Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Val J. Peter
INTRODUCTION: Once again, we are looking at Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth. His writings have sold a million copies and that tells you how much people like what he has to say and teach us. The ideas here are his. I often paraphrase so what is good is his and what isn’t so good is mine.
Prayer catapults us onto the frontier of the spiritual life. Of all the Spiritual Disciplines, prayer is the most central because it ushers us into perpetual communion with God our Father.
Mediation introduces us to the inner life.
Fasting is an accompanying means.
Study transforms our minds.
It is real Prayer that is life creating and life changing.
William Carey says: “Prayer, secret, fervent, believing prayer lies at the root of all personal goodness. To pray is to change. Prayer is the central avenue God uses to transform us. If we are unwilling to change, we will abandon prayer. And abandoning prayer is a noticeable characteristic then of our lives.”
“The closer we come to the heartbeat of God the more we see our need to pray, to be conformed to Christ.” William Carey tells us our task in life is to learn to bear God’s “beams of love.” How often we develop ways to keep the beams of love away from us. But when we pray, God slowly and graciously reveals to us how we try to hide from him and he sets us free from this hiding.
The Epistle of James says: “You ask and you do not receive because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” (James 4,3) To ask “rightly” involves transformed passions. In real prayers, we begin to think God’s thoughts, to desire the things God desires, to love the things God loves, to will the things God wills. And slowly we are taught to see things through prayer from God’s point of view.
All who have walked with God have viewed prayer as the main business of their lives. The word of the gospel of Mark: “And in the morning, a great while before day, He rose and went out to a lonely place and there He prayed,” stand as a commentary on the lifestyle of Jesus. (Mark 1:35)
David’s desire for God was such that: “Early will I seek Thee.” (Ps. 63,1)
When the apostles saw they should invest their energies in other important and necessary tasks, they determined to give themselves continually to pray and the ministry of the word. (Acts 6, 4)
Martin Luther says: “I have so much business I cannot get on without spending three hours daily in prayer.”
John Wesley says: “God does nothing without answering our prayers.” And Wesley backed up this conviction by devoting two hours daily to prayer.
David Brainerd’s life was his prayer. His Journal is filled with accounts of prayer, fasting and meditation. “I love to be alone in my cottage where I can spend much time in prayer…I set apart this day for secret fasting and prayer to God.”
William Penn testified of George Fox: “Above all, he excelled in prayer.”
Adoniram Judson takes seven times a day in order to engage in the holy work of prayer. He prayed at dawn, at nine, twelve, three, six, nine and midnight.
John Hyde of India made prayer so important in his life that he was nicknamed “Praying Hyde.”
Most of us are discouraged rather than challenged by such examples. These are giants of the faith and we are beginners ourselves. But we should remember that God always meets us where we are and slowly moves us into deeper things. No runner starts off by entering a marathon. They prepare and train for a long time and so should we. If we start now, we can expect to pray a year from now with greater authority and spiritual success than at present.
Many people who emphasize doing the will of God often do not pray much. Moses prayed boldly because he believed his prayers could change things, even God’s mind. The Bible stresses so forcefully the openness of our universe that it speaks of God (anthropomorphism) constantly changing His mind in accord with His unchanging love.
This comes as a genuine liberation to many of us, but it also sets tremendous responsibility for us. We are working with God to determine the future. Certain things will happen in history if we pray rightly. We are to change the world by prayer. Think of all the Catholics who prayed for the fall of the Soviet Union over and over and over again. And in 1991, it just happened one day.
Many forms of prayer have nurtured Christians through the centuries. There is discursive prayer, mental prayer, centering prayer, the prayer of quiet, the prayer of guidance, the prayer of intercession and many more. This paper is confined to prayer of intercession. That means learning how to pray effectively for others. We, who live in the 21st century, desperately need to learn how to pray. Those who lived in the 1st century already knew. Our culture does not teach us that. Theirs did. We need to learn.
Learning to Pray
Real prayer is something we learn. The disciples asked Jesus: “Lord, teach us to pray.” (Luke 11,1) They had prayed all their lives and yet something about the quality and quantity of Jesus’ praying caused them to see how important His prayer was. If their praying was to make any difference, there were some things they needed to learn from Jesus.
It’s liberating to you and me to understand that prayer involves a learning process. You are set free to experiment even if you fail, for you know you are learning.
