PRAYER (AGAIN)

 In her book An Altar in the World Barbara Brown Taylor has a chapter on prayer she titles “The Practice of Being Present to God.” She begins her essay by stating that she dreads writing about it and that she is also a failure at it. Reading that was a great consolation for me because I often feel the same way. Clergy, after all, are supposed to be experts on prayer just as we are also expected to be great practitioners of it.

Supposed expert practitioner notwithstanding, prayer often eludes me and even leaves me high and dry. I have more questions about prayer than answers and the answers I have are hardly ever satisfying enough to allow me to be at peace. More often than not when I pray, words are spoken but it also seems as if I am only going through the motions of praying than really praying. But I dare not not pray.

Why not? If prayer seems so empty so often, why bother? Even more, since I know God hears my prayers and since I know God knows my thoughts and wants and needs before I ever open my mouth, why bother? Why bother God and just save my breath? After all, when I pray that God’s will be done, I am actually praying, if I am honest enough to admit it, that my will becomes God’s will.

God will or will not answer my prayers or most certainly God will answer them as God deems best for me and not as I deem best for myself. Because I know all that, understand all that, accept all that, all that is why I have a difficult time with prayer. All that is a reminder, as Taylor’s chapter title attests, why I/we pray: prayer is that practice of being present to God, realizing we are in God’s presence whenever we pray.

In the end it does not matter if we ever get the words right or feel at peace with our prayer. Whenever we pray, we learn more about ourselves than we learn about God, providing, of course, that we take some time to reflect on our prayer life in general and not on any prayer or prayer practice in particular. The greatest of saints had off-days when it came to prayer but they never ceased praying even when they felt nothing and their words seemed quite empty.

They continued praying because they knew those words kept them close to their God. It was a reminder that they needed God more than God needed them even though they also knew that God needed them as much as they needed God. They were – and each and every one of us is – created by God for a very specific purpose. We will only fully understand that purpose when we arrive in eternity.

In the meantime we continue to pray in words, in silence, in gestures, in simply trying to be present to ourselves so that we can come into closer presence with our God. As Taylor suggests, what we are doing is practicing being present with our God, knowing we will never get it perfectly right because that only comes when we arrive into the fullness of that presence in eternity. If there is any consolation in all this, it is, at least for me, that I should not care how I pray or when I pray or where I pray or how I feel afterwards and that God does not care either. All that matters is that I pray.