The Art of Prayer

Speaking of the art of prayer is like speaking of the art of breathing. Everyone can do it, and life isn't the same without it. There is a reason the wise pray.

I wish I had grasped that long ago. I spent decades trying to master the art of prayer, reading about and imitating the great masters of mindful meditation. During my walk through the darkest valleys of my wilderness wandering, l discovered serendipitously that the heart of its art is its artlessness.

My Father Was a Prayer Artist

The older I get, the more I admire my father.

Dad was our family's self-designated prayer leader. Indeed, except in corporate worship, I never saw my mother pray. Perhaps it was a traditional gender role in our Southern culture. Maybe, also, it was because my father excelled in the role.

We would make a circle around the kitchen at family gatherings, holding hands as Dad gave thanks for the food. But it took a long time for Dad to get around to mentioning the food. As the food cooled off, Dad warmed up, his heart pouring out gratitude for an extensive catalog of blessings God had most recently heaped upon our family. Sometimes, Dad would be moved to tears by the grace he named for us. Often, by the time he turned to give thanks for the meal, the weather had changed, and grandkids had grown a few inches in height.

But corporate prayer leadership was but a fraction of my father's prayer life. There was another much more significant side I rarely witnessed but knew mostly through inference. Dad had a rich personal prayer life. Whereas his prayers at family gatherings overflowed with thanksgivings, intercessions dominated his private devotions. He'd go through the rosters of his extended family and friends and pray for each, expressing his heartfelt desires for their welfare.

His private devotion time was not a rare thing. Dad was very much a man of routine. He set time to do what he believed an honorable, dutiful, and faithful man does in his roles as husband, father, son, and citizen. Dad did those things quietly, without ostentation, as though they were sacred rituals to which God summoned him at appointed times.

When I was a midshipman at Annapolis, he wrote to me every month. Each letter contained bullet points handwritten at work on his yellow legal pad. He signed each, "Much love, Dad," and enclosed a $50 check. Those prescriptive letters were his way of training his son from afar in the way I should go (Prov 22:6).

While a busy CEO, he visited his widowed mother every Friday. Each time, he absorbed without response the poison darts she'd habitually fire with her untamed tongue because, well, "Honor Thy Mother."

And, every day, Dad would step away from his many projects to pray. He'd pray for us. All of us, with intention. His prayer time was a crucial element of the life he constructed in which he did his best to do what faithful husbands, fathers, sons, and citizens do.

My parents had a fallout at our Methodist church when Dad was in his early forties. They never left the church, but they stopped participating in weekly worship for a generation. But Dad never stopped praying. Eventually, they built a place off the Tickfaw River that we named "the Camp." There were a dock and pier on the water and a long wooden rail that delineated the yard space from the pier space. Dad called that his "prayer rail." He'd grab a drink and sit quietly, gazing at the water beyond the prayer rail, hooting at the owls and passing ducks, smiling at the fish, gators, and beaver as they went about their work. He'd listen to the Word spoken in the splendorous symphony of life on the Tickfaw River. His heart and mind settled, he'd pray.

Friendship with God

What I am describing is friendship. It's why God created us - to be friends with God and each other. In each of the Way of Love practices -   Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, Rest - we encounter God in friendship. Prayer is just another name for a conversation with God. Our personal conversations with God - and that's the kind I'm focused on here -  are our most profound, most intimate moments of friendship.

Earlier, I said prayer is like breathing. We now can see the more profound sense in which that is true.

We Christians hold that living does not consist merely of breathing. Some of us breathe quite well, but amid angst, we cry out that we are not living. Others have died yet continue to live because, as we say mystically at funerals, "life has changed, not ended." The truth to which we gesture with this poetic language is that relationships with God and each other constitute life. When we are in relationships with God and each other, we live.

Prayer is like breathing because both are essential for living. God breathes us into existence and, with each breath, sustains us. Prayer is the breath-powered conversation that constitutes the substance of living, which is our relationships with God and each other.

Our Role in the Covenant of Grace

In reflecting on my father, I originally described his prayer life as dutiful. That word seemed apt in that he indeed saw prayer as a responsibility arising from faith. But our English word, 'duty,' doesn't capture the mutuality of a life shaped by prayer.

Consider marriage as an analogy. Conversation with my wife is undoubtedly an obligation arising from our marriage covenant. But it is much more than that. Conversation - which includes our actions - is the way we participate in each other's lives. Conversation is how I respond to her beauty, her truth, her justice-making, and her acts of blessing. Conversation is how we conform to the evolving shape of our covenantal life. Our sociality creates our shared history. In like manner, our prayer life is the most basic way we respond responsibly to the covenant of grace God affirms each moment with us.

Moreover, we humans are created in the image of God. As I noted in The Art of Blessing, God is love, and love is creative action in humble self-offering so that others might flourish. Our active intercessory prayer life is the most basic means by which we manifest this image of God's active love. Prayer is our primary way of corresponding to God's creative, sustaining work in the world.

When we recognize that God desires and seeks conversation with all persons, it becomes clear that the longing for God that our prayers embody gives flesh to the covenant of grace. Prayer links us not just to God but also to the least literate and most learned, the rich and the poor, and peoples of all ethnicities and faith traditions. In prayer, we participate in the mystical, invisible body of Christ that transcends the walls of our estrangement. In prayer, we are never alone.

