“I don’t trust any clergy person who says they are satisfied with their prayer life.”
So said a friend of mine last week. A friend who has spent a lot of time mentoring clergy and has thought a fair bit about this.
And I think I understand why.
It’s not so much that clergy – that anyone – shouldn’t have a fulfilling prayer life.
It’s that a healthy prayer life should keep us pursuing more.
More connection with God,
more openness in our own hearts and spirits.
A healthy prayer life should increase our longing for the vibrant presence of God even as we feel our connections deepen through our prayer; increase our yearning to respond to God more fully even as we grow stronger in faith.
I mean, look at these disciples in our gospel story today.
They’re with Jesus, who is God, who listens to them, responds to them, teaches them, directs them, heals them and those they bring to him.
What more could you ask of your relationship with God, you might wonder?
But they aren’t satisfied with their prayer life.
Lord, they say, teach us to pray.
John taught his disciples. Don’t leave us out!
I suspect they want a formula, a specific set of steps or words to approach God: a best way, a right way, a way that always works.
And Jesus teaches them a way of prayer that may sound like a formula, but is in fact a process of aligning ourselves with God, one that can keep us reaching for more.
Father, he says, telling us to start by placing ourselves in the same intimate, vital, active relationship with the Almighty that Jesus himself has.
Hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.
From that place of intimate relationship, name the awesome holiness of God that’s constant, and also beyond our grasp.
And place yourself in God’s purpose. To bid the coming of God’s kingdom is to name our longing to be part of the way God is transforming the world, to keep wanting more.
Give us each day our daily bread. We need the basic stuff of life – food, water, air – not as something God sets in motion once, but as something we will always need more of, need renewed, a process that pulls us closer in trust.
Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. Jesus links our longing for God’s full and complete healing of all our wrongs and brokenness with the never complete, never enough work of forgiveness – of offering healing and release – in our relationships with everyone else. Enough grace for everything, one and the same with our constant need for more grace.
And do not bring us to the time of trial. Because too many things, every day, try to erode our faith we will always need more of God’s guidance; God’s protection.
Jesus goes on to describe, in story and example, the sense of persistent expectation that prayer should create in us. Prayer isn’t a process aimed at satisfaction, but an orientation of our life and heart to anticipation, hope, confidence that there is more to be found in our relationship with God.
Jesus is telling us to expect that as we pray God will respond to our basic needs and our emergencies, and also open up doors and quests and gifts whose shapes we don’t know, and may not name.
Jesus is encouraging us to express the longing for more in our relationship with God, to seek it out, even if we don’t know what we’re asking or searching for. He’s giving us examples and starting places, because it’s often difficult to find our own words to express the deep longings in our relationship with God. The phrases we’ve come to know as “the Lord’s Prayer” are our starting place, not the ending place of prayer, as Jesus teaches it.
Still, I suspect Jesus wasn’t surprised when we took up those examples of attitude and expectation as a formula we repeat verbatim, over and over, alone or gathered together, in celebration and distress, when our prayer life is fulfilling, and when it’s not enough.
Because what Jesus taught us works.
As we repeat those well-worn words, they can open up our hearts and minds and souls to the prayer we don’t have our own words for.
When the prayer we’re used to, the prayer we know, is not enough, we can turn to these words we know so well, and listen to Jesus praying with us, teaching us how to increase our longing for the vibrant presence of God even as we name and feel the solid, unbreakable holiness and purpose of God; teaching us to increase our yearning to respond to God more fully even as we grow stronger in faith.
Jesus doesn’t teach us a formula to get prayer right, to satisfy God, or us.
He teaches us to pray imperfectly – to place ourselves in the heart of God’s holiness and purpose with all our own incompleteness,
to open up our sense of anticipation, trust, and expectation of what we cannot name,
and let our longing for more be all that we need.
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