Carry at least this one Name upon your lips

C.S. Lewis once wrote a piece called “Festooning ready made prayers.” He understood the temptation of free improvisation and the poverty of the unfettered individualism it springs from.  He urged believers to follow more closely those prayers that are good representatives of the faith, tested by age.

So, to turn from whatever poverty in prayer leaves you hungry for God, consider:

1. Rethinking your stance toward what is rote.
2. Re-evaluating history and the gifts of the tradition (the Bible and historic practices).
3. Becoming suspicious of the mind’s desire to always be in control, always thinking, always demanding to know and understand (which is a form of control).
4. Suspend rational thought for awhile.  Has it really gotten you where you want to be in terms of intimacy with God?
5. Take the Holy Name of Jesus upon your lips and let it move down into your heart. Rest in the Name. Let your meditation (rote repetition) on the Name, keep you coming back to the one thought that really matters: the Name of Jesus.
6. When your thoughts assail you (like: “This is dumb; it’s just rote repetition”), come back to the Name and interrogate the thought: “Why should I believe you?”. Dwell instead in the presence of God.
7. Set apart some sacred time in a quite place.  Let your body settle into stillness.
8. Sit of lie still while remaining alert.
9. Watch your thoughts but don’t follow them or judge them good or bad, pleasurable or frustrating.
10. Return over and over to the Name.

This may not seem like prayer because we often think prayer is more like chattering at God.  But silence is the true language of God (click on 1 Kings 19.11-12; Psalm 4.4; Isaiah 50.4; Habakkuk 2.20; Mark 9.7).  When you're least conscious of your own thoughts about God, yourself, and the world---when you're naked of illusion, when there's no false self you have to feed, when you're dead to all but love---you are nearest to God, and nearest your true self made in God's image.

Avoiding rote and empty words

About contemplative prayer, Joe asks: "How do those of us for whom the ancient practices are so foreign, connect with the sense of awe and intimacy you advocate? I can see that while the Jesus Prayer can focus us, I'm concerned that it might just as easily become nothing but more than a rote and empty old habit." Joe asks an important question and offers a helpful caution. We don't want rote and empty old habits; Jesus does warn against vain repetition (Matthew 6.7).  Here's my take on this---

When Jesus taught us to pray, and warned us against "heaping up empty words," he nevertheless taught us to pray by rote (Matthew 6.9ff): “Our Father, who art in heaven…”

And if we look at the Bible’s many prayers, so many of them are essentially a recitation of the tradition (cf. Mary’s response to the angel in Luke 1.38: “Here I am, servant of the Lord, let it be with me according to your word,” compare also the disciples' response to persecution in Acts 4.23ff: they pray Psalm 2, verbatim, then improvise on it).

The Bible, and biblical prayer, celebrates rote repetition and is highly suspicious of the forms of free prayer we in the West consider “authentic.” They’d consider it vain. Any improvising the believer does in prayer is done based upon the memorized text from the tradition.

The problem is that those of us raised in modern, western, enlightened civilization think rote repetition is a bad thing. We’re hung up on so-called "free thought". There's no such thing as free thought. We all improvise on some “text”.

Listen to the prayers that spill from our lips; they do not cohere very closely to the Bible, but rather to Western values–mostly for security, safety, and abundance. There are a few precious exceptions of course, but these praying persons have drunk deep of sacred texts.

Next post, how repetitive praying can move us toward silence, the language of God...

Announcing the Annual Prayer of the Heart Conference

THE 14th CENTURY ENGLISH SCHOOL OF SPIRITUALITY February 19-20, 2010

In our turbulent world, it's easy to let distraction and turmoil scatter us and leave us spiritually dull and cold. This retreat explores the resurgence of the Prayer of the Heart among the fourteenth century English spiritual writers and mystics: Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and the anonymous writer of The Cloud of Unknowing. There was nothing easy about living in the fourteenth century, but these witnesses lived a life rooted in Jesus Christ in such a way that their world felt His grace.

Led by Dr. Robert Hale of the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, California, Dr. Steve Varvis, historian at Fresno Pacific University, and yours truly.

University Presbyterian Church, Fresno, California

Follow this link for more information on The Prayer of the Heart Conference

A guide for deepening your practice

For those deepening their spiritual practice, here's a simple introduction to the classic text on Christian prayer, The Cloud of Unknowing.  Follow this link for the longer article with helpful excerpts from the text.

For the first 16 centuries of the church, all Christians engaged in this silent form of prayer. Both then and today, contemplative prayer is practiced in the orthodox context of communal Christian worship and intense Bible study. Since it acknowledges the inadequacy of language to describe God, contemplative prayer is often called the via negativa ("negative way"). In the 16th century, John of the Cross embraced this prayer, saying that it purifies us and prepares us to love. Teresa of Avila taught that this "prayer of quiet" revives a "desolate and very dry" soul, creating an intimacy with God that is like "rain coming down abundantly from heaven to soak and saturate" the gardens of our hearts. Christians of all backgrounds are returning to this simple Jesus-centric prayer to grow their souls and learn to love in an increasingly complex post-modern world.

In Anonymous's timeless teaching on Christian contemplative prayer, the Cloud, he shows us how to pray and reconnect with a very personal, very forgiving God of love.

Prayer of the Heart: The Three Steps

There's a pretty broad consensus in the classical Christian tradition around the three essential steps or stages of prayer. I repeatedly return to the classical tradition for the same reason many of us return to Mozart or Bach, the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and U2. These artists are classic because they've proven themselves over time.

So too with the historic prayer tradition. That it's old doesn't make the ancient teaching valuable---there's plenty that's old, but worthless. It's valuable precisely because it's proven to be true over the ages. That is, those who've awakened to the spiritual life have found the teaching not only consistent with their experience, but competent to guide them on the path.

Okay, for those interested in digging around in the dust a bit, here's a list of just a few of the old ones who essentially agree: St. Dionysius, Evagrius, Maximus the Confessor, Nikitos Stithatos, and St. Isaac the Syrian. They speak of the stages or steps of prayer with several different terms such as "the purgative," "the illuminative," "the mystical" (Dionysius), or the "carnal," "psychic," and "spiritual" (St. Isaac).

For our ears today, I'll identify the steps in the Prayer of the Heart, the practice of the Jesus Prayer, in this way:

1. Letting go

2. Becoming aware

3. Resting

There's little new in what I'll show you. It's old as dust. But it's a tested path for all who seek a deep and continual experience of intimacy with God---who want to pray in such a way that they live with a nearly continuous sense of the Holy no matter what they're doing or where they are.

More on each of these stages or steps to come . . .