Perhaps the most astonishing characteristic of Jesus praying is that when He prays for others, He NEVER concluded by saying: “If it be thy will.” His praying was so positive; it often took the form of a direct authoritative command: walk…be well…stand up…devil out of him.
There is, of course, a proper time for us to pray: “If thy will be done.” In the prayer of guidance, it is the great yearning of our hearts to know the will of God. And so we pray: “What is your will, Lord? What would please you, Lord? Speak Lord, your servant is listening. What would advance your kingdom upon earth?”…and then there is the prayer of letting go where we are committed to letting go our will whenever it conflicts with the will and way of God.
At times, we must follow the lead of the Lord who in the garden prayed: “Nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” (Luke 22:42)
The work of prayer is the learning process. If we turn on our TV set and it doesn’t work, we assume something is wrong and we have to find what’s wrong and correct it. We can determine we are praying correctly if the requests we make come to pass. If not, we look for what’s wrong.” Perhaps we are praying wrongly. Perhaps something within us needs changing. Perhaps there are new principals of prayer to be learned. Perhaps patience and persistence are needed. So we listen. We make adjustments and we try again. We know that our prayers are being answered as surely as we can know the television set is working.
One of the most critical aspects of learning to pray for others is to get in contact with God so that His life and power can flow through us into others. Often we assume that we are in contact with God when we are not. For example, dozens of television and radio signals are going through your room while you are reading these words, but you have failed to pick them up because you were not tuned to the proper frequencies. Often people pray and pray with all the faith in the world, but nothing happens. They are not tuned into God. We begin praying for others by first quieting our fleshly activity. Listening to the Lord is a first step. Speak Lord, your servant is listening. It is also the second thing necessary.
Soren Kierkegaard once said: “A man prayed and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until, in the end, he realized that prayer is listening.”
Listening to God is the necessary prelude to intercession.
Sometimes we are afraid we do not have enough faith to pray for this child or that marriage or whatever. Our fears should be put to rest. The Bible tells us that great miracles are possible through faith the size of a tiny mustard seed. The courage, actually to go and pray for a person, is a sign of sufficient faith. Frequently our lack is not faith, but compassion. It seems that genuine empathy between the one praying and the one prayed for often makes the difference. We are told that Jesus was “moved with compassion for people.” Compassion was an evident feature of every healing of Jesus.
The inner sense of compassion is one of the clearest indications from the Lord that this is a prayer project for you. In times of meditation, there may come a rise in the heart, a compulsion to intercede, an assurance and a flow of the spirit. This inner “yes” says to pray for that person or situation. If the idea is accompanied with a sense of dread, you should probably set it aside. God will lead someone else to pray for that matter.
The Foothills of Prayer
We should never make prayer too complicated. Jesus taught us to come like children to a father. Openness, honesty and trust mark the communication of children with their father. The reason God answers prayers is because His children ask. There is intimacy between parents and children that has room for both seriousness and laughter.
St. Teresa of Avila said: “This is my method of prayer. I try to picture Christ within me…I did many simple things of this kind…I believe my soul gained very much in this way because I began to practice prayer without knowing what it was.” George Bernard Shaw, in the play St. Joan, points out that Joan of Arc hears voices that come from God. The bishop, who is a skeptic and laughs at her voices, hears Joan saying to him: “You would hear voices of God, too, if you listened.”
We must learn to pray against evil. The old writers urged us to wage spiritual warfare against “the world, the flesh and the devil.” We must never forget that the enemy of our souls prowls about like “a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.” (1 Peter 5,8) In prayer, do we fight against the principalities and powers. And we need to pray prayers of protection, surrounding ourselves, covering ourselves with the blood of Christ, sealing ourselves with the cross of Christ.
We must never wait until we feel like praying before we pray. Prayer is like any other work. We may not feel like working, but once we have been at it a bit we feel like working. We may not feel like practicing the piano, but once we play for a while we feel like doing it. In the same way, our prayer muscles need to be limbered up a bit and we find then that we feel like praying.
We need not worry that prayer will take up too much of our time. It takes little time, but it occupies all our time. Thomas Kelly says: “There is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once. On one level, we may be thinking, discussing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs. But deep within, behind the scenes, at a profounder level, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship, a gentle receptiveness to divine breathings.
We have so much to learn, so far to go. Listen to your heart saying: “I want a life of greater, deeper, truer prayer.”
