Prayer: the Spiritual Frontier
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Prayer: the Spiritual Frontier February 21, 2010
Text: Matthew 6:9-13
Ken Shigematsu
Prop: Trellis, sandwich, and Snapple, Rule of Life Sheet.
BIG IDEA: Prayer enables us to grow in our relationship with God.
When I was in grade 6, I had a crush on Kristy. During the summer between grade six and grade seven, I rode my bike to her house three or four times a week. We sat on the grass under the warm sun, jumped on her trampoline, and ate donuts and drank Coke at Tim Horton’s. It was a blissful, magical time.
In grade six, what did I know about relationships? Next to nothing. But one thing I did know is that if you want to get to know someone, you have to get on your bike, go their house, and spend time with that person.
In order to develop a friendship with someone—not just a romantic friendship—but any kind of friendship we need to spend time with someone. If you want to receive the spirit and wisdom of a mentor, you need to spend time with that person. If you want to turn a Facebook friend into a real friend, you need to spend actual face to face time with the person.
And if we want to grow in our friendship with God, we will cultivate a rhythm of spending time with God.
What a privilege it is to even have this opportunity.
Have you ever experienced a sense of “wow” because someone wanted to spend time with you?
On psychological tests, I tend fairly to score fairly high on task orientation, but I feel immense gratitude for the friendships I’ve had in my life.
This week I got a call from an older friend—a mentor. For the past nearly 18 years the door to friendship with his person has felt really open. I have sensed his welcome and love. I have friendships with peers that feel precious and that I don’t want to lose. I have experienced the gift of friendship with some younger people whose passion and desire to grow inspires me. I am grateful for my friendship members of my own family. The journey with my wife and son feel like gracious gifts of God.
If we look into our hearts, many of us—even those of us who consider ourselves task oriented-- would say that our most precious gifts are our relationships with friends and family.
But, the best of these friendships are a faint analog to the friendship we have can have with God.
We have the opportunity to experience the priceless gift of friendship with the God of the universe, with the one who knows us better than anyone else and yet who receives us more unconditionally than anyone else and who wants to spend time with us.
God is literally dying to be with us. In the book of Hebrews we are told that through the shedding of God’s blood as a human being in Jesus Christ on the cross—that is through Christ’s sacrificial death for us on the cross--the way has been opened for us to enter into friendship with God. So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God (Hebrews 4:16).
If we want to grow in our relationship with God, we will cultivate a rhythm of spending time with God. This rhythm will become part of our rule of life, part of the trellis that supports our relationship with God.
Richard Foster says, “Prayer catapults us on the frontier of the spiritual life, of all the spiritual disciplines prayer is the most central because it ushers us into the perpetual communion with the Father.”1
Prayer, like Sabbath as we said last week, is a foundational part of our rule of life, a key part of our trellis (show prop) that supports the growth of our relationship with God. It is through this rhythm of spending time with God in prayer that we grow in our friendship with God.
You've probably seen an older couple holding hands who have created this masterpiece of the relationship over 30 or 40 years. What is the difference between infatuation that fades after a few months and a love that lasts a lifetime? One key difference is that the couple whose love lasts has some kind of kind of trellis that has enabled them to continue to experience meaningful time together on a regular basis so that their love grows across the years. If we have a trellis that enables us to spend time regularly with God, we can grow our relationship with him over our lifetime.
I now want to shift and ask some practical questions. Like what kind of prayer rhythm might work for us? How do we pray? How does our life stage shape what our rule of life as it relates to prayer look like?
Prayer Rhythms
What kind of prayer rhythm would work well for us?
Mornings work best for me. My mind feels relatively uncluttered. I make a point of not checking email or phone messages first thing in the morning. These things will trigger my mind to travel down the path of all the things I feel I ought to do.
