SCRIPTURE/PRAYER

How to Pray the Scriptures

Questions that reading the Sacred Scriptures always pose to us:

• What are the Scriptures themselves saying in the original context?
• What are the Scriptures offering or asking of me?
• What are the Scriptures offering or asking of us?
• What are the Scriptures offering or asking of the Church?
• What are the Scriptures offering or asking of the world?

The Basics About Prayer

Saying Prayers ... or Praying

When I was stationed at St. Columba in St. Paul during the mid-1980s, every First Friday the Pastor and I took communion to people confined to their homes. During those years I spent time with Mary. In her mid-eighties, mother of three, grandmother of eight, Mary's health was fragile and she carried the burden of serious family problems among her children and her grandchildren. The weight of worry seemed very heavy for Mary.

One First Friday she said to me, "Why isn't God listening to me, Father? I say these prayers every day (she pointed to a stack of holy cards in the middle of her coffee table) and nothing changes. Why isn't God listening to me?"

I immediately had the strong hunch that Mary was saying prayers, but Mary was not praying. As the weeks and months passed, Mary and I had some very careful, long talks. It turned out that, indeed, though she was saying prayers, Mary was not really praying. Her learning to pray instead of simply saying prayers made a difference for her.

The Scriptures call all of us to active, persistent, dogged, unflagging, relentless prayer. But what does that look like? Four things: prayer needs to be authentic, two-layered, scriptural and shameless.

Authentic Prayer

A life of prayer calls us to place our real selves before God, to be personally transparent before God, to lay before God what we truly think and feel about the persons and events of our lives: our joy and melancholy, gratitude and anger, tranquility and fear, wonder and sexual feelings, strength and weakness, willingness to change and stubborn resistance.

If we are not sure how, the school for authentic prayer is the Scripture's Book of Psalms. There every conceivable thought and emotion is offered to God in prayer. For instance, Psalm 88 ends: "Friend and neighbor you have taken away. My one companion is darkness." That verse expresses overwhelming melancholy, but in its context it is a prayer, authentic prayer. Psalm 137 ends: "O Babylon, destroyer, he is happy who repays you the ills you brought on us. He shall seize and shall dash your children's skulls on the rocks." Those verses express the rage of oppression, but in their context they are a prayer, authentic prayer. The Book of Psalms teaches us the attitudes and the words for offering God in prayer every conceivable emotion or thought that might rise in us.

Our prayer needs to be authentic. It need to express what we really think and feel.

Two-Layered Prayer

Our prayer needs to be two-layered.

Habitual Prayer

The first layer needs to be some form of habitual prayer. Frankly, wonderful habits as they are, neither grace before meals, nor giving God a few moments in bed before we sleep, nor both, are enough for any of us. We need to establish a habitual time of some length for prayer, at least fifteen minutes to half an hour each day, and we need to do a form of praying in that time that we commit ourselves to doing always. This habitual prayer might be the solitary reading of Scriptures; or intercessory prayer for family friends and the world as we take a walk each day; or writing to God in a journal; or gazing at a candle flame in dark stillness; or a visit in church; or praying our calendar at the beginning and the end of each day. Whatever we choose, the time for our prayer needs to be when we are reasonably open and fresh, the location needs to be where we can be solitary and free, the form of our prayer needs to be whatever it is that opens us to the possibility of either inner quiet (for about one third of us), inner probing (for about another third of us), utter stillness (for about another third of us) or for a combination of these.

Spontaneous Prayer

The second layer of our prayer needs to be our remaining open to praying wherever, whenever, however. Feeling moved to pray, over time, becomes ever more attractive and ever more pervasive. If we stay open, then we can lay ourselves before God in the car and in the store, in the shower and at the ball game. We can dance or sing our hearts out! We can just sob. Whatever. We need to allow ourselves time and space to pray spontaneously throughout our day. These complementary and necessary movements - a set time and form for prayer, and permission to pray whenever, however - both need to be in place for all of us each day.

Scriptural Prayer

Our prayer needs to be Scriptural. The Sacred Scriptures tell the stories of how God lives and moves and has being with and among and for his people in history. The Bible is a vast storehouse of riches for our pondering God and our relationship with God and one another. We can use the Scriptures for prayer in many different ways. We can read a Scripture text out loud slowly, repeating lines that strike us, like we might do in memorization, taking the text ever more deeply into our being. We can reflect on the stories of the Scriptures using our imagination: seeing the action, hearing the sounds, touching the characters, smelling the fragrances, tasting the foods, placing ourselves in the story and letting our emotions and insights rise within. We can take a single phrase, like "into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit" and repeat it with our breathing over and over again, out loud and then in our hearts, and carry it with us wherever we go in our days, weeks, months and years. We can simply read, and then fall silent when we are struck, letting God move as God wills in inspiring our dispositions and our response.

Whatever method it is that might work best for us, we must always keep it in mind that Scripture is the foundation of our prayer. The Scriptures give language and concepts for our praying. The Scriptures are the content of our prayer. They teaches us how to pray and themselves come to life in our praying.

Being Shameless in Prayer

We need to ask for what we need, demand it even, and then listen. We should feel able to rage at God as much as we might weep our hearts out before God. We should feel able to laugh before God as much as we might, at times, cower in fear. We should feel free to offer God whatever is, however we are ... and then listen for God's response.

We also need to understand that we have ups and downs in our praying. At times prayer is dry as dust. At times it is refulgent with God's splendor. These experiences are normal, natural and to be expected. After all, prayer is a relationship. What we know in relationship with God will be for us very much like what we know in the other relationships of our lives.

We will also experience victory and defeat in prayer. The important thing is that we remain faithful, keep going, never give-up. If we do so, we will be surprised by amazing paradoxes and wondrous reversals.

Grounded in Eucharist

Finally, even though we may be alone when we pray, the language and concepts we use in prayer come from our gathering as a community around the table of God's word and the table of the Body and Blood of the Lord. Even though we might pray in absolute solitude, the fountain of our prayer, its nourishment and its goal, is to be found in our gathering as a community for Eucharist. A life of prayer begins in Eucharist and ends in Eucharist. Prayer is all about being Church. When we pray, always, we are living in communion with the Church across the world, we are being the Body of Christ, animated by the Holy Spirit, hands raised to the Father in praise and thanks.

In Conclusion

True prayer is far beyond merely saying prayers. The Scriptures call all of us to active, persistent, dogged, unflagging, relentless prayer. If our prayer is authentic, two-layered, scriptural and shameless, then we will come to know over time the tender intimacy and immense consolation that comes with true prayer - a real relationship with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.