Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools

Notes

Personal Summary

An outline of various approaches and corresponding practices for prayer.

Definitions of prayer

• “Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.” (Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel via PLM: Introduction, 3)
• “Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God’s point of view.” (Philip Yancey quoted at PLM: Be Still and Know, 35)
• “Be still, and know that I am God. Slow down. Remember who God really is. Remember who you really are. That’s prayer.” (Be Still and Know, 47)

Practices outlined

• “Pray as you can”: just talk to God about all the details, stresses, and anxieties of life
• “Be still”: sit in silence for 2-10 minutes

Themes

Prayer as spiritual formation

• “There is a tragic disconnect between the sacred and the secular in today’s Christianity that has led to an unbiblical divorce between a ‘spiritual life’ (made up of activities like Scripture reading, prayer, and tithing) and a ‘normal life’ (made up of basically everything else)” (PLM: Introduction, 5)
  • Note: Severance is not possible between holy and worldly, eternal and present, spiritual and normal. I love God, the eternal, by loving people on earth and their temporary, physical, real-world needs.
• Discover more about prayer by practicing prayer
  • “Knowledge is hearsay. It’s memorizing the facts. Discovery requires personal experience” (PLM: Holy Ground, 24).
  • “When it comes to prayer, you can read all the classics, study the revival stories, and treasure up every biblical insight… Or you can live daily in relationship with God through prayer, insist on processing the extraordinary, the devastating, and all the mundanity in the middle with the early listening Father” (PLM: Holy Ground, 25)
  • Note: Prayer is something that can be developed overtime with repeated, concentrated efforts. This discovery via practice (or learn by doing) goes for all spiritual practices.
  • Note: It’s a reminder that the primary goal is “living daily in relationship with God.” Each practice encourages more time and attention directed towards God
• Solitude as a form of silent prayer
  • The goal of solitude is to release control, remembering that I am a finite human and God is eternal.
    • Re #Psalm/46/10 “Be still and know that I am God”: “The Latin term is vacate, from which we get the English word vacation… Stop playing God over your own life for a moment. Release control” (PLM: Be Still and Know, 40)
    • “Stillness is the quiet space where God migrates from the periphery back to the center, and prayer pours forth from the life that has God at the center.” (PLM: Be Still and Know, 44)
  • Solitude forms me into a person that is “Intentional and interruptible”
    • E.g. from the Russian church lifestyle of poustinia: “They embraced lives of intentional stillness as a discipline, but equally lives of interruptibility, refusing to ever latch their door, remaining constantly available, and making the need of their neighbor the highest priority” (PLM: Be Still and Know, 48)
    • Note: Just like all other spiritual practices, being “good at prayer” is not the goal – it is to become more like Jesus and love others
    • “Practice silence as a sacrificial offering to God. It’s that simple. It’s about giving something of yourself to God, not getting something from God” (Be Still and Know, 51)
      • Note: silent prayer forms an intentional and interruptible character because this is what I’m practicing in the presence of God.

• Prayer is dependent on Solitude because solitude bring awareness and honesty to prayer.

  • “We try to import prayer into our hurried lives – treating the symptoms but avoiding the full detox – and the result is lip service to God, while effortless conforming to culture remains the one, true god we worship” (PLM: Be Still and Know, 40)

Developing a posture of humility

• By practicing being in awe of God, recognizing our place as children to God, and seeing other people as children of God

• I practice seeing myself as not the protagonist of God’s story, someone God is calling and dependent on to get something started. Instead, I am invited into joining the active current God has already put in place.
  • “Prayer can’t be mastered. Prayer always means submission. To pray is to willingly put ourselves in the unguarded, exposed position… To pray is to risk being naive, to risk believing, to risk playing the fool.” (PLM: Holy Ground, 14)
  • “See anything more powerful than you? Can you see yourself in the midst of this vast expanse beyond you? Can you see yourself from God’s perspective for just a moment… [this is the] stillness and wonder from which all prayer emerges.” (PLM: Be Still and Know, 35)
  • “Many confuse stillness with waiting for revelation. Sometimes revelation does come, and it’s marvelous. But that’s not the purpose of stillness. The purpose is consent. It is the daily practice of consenting to the work of God’s Spirit, which is deeper than understanding or words” (Be Still and Know, 50).
• I practice knowing the temporary nature of my life compared to the infinite nature of the God I pray to.
  • “When you see how great God is and how fragile and fleeting you are, you equally see how profoundly you matter… We’re dust. But God has hidden redemption in us” (Be Still and Know, 47)
  • “I was always strangely comforted when I looked across all those tombstones [at the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn]… Every one of those stones represents someone who was living fast, making plans, and dodging every obstacle in the way of their preferred future… Now they’re a memory, and the city is filled with new people living even faster and making more plans.” (PLM: Be Still and Know, 45)
    • Note: Optimism for the future implies that all things in the present have a shelf life of relevance. Just like how all companies go to dust, so do all people.
• I practice relinquishing control of my life to a God that is actually capable of holding it together
  • “Everyone I meet is drowning in ‘their thing.’ It doesn’t matter if “your thing” is an artistic endeavor, profit margins, wining and dining clients, or raising children. We can’t see past “our thing” because ‘our thing’ is all consuming” (PLM: Holy Ground, 17)
    • Note: This is risk of a skewed practice of [[Live a life that is unique to you and how God created you to be|family value #2]]. The way God has uniquely made me is not meant for self-sufficiency.

Misc. Notes

• Anxiety and Prayer’s diametric relationship as found in #Philippians/4/5-7

  • A working definition for anxiety – “a subconscious drive to control the circumstances overwhelming me” (PLM: Holy Ground, 13)
  • “Prayer itself makes us anxious because it uncovers fears we can ignore as long as we don’t engage deeply, thoughtfully, vulnerably with God .” (PLM: Holy Ground, 14)

• Actually pray for real stuff instead of vague and infrequent stuff

  • Real requests
    • “Constantly overwhelmed lives should. drive us to prayer at its purest and rawest, but the tendency for may of us is to pray safe, calculated prayers that insulate us from both disappointment and freedom (PLM: Holy Ground, 18)”
  • Real emotion/complaints
    • Re: the heretical honesty of David’s Psalms… “God is looking for relationship, not well-prepared speeches spoken from perfect motives… God is grading essays; he’s talking to children (PLM: Holy Ground, 21)”

• “When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he wasn’t teaching them to pray more or prayer harder, but rather to pray differently - ‘Teach us to pray’ – the implication being, ‘to pray like that, the way you do it, Jesus.’” (PLM: Our Father, 55)

  • “Jesus prayed differently… he prayed with a sense of familiarity with God that no one had ever seen.” (PLM: Our Father, 55)
    • “The big question in ancient days wasn’t, ‘Does God exist?’ It would be foolish to ask such a question… Instead, question in ancient days was, ‘Is God knowable?’” (PLM: Our Father, 56)
      • Note: The cultural significance of “Father” is that the same God who was a cylinder of fire in the desert is who Jesus invites me to pray to

Open Questions

• How do all the different mindsets of prayer intersect? For example, how do I both pray in the middle voice and ask for daily bread? I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around how middle voice applies to the Lord’s Prayer.
  • Similarly, should I go through all of these points each time I pray? Is the practice only valid if I quiet my soul, recognize God as Father, pray for his kingdom, etc.?
• When praying in the middle voice, how do I hear the word of God?