When I was single and married without kids, I’d really enjoyed getting up very early, doing a brief exercise routine of stretching and skipping, push ups and sits ups, a brief time of silence and waiting and then a time in Scriptures and enter into a time of prayer. I like to think of my time with God like a meal I would share with someone. My time with God then felt like a three-course meal at a restaurant. But, now with a son who is 1 ½ years, I find that if I try get up at 5:00 or 5:30 to exercise and to pray, I found that our son Joey would be aware of my physical and psychic movements… and he would wake up saying, “Daddy! Daddy!” So even if I wake up early I lie in bed, usually until 7:00. My morning time with God, feels more like I’m going to a counter at the Deli getting a sandwich and some Snapple (show prop). It’s still nourishing, but not as long and lingering as it used to be.
But this morning rhythm may not be suitable for you (some one on our blog said I’m not a morning person). Some people can’t focus well first thing in the morning—especially without coffee. Gordon Smith who will be speaking at our Tenth getaway weekend in May says, “I came to realize that a better guiding rule (than praying first thing in the morning) is that we should give the best time of our day to God; and by best I mean the time when we are most alert and capable of being present to God in our prayer.”3 Some people are more alert in the morning; others are better able to focus in the evening. Each person ought to decide for themselves which time of day works best for them. Part of this calculation, of course, will depend on our life stage in life.
When I was an undergraduate student, I enjoyed doing prayer walks or jogs late at night at about 10 or 11 p.m. At some point in my thirties, I found I was less alert late at night and that my life was more complex, so if I didn’t set time to focus on God in the morning, it wasn’t likely to happen the rest of the day either.
This past week, I heard of woman who looked at this half page sheet on the categories of the rule of life (which is available in the back) and said, I feel drawn to develop the area of prayer. Since she’s a nursing mother, she feels the best time for her to pray is while she’s breastfeeding.
Even if we are not a nursing a new born baby in the middle of the night, and we happen to wake up in the middle of the night (and can’t fall asleep right way), we can use that time to pray for what comes to mind.
In monasteries, monks speak of praying the hours or the daily offices at various times through the day as the bell in the monastery summons them to prayer. Most of us will not end up living in a monastery, but we can establish a rhythm where we are reminded to pray briefly at various times through the day. Many of us pray before meals. I sometimes use a watch that chimes to remind me to pray. We may be praying with a weekly rhythm in community in our small groups, or as we come to worship on Sundays, (Would love to hear about your prayer rhythms on our blog on our website).
Remember that prayer is a gift to grow your friendship with the God who knows you better than anyone else and the one who loves more than anyone else.
Erich Fromm, the famous social psychologist, was asked to give a simple recipe for psychic health in a culture that is as pressured as our own.
As humanistic, secular person Fromm said, “A half-hour of silence once a day, twice a day if you can afford the time. That will do marvels for your health.”
For those who know God, we experience not just silence. We can experience peace in the presence of a God who knows and loves us. We will grow our friendship with God and it will also help us become more centered, grounded human beings.
Structure and Words
Have you been in a conversation where you wanted to talk to someone and get to know them, but didn’t know what to say? When I was junior high (grade 8 I think), there was this girl that I really liked a lot. I was riding the bus on my way to school. I was sitting on the left hand side of the bus 2/3rds of the way down and there was a seat open beside me. This girl that I really liked, Michelle, got on the bus and walked down the bus and said can I sit beside you? I said, yuh. It was a day at our school, where we supposed to dress up. I was wearing jeans. Michelle, asks, “Are those your favorite jeans?” I said, yuh. She asked another question or two… I didn’t know what to say. All I could say, yuh. I know that a conversation with God is very different than a conversation with a girl you have crush in grade eight, but it can be similar in one way—it can be similar in that in both conversations you may find we don’t know what to say.
So for many of us, having some kind of structure to pray may be helpful for us.
