Prayer as Work?
August 22nd 2007 09:52
One of the things about being out of work, or on holiday, is that your day becomes much less disciplined. All through the years when I worked I used to get up early and try and spend time praying and reading the Bible. Often I would write to God, or make notes about how things were going in my spiritual life. There was a sense of a patch of time early in the day when I gave God particular focus.
But since I left my job and have had only intermittent work, and since we’ve been on holiday, my time with God has become all out of kilter, to the point that I feel as though I’m losing touch with him. Other things - like opening up email first thing in the day and checking out blogs and such - have taken over. Exactly the sort of thing that I was writing about yesterday.
Plainly it’s time to get my life back into some order again, even if I am on holiday. Otherwise I have a real feeling of being very far away from God, and that ain’t good!
Apropos of this, I came across the following ‘prayer’ by Karl Rahner, from his book, Encounters in Silence. (It was quoted in another book that I’m reading: Prayer, the Transforming Friendship, by James Houston).
I should like to speak to you about my prayer, O Lord. And though it often seems to me that you pay little heed to what I try to say in my prayers, please listen to me now very carefully.
O Lord God, I don’t wonder that my prayers fall so short of you - even I myself often fail to pay the least attention to what I’m praying about. So often I
consider my prayer as just a job I have to do, a duty to be performed. I ‘get it out of the way’ and then relax, glad to have it behind me. When I pray, I’m at my duty, instead of being with you.
Yes, that’s my prayer. I admit it. And yet, my God, I find it hard to be so sorry for praying so poorly. How can a man hope to speak with you? You are so distant and so mysterious. When I pray, it’s as if my words have disappeared down some deep, dark well from which no echo ever comes back to reassure me that they have struck the ground of your heart.
Is my life really no more than a single short aspiration, and all my prayers just different formulations of it in human words? Is the eternal possession of you your eternal answer to it? Is your silence when I pray really a discourse filled with infinite promise, unimaginably more meaningful than any audible word you could speak to the limited understanding of my narrow heart - a word that would itself have become as small and poor as I am? I suppose that’s the way it is, Lord…If my life is supposed to be one single prayer, and my praying is to be part of this life carried on in your presence, then I must have the power to present my life, my very self to you.
What I like about this prayer is its honesty, its closeness to the way the Psalmists write in the Bible, and the sense that in spite of our failings and weakness, God still takes hold of what we offer and makes far more of it than we could imagine.
But since I left my job and have had only intermittent work, and since we’ve been on holiday, my time with God has become all out of kilter, to the point that I feel as though I’m losing touch with him. Other things - like opening up email first thing in the day and checking out blogs and such - have taken over. Exactly the sort of thing that I was writing about yesterday.
Plainly it’s time to get my life back into some order again, even if I am on holiday. Otherwise I have a real feeling of being very far away from God, and that ain’t good!
Apropos of this, I came across the following ‘prayer’ by Karl Rahner, from his book, Encounters in Silence. (It was quoted in another book that I’m reading: Prayer, the Transforming Friendship, by James Houston).
I should like to speak to you about my prayer, O Lord. And though it often seems to me that you pay little heed to what I try to say in my prayers, please listen to me now very carefully.
O Lord God, I don’t wonder that my prayers fall so short of you - even I myself often fail to pay the least attention to what I’m praying about. So often I
Karl Rahner - looking very serious!
Yes, that’s my prayer. I admit it. And yet, my God, I find it hard to be so sorry for praying so poorly. How can a man hope to speak with you? You are so distant and so mysterious. When I pray, it’s as if my words have disappeared down some deep, dark well from which no echo ever comes back to reassure me that they have struck the ground of your heart.
Is my life really no more than a single short aspiration, and all my prayers just different formulations of it in human words? Is the eternal possession of you your eternal answer to it? Is your silence when I pray really a discourse filled with infinite promise, unimaginably more meaningful than any audible word you could speak to the limited understanding of my narrow heart - a word that would itself have become as small and poor as I am? I suppose that’s the way it is, Lord…If my life is supposed to be one single prayer, and my praying is to be part of this life carried on in your presence, then I must have the power to present my life, my very self to you.
What I like about this prayer is its honesty, its closeness to the way the Psalmists write in the Bible, and the sense that in spite of our failings and weakness, God still takes hold of what we offer and makes far more of it than we could imagine.
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