Living a Life of Prayer

In To Pray and to Love, Roberta Bondi writes, "Prayer is shared life with God over an entire lifetime."  I love that!  And I can think of no better way to characterize or distill the central core of what prayer really is.  It is, just as Bondi puts it, a "shared life with God over an entire lifetime."  In this shared life, we get to know God—some of what He thinks, a little of what He feels—and we get to invite Him to be a part of our lives as individuals and as a community of faith.

As members of a fallen race, we share a woundedness that, all too often, leads us from God.  It is, unfortunately, a systemic sickness that inclines us not only to our own destruction but also to the destruction of those around us (even those we love the most).  Prayer is THE ground zero for the healing and reviving of God’s original Image in us, the quickening of those endowments of creating, feeling, thinking, dreaming, and worshipping that were given us at creation.  These endowments, and how they operate in our lives, affect who we are, which, in turn, affects what we do, and which, coming back around full circle, influences who we are.  They comprise the substance of what make us human; for to be a human being is to be one who has been created in the very Image of a creating, feeling, thinking, dreaming, and, yes, worshipping God.  Like many have believed throughout history, the monastics believe that the original implanting of God’s nature—His very ousia—can be awakened within us as we reacquaint ourselves with the Image of God within us and, with His help, embrace it once again as our own.  And It is ours to embrace, for God gave It to us, and, as the scriptures read, "the gifts and callings of God are irrevocable" (see Romans 11:29).

Thousands of years ago, God conveyed through the prophet Isaiah the following Words:  "My Thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My Ways" (see Isaiah 55:8).  While it is true that, in our fallen state, our ways of thinking and doing are not God’s Ways of Thinking and Doing, it is my belief that, through scripture and God’s invitation to pray through and meditate on it, God has provided THE means for us to make His Thoughts our thoughts and to make His Ways our ways.  For more than 1,600 years, the monastics have striven to live out this principle by making scripture and the praying of scripture central to their daily practice of living.
As I hope you will discover as you read some of the postings on this blog, I have a deep love for the Psalms.  For me, they are, along with "The Our Father" prayer, the starting point for individual and corporate prayer.  As millions, if not billions, have experienced down through the centuries, the Psalms embody almost completely the spectrum of the human condition.  In beginning to pray the Psalms, the early monastic communities rediscovered what the ancients had learned more than a millennia before, and that’s this:  that as they prayed the praises, laments, pleadings, confessions, and remembrances of the Psalms, the Holy Spirit began to bring the Words to life personally in their own particular situations.  God’s Word (read, “His Thoughts”) began to dominate their thoughts, and His Ways began to become their ways.

Through all of this, the monastics were not trying to earn their way to God.  No!  On the contrary, they simply had a singular, life-long passion to know this God Who loved them intimately…this God Who accepted them already just as they were.  And, it would seem, the more they learned of God, the more they wanted to know Him, and the more they wanted to know Him, the more God unveiled to them the many facets of His unlimited nature, character, and personality.  Prayer provided the means for them to feel their hunger for God, and, as they did, they allowed it to evolve into what I might call “a deep starvation.”  And it was a starvation that only God could satiate.

So I ask you, dear friend:  Do you feel your hunger for God?  If not (and even if you do!), I would like to urge you to venture forth, just as the monastics of the past 1,600 years have done, and allow yourself to get in touch with your own personal hunger for God.  For, as I have written already, nothing in life will compare with the surpassing pleasure of having God satisfy you completely, continuously, and forever.  I wish to close with one of my favorite verses from scripture.  It’s found in the Psalms, of all places, and it reads as follows:  “Thou wilt make known to me the Path of Life.  Thy Countenance is Fullness of Joy; at Thy Right Hand are pleasures forevermore” (see Psalm 16:11).  That, my friends, is the crux of life...and it turns on the axis of prayer and deep communion with Almighty God.

CU...

Dave