As a new follower of Christ, I was a taught to pray using the acrostic ACTS whose four letters stand for adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication (in his book Too Busy Not to Pray Bill Hybels describes this pattern and his book is available at the book table), and from time to time, I still use this pattern in my prayers. The Psalms served as Israel’s ancient hymn and prayer book. They offer us wonderful prayers to pray either word for word or as patterns for prayer or patterns for prayer. They express a wide range of human emotion: joy, gratitude, hope, guilt, despair, frustration, anger, and lament.
When Jesus’ disciples asked, how should we pray? Jesus offered them what is famously known as, The Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13). It can be prayed as it is (Our Father who are in heaven… or as a structure for prayer.
Sometimes I will use this prayer as pattern for my prayers.
The Lord’s Prayer begins with Our Father in heaven, so we can begin our prayers with an acknowledgment that we are praying to our loving, good, strong Abba Father (the most personal word for God) who I know that many others have made this observation before, but I found becoming a father and the love I feel for my son, which is independent of any achievement on his part has given me a profound new sense of God’s love. And for me that is not conditioned by any achievement of my part. That’s a great place to begin prayer.
Who art in heaven—reminds me that God reigns over all the earth. God loves me, but God is also powerful.
The prayer continues, hallowed be your name. We acknowledge that God`s name is hallowed, honored, and revered, and we can also pray for God’s name to be recognized as such by us and by others… I might pray that I would recognize God as holy and great. I may pray that for others too.
We pray Thy Kingdom Come, thy will be done. We ask for God’s good purposes to be fulfilled in each area of our lives: our work, our relationships, and submit these areas to God… (I know there have been times when I have really wanted something badly and prayed and God allowed me to have it, it wasn’t necessarily the best thing for my relationship with God… and so now I pray with more heart your will be done.) We pray not only for God’s will to be done in our lives, but also for that God’s justice and peace would spread throughout the whole world… in the city, in places Haiti, Darfur.
Give us this day our daily bread. We pray for our basic needs to be met and the plural our also suggests we are to pray that God would provide food for the hungry billions of the world. We live where about 40% of people live on less than 2 dollars a day, and according the UN, about 850 million people go to bed hungry each night.
Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Forgiving others is as necessary for the health of our soul as food is for the health of our body. I name sins and pray for forgiveness. As we pray we forgive those who have sinned against us.
Lead us not in temptation, but deliver us from evil. Having prayed for our sins to be forgiven, we pray that we would not return to our sins. We pray that when we are tempted we would not be vulnerable to sin, and when we are vulnerable, to not have the opportunity to sin.
For thine is the Kingdom, and the power and the glory forever, Amen. We conclude our prayer by acknowledging the Lord of heaven and earth and worshipping our great God! The Lord’s Prayer can help to guide and offer balance for our prayers.
If can be helpful to have some kind of structure in your prayer; it can also help begin pray for those things you truly care most about. Dallas Willard wisely says, “Prayer simply dies from efforts to pray about ‘good things,’ things that honestly don’t matter to us.” The way to get to meaningful prayer for those good things is to start by praying for what we are truly interested in. I lay out my prayers with themes across the different days of the week that correspond to things I really do care about… Many people have found prayer impossible because they thought they should only pray for wonderful but remote needs they actually had little or no interest in or even knowledge of.
Dallas Willard describes prayer as, “Talking to God about what we are doing together… Prayer is a matter of sharing my concerns about what he too is concerned about in my life.” I personally find it helpful to pray for different people and issues I care about on different days of the week… but praying for the things that are on our heart or come to mind may be a good beginning point for pray.
Sometimes we may feel like we ought to pray noble, lofty, poetic prayers, but this practice may be like a heavy burden, or impossible to reach or sustain.
It’s really freeing knowing that God knows all things and knows what we will pray before we pray it (whether we pray audibly or even consciously or not) we can trust that the Holy Spirit helps us in our prayers. We may not know what we ought to pray for, but, as Paul says in Romans 8, the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. He who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Holy Spirit intercedes for God's people in accordance with the will of God (Romans 8:26-27). Pray as you can, not as you can’t.