If you like this chapter, why not go to the bookstore and buy Richard J. Foster’s Celebration of Discipline (Harper Collins, San Francisco: 1978)
INTRODUCTION: Once again, we are looking at Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth. His writings have sold a million copies and that tells you how much people like what he has to say and teach us. The ideas here are his. I often paraphrase so what is good is his and what isn’t so good is mine.
Prayer catapults us onto the frontier of the spiritual life. Of all the Spiritual Disciplines, prayer is the most central because it ushers us into perpetual communion with God our Father.
Mediation introduces us to the inner life.
Fasting is an accompanying means.
Study transforms our minds.
It is real Prayer that is life creating and life changing.
William Carey says: “Prayer, secret, fervent, believing prayer lies at the root of all personal goodness. To pray is to change. Prayer is the central avenue God uses to transform us. If we are unwilling to change, we will abandon prayer. And abandoning prayer is a noticeable characteristic then of our lives.”
“The closer we come to the heartbeat of God the more we see our need to pray, to be conformed to Christ.” William Carey tells us our task in life is to learn to bear God’s “beams of love.” How often we develop ways to keep the beams of love away from us. But when we pray, God slowly and graciously reveals to us how we try to hide from him and he sets us free from this hiding.
The Epistle of James says: “You ask and you do not receive because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” (James 4,3) To ask “rightly” involves transformed passions. In real prayers, we begin to think God’s thoughts, to desire the things God desires, to love the things God loves, to will the things God wills. And slowly we are taught to see things through prayer from God’s point of view.
All who have walked with God have viewed prayer as the main business of their lives. The word of the gospel of Mark: “And in the morning, a great while before day, He rose and went out to a lonely place and there He prayed,” stand as a commentary on the lifestyle of Jesus. (Mark 1:35)
David’s desire for God was such that: “Early will I seek Thee.” (Ps. 63,1)
When the apostles saw they should invest their energies in other important and necessary tasks, they determined to give themselves continually to pray and the ministry of the word. (Acts 6, 4)
Martin Luther says: “I have so much business I cannot get on without spending three hours daily in prayer.”
John Wesley says: “God does nothing without answering our prayers.” And Wesley backed up this conviction by devoting two hours daily to prayer.
David Brainerd’s life was his prayer. His Journal is filled with accounts of prayer, fasting and meditation. “I love to be alone in my cottage where I can spend much time in prayer…I set apart this day for secret fasting and prayer to God.”
William Penn testified of George Fox: “Above all, he excelled in prayer.”
Adoniram Judson takes seven times a day in order to engage in the holy work of prayer. He prayed at dawn, at nine, twelve, three, six, nine and midnight.
John Hyde of India made prayer so important in his life that he was nicknamed “Praying Hyde.”
Most of us are discouraged rather than challenged by such examples. These are giants of the faith and we are beginners ourselves. But we should remember that God always meets us where we are and slowly moves us into deeper things. No runner starts off by entering a marathon. They prepare and train for a long time and so should we. If we start now, we can expect to pray a year from now with greater authority and spiritual success than at present.
Many people who emphasize doing the will of God often do not pray much. Moses prayed boldly because he believed his prayers could change things, even God’s mind. The Bible stresses so forcefully the openness of our universe that it speaks of God (anthropomorphism) constantly changing His mind in accord with His unchanging love.
This comes as a genuine liberation to many of us, but it also sets tremendous responsibility for us. We are working with God to determine the future. Certain things will happen in history if we pray rightly. We are to change the world by prayer. Think of all the Catholics who prayed for the fall of the Soviet Union over and over and over again. And in 1991, it just happened one day.
Many forms of prayer have nurtured Christians through the centuries. There is discursive prayer, mental prayer, centering prayer, the prayer of quiet, the prayer of guidance, the prayer of intercession and many more. This paper is confined to prayer of intercession. That means learning how to pray effectively for others. We, who live in the 21st century, desperately need to learn how to pray. Those who lived in the 1st century already knew. Our culture does not teach us that. Theirs did. We need to learn.
Learning to Pray
Real prayer is something we learn. The disciples asked Jesus: “Lord, teach us to pray.” (Luke 11,1) They had prayed all their lives and yet something about the quality and quantity of Jesus’ praying caused them to see how important His prayer was. If their praying was to make any difference, there were some things they needed to learn from Jesus.
It’s liberating to you and me to understand that prayer involves a learning process. You are set free to experiment even if you fail, for you know you are learning.
Perhaps the most astonishing characteristic of Jesus praying is that when He prays for others, He NEVER concluded by saying: “If it be thy will.” His praying was so positive; it often took the form of a direct authoritative command: walk…be well…stand up…devil out of him.
