How we pray.
October 22, 2008
Prayer: petitioning God in word or thought. We pray for everything from world peace to athletic victories (going so far as to adapt the name of a plea for intercession from the mother of Jesus as a ditch-effort play), from good weather and academic grades to divine intervention.
We petition quite a lot. It’s left me wondering how thoughtful we are about what we ask. Perhaps we have all been cautioned to “be careful what [we] ask for”, and certainly that applies in prayer life. I’m particularly struck by how we pray for one another. We pray for safety, for deliverance, for protection, for miracles–and we limit the way that the deliverance, protection and miracles may take shape. It seems that most of our petitions are one-demensional, bound by our physical world and focused on the immediate situation (specifically avoiding or escaping that circumstance).
We are uncomfortable with suffering, with struggle. We are so focused on escaping trial, that we miss the opportunity to pray for sustanence within it. Just fix it. Make it stop. I want to be happy, without worry. Without pain.
I’m not suggesting that we give up on miracles. I merely suggest that “fix-it” miracles not become the gut-reaction, the sole answer–”well…we’ll just pray for a miracle”–as though we through up our hands in disgust at the helplessness of the situation. Or, rather that we cast off our responsibility to really minister and intercede at a deeper, more intimate level.
So, pray for strength to endure, for emotional and spiritual growth, for deeper faith to result. Pray for comfort, encouragement and sensitivity in the physical world. Pray that eyes will be opened to the suffering in and the redemption of the world. Might these be the true miracles we hope for.
I wholeheartedly agree with you on how we pray for one another. It seems so limited . . . we want God to take care of our ‘little’ requests so we can take care of the big stuff on our own. Very seldom do we hear prayers for God’s will to be done, or for us to grow in the love and knowledge of Jesus Christ. In the bible, there are a number of beautiful prayers that we could use and just ignore. For example, Jonah’s prayer in Jonah 2, is almost completely quoted from other places in scripture. This idea of learned prayer, or praying phrases we have learned is a way to combat our view as God the vending machine.
Blaine, where did the ‘learned’ prayer (as in your example of Jonah) get abandoned? Is this part of getting too comfortable with Jesus? Relearning how to pray is something I’ll be working on.
I don’t really know when ‘learned’ prayer was abandoned, but I do have a sneaky suspicion that the Reformation might have something to do with it. Learned prayer seems very liturgical or part of ‘high church’. I’m sure many Protestants broke away from this practice to dissociate themselves from Roman Catholicism. Then again, I might be completely wrong with this thought. As for me, part of what I do for learned prayer is simply read a prayer every morning for a week or two (or test drive it for a month for that matter). Before I know it, phrases from these prayers begin to fill spontaneous prayers I have throughout the day and seem to resonate at a deeper level than the surface-y prayers that often accompany spontaneous prayer.