Consider Your Life Stage
Our rule of life or trellis will take into account our stage of life. As I said earlier, when I was a single person, my rule looked different. When I got married, my rule changed. I have recently become a parent and again my rule looks different.
A rule for a single person and for a parent of young children will and ought to look drastically different.
Carlo Carretto, one of the best spiritual writers of the last century, spent many years in the Sahara Desert praying. Yet he once confessed he felt that his mother who spent nearly 30 years raising children was much more contemplative than he was, and less selfish.
If that is true, and Carretto suggests that it is, the conclusion that we should draw is not that there was anything wrong with his spending long hours of solitude and prayer in the desert, but there was something very right about the years his mother lived an interrupted life among the noise and demands of small children.
If you are the mother of a young child or a stay-at-home dad, as the priest from Edmonton, Ronald Rolheiser, observes, you are being forced against your will in some ways to mature. For the years while you are raising small children, your time is not your own. Your own needs have to be put into second place. Every time you turn around, some hand is demanding something. These years will mature you. You may not have the same need for prayer for an hour a day that some people might have. (And if we are not raising small children, we truly need that time of private prayer to get outside ourselves and to experience maturing.)
Monks and contemplative nuns withdraw from the world, in part, to try to become less selfish, more tender, and more in harmony with God. To achieve this, they pray for long hours in solitude. Mothers of young children are often offered the identical privilege—withdrawal, solitude and removal from the centres of worldly power. They do not need the long hours of private prayer. It may that their conscious times of prayer are while breast-feeding or taking a shower. The demands of the very young are as, Ron Rolheiser rightly observes, a functional substitute.
Our rule of life and our prayer will look different at different stages of our life, but if we want to grow in our relationship with God, like any other relationship we deeply want to pursue in our lives, we will discover a way to be with God.
A relationship with God is very different from a relationship with a girl you have crush on in grade six, but it’s the same in this regard, if you want to grow a relationship with a classmate or with God, you’ll spend time together. You’ll enter into the gift and joy of the other person’s presence.
Prayer: the Spiritual Frontier February 21, 2010
Text: Matthew 6:9-13
Ken Shigematsu
Prop: Trellis, sandwich, and Snapple, Rule of Life Sheet.
BIG IDEA: Prayer enables us to grow in our relationship with God.
When I was in grade 6, I had a crush on Kristy. During the summer between grade six and grade seven, I rode my bike to her house three or four times a week. We sat on the grass under the warm sun, jumped on her trampoline, and ate donuts and drank Coke at Tim Horton’s. It was a blissful, magical time.
In grade six, what did I know about relationships? Next to nothing. But one thing I did know is that if you want to get to know someone, you have to get on your bike, go their house, and spend time with that person.
In order to develop a friendship with someone—not just a romantic friendship—but any kind of friendship we need to spend time with someone. If you want to receive the spirit and wisdom of a mentor, you need to spend time with that person. If you want to turn a Facebook friend into a real friend, you need to spend actual face to face time with the person.
And if we want to grow in our friendship with God, we will cultivate a rhythm of spending time with God.
What a privilege it is to even have this opportunity.
Have you ever experienced a sense of “wow” because someone wanted to spend time with you?
On psychological tests, I tend fairly to score fairly high on task orientation, but I feel immense gratitude for the friendships I’ve had in my life.
This week I got a call from an older friend—a mentor. For the past nearly 18 years the door to friendship with his person has felt really open. I have sensed his welcome and love. I have friendships with peers that feel precious and that I don’t want to lose. I have experienced the gift of friendship with some younger people whose passion and desire to grow inspires me. I am grateful for my friendship members of my own family. The journey with my wife and son feel like gracious gifts of God.
If we look into our hearts, many of us—even those of us who consider ourselves task oriented-- would say that our most precious gifts are our relationships with friends and family.
But, the best of these friendships are a faint analog to the friendship we have can have with God.
We have the opportunity to experience the priceless gift of friendship with the God of the universe, with the one who knows us better than anyone else and yet who receives us more unconditionally than anyone else and who wants to spend time with us.