There is, of course, a proper time for us to pray: “If thy will be done.” In the prayer of guidance, it is the great yearning of our hearts to know the will of God. And so we pray: “What is your will, Lord? What would please you, Lord? Speak Lord, your servant is listening. What would advance your kingdom upon earth?”…and then there is the prayer of letting go where we are committed to letting go our will whenever it conflicts with the will and way of God.
At times, we must follow the lead of the Lord who in the garden prayed: “Nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” (Luke 22:42)
The work of prayer is the learning process. If we turn on our TV set and it doesn’t work, we assume something is wrong and we have to find what’s wrong and correct it. We can determine we are praying correctly if the requests we make come to pass. If not, we look for what’s wrong.” Perhaps we are praying wrongly. Perhaps something within us needs changing. Perhaps there are new principals of prayer to be learned. Perhaps patience and persistence are needed. So we listen. We make adjustments and we try again. We know that our prayers are being answered as surely as we can know the television set is working.
One of the most critical aspects of learning to pray for others is to get in contact with God so that His life and power can flow through us into others. Often we assume that we are in contact with God when we are not. For example, dozens of television and radio signals are going through your room while you are reading these words, but you have failed to pick them up because you were not tuned to the proper frequencies. Often people pray and pray with all the faith in the world, but nothing happens. They are not tuned into God. We begin praying for others by first quieting our fleshly activity. Listening to the Lord is a first step. Speak Lord, your servant is listening. It is also the second thing necessary.
Soren Kierkegaard once said: “A man prayed and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until, in the end, he realized that prayer is listening.”
Listening to God is the necessary prelude to intercession.
Sometimes we are afraid we do not have enough faith to pray for this child or that marriage or whatever. Our fears should be put to rest. The Bible tells us that great miracles are possible through faith the size of a tiny mustard seed. The courage, actually to go and pray for a person, is a sign of sufficient faith. Frequently our lack is not faith, but compassion. It seems that genuine empathy between the one praying and the one prayed for often makes the difference. We are told that Jesus was “moved with compassion for people.” Compassion was an evident feature of every healing of Jesus.
The inner sense of compassion is one of the clearest indications from the Lord that this is a prayer project for you. In times of meditation, there may come a rise in the heart, a compulsion to intercede, an assurance and a flow of the spirit. This inner “yes” says to pray for that person or situation. If the idea is accompanied with a sense of dread, you should probably set it aside. God will lead someone else to pray for that matter.
The Foothills of Prayer
We should never make prayer too complicated. Jesus taught us to come like children to a father. Openness, honesty and trust mark the communication of children with their father. The reason God answers prayers is because His children ask. There is intimacy between parents and children that has room for both seriousness and laughter.
St. Teresa of Avila said: “This is my method of prayer. I try to picture Christ within me…I did many simple things of this kind…I believe my soul gained very much in this way because I began to practice prayer without knowing what it was.” George Bernard Shaw, in the play St. Joan, points out that Joan of Arc hears voices that come from God. The bishop, who is a skeptic and laughs at her voices, hears Joan saying to him: “You would hear voices of God, too, if you listened.”
We must learn to pray against evil. The old writers urged us to wage spiritual warfare against “the world, the flesh and the devil.” We must never forget that the enemy of our souls prowls about like “a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.” (1 Peter 5,8) In prayer, do we fight against the principalities and powers. And we need to pray prayers of protection, surrounding ourselves, covering ourselves with the blood of Christ, sealing ourselves with the cross of Christ.
We must never wait until we feel like praying before we pray. Prayer is like any other work. We may not feel like working, but once we have been at it a bit we feel like working. We may not feel like practicing the piano, but once we play for a while we feel like doing it. In the same way, our prayer muscles need to be limbered up a bit and we find then that we feel like praying.
We need not worry that prayer will take up too much of our time. It takes little time, but it occupies all our time. Thomas Kelly says: “There is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once. On one level, we may be thinking, discussing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs. But deep within, behind the scenes, at a profounder level, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship, a gentle receptiveness to divine breathings.
We have so much to learn, so far to go. Listen to your heart saying: “I want a life of greater, deeper, truer prayer.”
If you like this chapter, why not go to the bookstore and buy Richard J. Foster’s Celebration of Discipline (Harper Collins, San Francisco: 1978)
posted by Fr. Peter | 9:14 AM
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