.  And in the listening and naming and asking and wrestling, do you know what happens?   We discover who we are and then we find ourselves stepping into our lives in new ways.  And in good time, we discover that our desires have slowly become aligned with what God desires, for what our souls truly desire is what God desires for us…Your kingdom come. Your will be done (Mt. 6:10). The more we listen and name and listen and name, all within the presence of God, we are being formed and reformed.

Pádraig Ó Tuama summons us to pray this way: 
“So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars.  
Let us listen to the sound of breath in our bodies.  
Let us listen to the sounds of our own voices, of our own names, of our own fears.  
Let us name the harsh light and soft darkness that surround us.  
Let’s claw ourselves out from the graves we’ve dug, let’s lick the earth from our fingers.  
Let us look up, and out, and around.  
The world is big, and wide, and wild and wonderful and wicked, 
and our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable and full of meaning.  
Oremus.  
Let us pray.”[9]



[1] Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Thoughts), paragraph 139. First published in 1670.
[2] Thomas G. Long, Matthew (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 69.
[3] Søren Kierkegaard, Self-Examination/ Judge for Yourself (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).  See also Perry D. LeFevre, The Prayers of Kierkegaard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
[4] Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (New York: Routledge Classics, 2002), 67
[5] Fritz Kunkel, Creation Continues: A Psychological Interpretation of the Gospel of Matthew (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 88.  See also Ann Ulanov and Barry Ulanov, Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer (Wesminster John Knox Press, 1982).
[6] Recounted by Marilyn Nelson in “Pádraig Ó Tuama and Marilyn Nelson: Choosing Words That Deepen the Argument of Being Alive.” The full interview may be found here: Onbeing.org
[7] I’m grateful to Pádraig Ó Tuama for this insight in his essay, “Oremus,” in Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2017), xvi. Indeed, this sermon was inspired by Krista Tippett’s recent interview with Ó Tuama, which led me to “Oremus.”
[8] Ó Tuama, xx.
[9] Ó Tuama, xx.

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