God is literally dying to be with us. In the book of Hebrews we are told that through the shedding of God’s blood as a human being in Jesus Christ on the cross—that is through Christ’s sacrificial death for us on the cross--the way has been opened for us to enter into friendship with God. So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God (Hebrews 4:16).
If we want to grow in our relationship with God, we will cultivate a rhythm of spending time with God. This rhythm will become part of our rule of life, part of the trellis that supports our relationship with God.
Richard Foster says, “Prayer catapults us on the frontier of the spiritual life, of all the spiritual disciplines prayer is the most central because it ushers us into the perpetual communion with the Father.”1
Prayer, like Sabbath as we said last week, is a foundational part of our rule of life, a key part of our trellis (show prop) that supports the growth of our relationship with God. It is through this rhythm of spending time with God in prayer that we grow in our friendship with God.
You've probably seen an older couple holding hands who have created this masterpiece of the relationship over 30 or 40 years. What is the difference between infatuation that fades after a few months and a love that lasts a lifetime? One key difference is that the couple whose love lasts has some kind of kind of trellis that has enabled them to continue to experience meaningful time together on a regular basis so that their love grows across the years. If we have a trellis that enables us to spend time regularly with God, we can grow our relationship with him over our lifetime.
I now want to shift and ask some practical questions. Like what kind of prayer rhythm might work for us? How do we pray? How does our life stage shape what our rule of life as it relates to prayer look like?
Prayer Rhythms
What kind of prayer rhythm would work well for us?
Mornings work best for me. My mind feels relatively uncluttered. I make a point of not checking email or phone messages first thing in the morning. These things will trigger my mind to travel down the path of all the things I feel I ought to do.
When I was single and married without kids, I’d really enjoyed getting up very early, doing a brief exercise routine of stretching and skipping, push ups and sits ups, a brief time of silence and waiting and then a time in Scriptures and enter into a time of prayer. I like to think of my time with God like a meal I would share with someone. My time with God then felt like a three-course meal at a restaurant. But, now with a son who is 1 ½ years, I find that if I try get up at 5:00 or 5:30 to exercise and to pray, I found that our son Joey would be aware of my physical and psychic movements… and he would wake up saying, “Daddy! Daddy!” So even if I wake up early I lie in bed, usually until 7:00. My morning time with God, feels more like I’m going to a counter at the Deli getting a sandwich and some Snapple (show prop). It’s still nourishing, but not as long and lingering as it used to be.
But this morning rhythm may not be suitable for you (some one on our blog said I’m not a morning person). Some people can’t focus well first thing in the morning—especially without coffee. Gordon Smith who will be speaking at our Tenth getaway weekend in May says, “I came to realize that a better guiding rule (than praying first thing in the morning) is that we should give the best time of our day to God; and by best I mean the time when we are most alert and capable of being present to God in our prayer.”3 Some people are more alert in the morning; others are better able to focus in the evening. Each person ought to decide for themselves which time of day works best for them. Part of this calculation, of course, will depend on our life stage in life.
When I was an undergraduate student, I enjoyed doing prayer walks or jogs late at night at about 10 or 11 p.m. At some point in my thirties, I found I was less alert late at night and that my life was more complex, so if I didn’t set time to focus on God in the morning, it wasn’t likely to happen the rest of the day either.
This past week, I heard of woman who looked at this half page sheet on the categories of the rule of life (which is available in the back) and said, I feel drawn to develop the area of prayer. Since she’s a nursing mother, she feels the best time for her to pray is while she’s breastfeeding.
Even if we are not a nursing a new born baby in the middle of the night, and we happen to wake up in the middle of the night (and can’t fall asleep right way), we can use that time to pray for what comes to mind.