Prayer as Performance Art

How foolish I was to think I ought and need not pray until I learned the art of prayer! Unlike breathing, the capacity to pray may not be innate, but few skills are as democratically distributed across humanity. That fact evaded me. My father got it.

When it cohered with his business purpose, my father was great at self-promotion. We sons ate the fruit of that gift. Dad was a competitor: no one could beat him at his business or jump shots or horseshoes. Given these traits, it's notable that Dad did not draw attention to his prayer prowess or participate in that ugly aspect of Southern male culture, prayer as performance.

In our culture, every peacock is taught three essentials that proclaim robust manhood: (1) how to pontificate on SEC sports, (2) how to boil crawfish, and (3) how to pray. Though he had a gift for prayer, Dad didn't play that game. He didn't co-opt the genre and make it about himself. My father didn't subvert prayer by reducing it to performance art, a tool of self-promotion. Before I was born, he must have intuited that prayer ceases to be prayer when we direct our words to human ears.

It took me a while to figure that out. I was intimidated by the poetic prayers of pastors and peacocks and led astray by bad theology. Sometimes I feared people would judge my prayers poorly. Sometimes I feared God would do the same. So I avoided praying the way some folks avoid dancing: I denied myself the blessing lest others discover I'm not a pro and think less of me.

The pastors and peacocks taught me through their example that prayers are performance art. Pastors prayed so often in beautifully crafted, formulaic structures that so perfectly captured the moment that I assumed their creations are the standard for personal devotions, too. Rich in the Elizabethan language and soaked in the psalms, their prayers were in a register I could never obtain.

The peacocks reinforced this sense. They prayed in a way that drew attention to their art rather than God. My inference was that prayer is like an invitation to a rap battle with Lin-Manuel Miranda. I knew I didn't belong in that game.

So I refused to play. I refused to pray.

Prayer as Meritorious Spirituality

Bad theology was more pernicious. Somehow Paul's reminder in Romans 8:38-39 "that nothing can separate us from God's love⁠" didn't penetrate my mind when I tried to pray. I affirmed that truth with my lips but behaved as though the opposite is true. I approached prayer as though my standing with God was at stake. I had to get it right, so I studied the fruits of both the monastics and the modern spirituality industry. I mastered the forms, methods, and structures of prayer. They undoubtedly were helpful, but their chief effect was to make me like a guy on his first date, self-consciously sweating each dance step lest he gets off-beat or gets things out of order. Awash in rules, afraid God would detect my bumbling moves and reject me, all that art left me speechless before God.

I didn't grasp that God had decided to accept me even before asking me to dance. And that my clumsy moves had nothing whatsoever to do with God's decision. Now I know that God laughs in joy when, in my clumsiness, I step on God's foot. Because what God wanted all along was to teach me the fellowship of the divine dance. I don't need to know any moves or methods. I only need to show up and follow.

Paul's reminder "that nothing can separate us from God's love⁠" eventually helped me recognize another unhelpful practice I picked up as I learned to pray. At times my burdens felt so heavy that I ratcheted up the volume and repeated my prayer incessantly. That was fine: Jesus and the apostles urge us to pray incessantly when our hearts tremble with angst. Yet sometimes, I offered promises in exchange for God's fulfillment of my requests. And sometimes, the volume and frequency were not mere metrics of my concern but ways of expressing resentment that God had not given me my due on my schedule. Or I'd say, "God, I just want to ask this little thing," as though by minimizing my request, I could manipulate God into a duty of conforming to my desires.

I think of those prayers now as misguided temper tantrums. For at such times, my conversation consisted of negotiating with God, as though the covenant of grace requires God to comply when my volume, frequency, and promises reach certain thresholds. But of course, Paul's point is that God is that non-negotiating presence who decided to be with us before and independently of our merit. When we start negotiating with God, we forget our conversation partner's identity. God already wills the good for us. We don't need to persuade God. As Jesus taught, our line is, "Thy will be done."

The Artful Artlessness of Prayer

That brief, unadorned phrase from the Lord's Prayer illustrates pretty well the necessary course corrections I learned from Soren Kierkegaard and Stanley Hauerwas.

Like me, Kierkegaard thought that prayer was talking at first but eventually learned that "Prayer is listening." Listening, of course, names the way the wise converse with friends. Listening is a critical skill in the Art of the Turn.

Like me, Hauerwas struggled with prayer at first but eventually learned to "pray the way I talk - plainly and straightforwardly…." Hauerwas also taught me that the "fundamental rule is never to think that my job is to protect either God or us from the truth."

That wisdom points to the art of prayer. Its art is in its artlessness. It begins with an attitude of listening, the posture of one who knows that we learn where we are only by checking our position relative to God's instruction. Its language is plain and straightforward, haiku-like in expressing its beauty solely through unadorned truth. It names and owns sin, aspires to repentance, reconciliation, and excellence, and communicates gratitude corresponding to grace. It's intimate conversation with the One who knows you at your worst and will never abandon you. It's courageous conversation that expects God to be God.

It's like my Dad at his prayer rail, hooting at the owls, laughing at the beavers, and faithfully telling God about the concerns of his heart. Day after day, fulfilling his part in the covenant of grace.