In monasteries, monks speak of praying the hours or the daily offices at various times through the day as the bell in the monastery summons them to prayer. Most of us will not end up living in a monastery, but we can establish a rhythm where we are reminded to pray briefly at various times through the day. Many of us pray before meals. I sometimes use a watch that chimes to remind me to pray. We may be praying with a weekly rhythm in community in our small groups, or as we come to worship on Sundays, (Would love to hear about your prayer rhythms on our blog on our website).
Remember that prayer is a gift to grow your friendship with the God who knows you better than anyone else and the one who loves more than anyone else.
Erich Fromm, the famous social psychologist, was asked to give a simple recipe for psychic health in a culture that is as pressured as our own.
As humanistic, secular person Fromm said, “A half-hour of silence once a day, twice a day if you can afford the time. That will do marvels for your health.”
For those who know God, we experience not just silence. We can experience peace in the presence of a God who knows and loves us. We will grow our friendship with God and it will also help us become more centered, grounded human beings.
Structure and Words
Have you been in a conversation where you wanted to talk to someone and get to know them, but didn’t know what to say? When I was junior high (grade 8 I think), there was this girl that I really liked a lot. I was riding the bus on my way to school. I was sitting on the left hand side of the bus 2/3rds of the way down and there was a seat open beside me. This girl that I really liked, Michelle, got on the bus and walked down the bus and said can I sit beside you? I said, yuh. It was a day at our school, where we supposed to dress up. I was wearing jeans. Michelle, asks, “Are those your favorite jeans?” I said, yuh. She asked another question or two… I didn’t know what to say. All I could say, yuh. I know that a conversation with God is very different than a conversation with a girl you have crush in grade eight, but it can be similar in one way—it can be similar in that in both conversations you may find we don’t know what to say.
So for many of us, having some kind of structure to pray may be helpful for us.
As a new follower of Christ, I was a taught to pray using the acrostic ACTS whose four letters stand for adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication (in his book Too Busy Not to Pray Bill Hybels describes this pattern and his book is available at the book table), and from time to time, I still use this pattern in my prayers. The Psalms served as Israel’s ancient hymn and prayer book. They offer us wonderful prayers to pray either word for word or as patterns for prayer or patterns for prayer. They express a wide range of human emotion: joy, gratitude, hope, guilt, despair, frustration, anger, and lament.
When Jesus’ disciples asked, how should we pray? Jesus offered them what is famously known as, The Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13). It can be prayed as it is (Our Father who are in heaven… or as a structure for prayer.
Sometimes I will use this prayer as pattern for my prayers.
The Lord’s Prayer begins with Our Father in heaven, so we can begin our prayers with an acknowledgment that we are praying to our loving, good, strong Abba Father (the most personal word for God) who I know that many others have made this observation before, but I found becoming a father and the love I feel for my son, which is independent of any achievement on his part has given me a profound new sense of God’s love. And for me that is not conditioned by any achievement of my part. That’s a great place to begin prayer.
Who art in heaven—reminds me that God reigns over all the earth. God loves me, but God is also powerful.
The prayer continues, hallowed be your name. We acknowledge that God`s name is hallowed, honored, and revered, and we can also pray for God’s name to be recognized as such by us and by others… I might pray that I would recognize God as holy and great. I may pray that for others too.
We pray Thy Kingdom Come, thy will be done. We ask for God’s good purposes to be fulfilled in each area of our lives: our work, our relationships, and submit these areas to God… (I know there have been times when I have really wanted something badly and prayed and God allowed me to have it, it wasn’t necessarily the best thing for my relationship with God… and so now I pray with more heart your will be done.) We pray not only for God’s will to be done in our lives, but also for that God’s justice and peace would spread throughout the whole world… in the city, in places Haiti, Darfur.
Give us this day our daily bread. We pray for our basic needs to be met and the plural our also suggests we are to pray that God would provide food for the hungry billions of the world. We live where about 40% of people live on less than 2 dollars a day, and according the UN, about 850 million people go to bed hungry each night.
Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Forgiving others is as necessary for the health of our soul as food is for the health of our body. I name sins and pray for forgiveness. As we pray we forgive those who have sinned against us.
Lead us not in temptation, but deliver us from evil. Having prayed for our sins to be forgiven, we pray that we would not return to our sins. We pray that when we are tempted we would not be vulnerable to sin, and when we are vulnerable, to not have the opportunity to sin.
For thine is the Kingdom, and the power and the glory forever, Amen. We conclude our prayer by acknowledging the Lord of heaven and earth and worshipping our great God! The Lord’s Prayer can help to guide and offer balance for our prayers.
If can be helpful to have some kind of structure in your prayer; it can also help begin pray for those things you truly care most about. Dallas Willard wisely says, “Prayer simply dies from efforts to pray about ‘good things,’ things that honestly don’t matter to us.” The way to get to meaningful prayer for those good things is to start by praying for what we are truly interested in. I lay out my prayers with themes across the different days of the week that correspond to things I really do care about… Many people have found prayer impossible because they thought they should only pray for wonderful but remote needs they actually had little or no interest in or even knowledge of.
Dallas Willard describes prayer as, “Talking to God about what we are doing together… Prayer is a matter of sharing my concerns about what he too is concerned about in my life.” I personally find it helpful to pray for different people and issues I care about on different days of the week… but praying for the things that are on our heart or come to mind may be a good beginning point for pray.
Sometimes we may feel like we ought to pray noble, lofty, poetic prayers, but this practice may be like a heavy burden, or impossible to reach or sustain.
It’s really freeing knowing that God knows all things and knows what we will pray before we pray it (whether we pray audibly or even consciously or not) we can trust that the Holy Spirit helps us in our prayers. We may not know what we ought to pray for, but, as Paul says in Romans 8, the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. He who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Holy Spirit intercedes for God's people in accordance with the will of God (Romans 8:26-27). Pray as you can, not as you can’t.
Consider Your Life Stage
Our rule of life or trellis will take into account our stage of life. As I said earlier, when I was a single person, my rule looked different. When I got married, my rule changed. I have recently become a parent and again my rule looks different.
A rule for a single person and for a parent of young children will and ought to look drastically different.
Carlo Carretto, one of the best spiritual writers of the last century, spent many years in the Sahara Desert praying. Yet he once confessed he felt that his mother who spent nearly 30 years raising children was much more contemplative than he was, and less selfish.
If that is true, and Carretto suggests that it is, the conclusion that we should draw is not that there was anything wrong with his spending long hours of solitude and prayer in the desert, but there was something very right about the years his mother lived an interrupted life among the noise and demands of small children.
If you are the mother of a young child or a stay-at-home dad, as the priest from Edmonton, Ronald Rolheiser, observes, you are being forced against your will in some ways to mature. For the years while you are raising small children, your time is not your own. Your own needs have to be put into second place. Every time you turn around, some hand is demanding something. These years will mature you. You may not have the same need for prayer for an hour a day that some people might have. (And if we are not raising small children, we truly need that time of private prayer to get outside ourselves and to experience maturing.)
Monks and contemplative nuns withdraw from the world, in part, to try to become less selfish, more tender, and more in harmony with God. To achieve this, they pray for long hours in solitude. Mothers of young children are often offered the identical privilege—withdrawal, solitude and removal from the centres of worldly power. They do not need the long hours of private prayer. It may that their conscious times of prayer are while breast-feeding or taking a shower. The demands of the very young are as, Ron Rolheiser rightly observes, a functional substitute.
Our rule of life and our prayer will look different at different stages of our life, but if we want to grow in our relationship with God, like any other relationship we deeply want to pursue in our lives, we will discover a way to be with God.
A relationship with God is very different from a relationship with a girl you have crush on in grade six, but it’s the same in this regard, if you want to grow a relationship with a classmate or with God, you’ll spend time together. You’ll enter into the gift and joy of the other person’s presence.
posted by Shigematsu at 6:30 PM
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