Patterns OF PRAYER
OUR MISSION Inspired by the love of Jesus, we are building the kingdom of heaven, where differing people live in community, serving God and each other.
DEAR PEOPLE OF GOD,
How do we learn to pray? Is there a right way and a wrong way? And how do we pay attention to the growth and transitions that take place in our prayer lives? Where can you learn this stuff?
Prayer is the language of love that we use when trying to be in a relationship with God. Whenever we interact with God, it is prayer. And since God made us, we come to realize that even our breath can be a kind of prayer. Once you begin to awaken to a life lived in relationship with God, almost everything becomes a form of prayer.
Prayer is as old as the human race. Over the centuries, many have written about how to pray and how to listen. Prayer is as varied and as individual as each human being. No two people pray alike. But how do we find the best way for us to pray? And how do we know when we need to change things up? What about boredom? What kinds of experiences should we expect?
Martin Laird, a renowned scholar of prayer, tells us that boredom is actually a gift from God when it comes to prayer. When you sit in silence, if you get bored, remember these words…
“A farmer leaves certain fields fallow with a view to future fertility. Boredom is God’s way of letting certain fields of the mind lie fallow, fields manured with boredom.”
The experience of boredom or of restlessness is typical of the American mind. The mind must spin and sputter; you will feel helpless and inadequate. I often find myself not liking my own thoughts. But in time, a deeper presence begins to be revealed. So have faith, and just keep trying to pray – try all kinds of trusted ways. Try reading scripture, sitting still, singing, painting, walking in nature, or just breathing. Try it all, and try again.
And open this beautiful quarterly, which is created as a gift to you. We hope that you will take some time this summer to try new kinds of prayer. Lie fallow in some boredom! And let the richness unfold.
May God bless you. In Christ’s Love,
“ICH BETE WEIDER, DU ERLAUCHTER”
by Rainer Maria Rilke
I am praying again, Awesome One. You hear me again, as words from the depths of me rush toward you in the wind. I’ve been scattered in pieces, torn by conflict, mocked by laughter, washed down in drink. In alleyways I sweep myself up out of garbage and broken glass. With my half-mouth I stammer you, who are eternal in your symmetry.
I lift to you my half-hands in wordless beseeching, that I may find again the eyes with which I once beheld you.
I am a house gutted by fire where only the guilty sometimes sleep before the punishment that devours them hounds them out in the open.
I am a city by the sea sinking into a toxic tide.
I am strange to myself, as though someone unknown had poisoned my mother as she carried me.
It’s here in all the pieces of my shame that now I find myself again.
I yearn to belong to something, to be contained in an all-embracing mind that sees me as a single thing. I yearn to be held in the great hands of your heart –oh let them take me now. Into them I place these fragments, my life, and you, God – spend them however you want.
POWDERED RICE VISUAL PRAYER | Woman in Southern India completes a visual prayer drawn in powered rice near her home/ From The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images
“THE ART AND FORM OF THE COLLECT”
by Pádraig Ó Tuama
While I was involved in charismatic Christianity, I was often confused. PRAY we were often told, with demand. Mostly I wandered graveyards and begged not to be hated by the God I prayed to. Eventually, mostly out of exhaustion, I started turning to the old forms I knew well. The rosary, the stations of the cross, some lectio divina. Those provided a container, and at least I could stop feeling [terrible] at the end of those mandatory times of devotion. I needed more containers, though, more forms. Ones that made space for language but also had the capacity to hold wild language. The collect presented itself.
The oldest written collect is in Latin, around one thousand years ago. But for a collect to be written implies it’s older than the paper it’s written on.
Deus cui omne cor pater et omnis voluntas loquitur: et quem nullum latet secretum: purifica per infusionem sancti spiritus cogitationes cordis nostril: ut te perfecte diligere et digne laudare mereamur, per dominum nostrum iesum christum filium tuum qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate eiusdem spiritus sancti deus, per omnia secula seculorum. Amen.
It’s a precursor to what is known as the Collect for Purity in contemporary liturgies in the worldwide Anglican Communion. An early English-language version of the same collect is found in The Cloud of Unknowing, a mystical text by an unknown scribe, probably written in the late 1300s.
God, unto whom alle hertes ben open, and unto who alle wille spekith, and unto whom no privé thing is hid: I beseche thee so for to clense the entent of myn heart with the unspekable gift of thi grace that I may parfiteliche love thee, and worthilich preise thee. Amen.
Before looking at the structure – and it’s a beautiful fivefold structure –it’s worthwhile thinking about the word “collect.” In liturgical circles it’s pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable – COLLect – rather
than the ordinary usage of going to collect a message, where the emphasis is on the second – collECT. There’s no magic about this. It’s tradition, or distinction, or dialect, or snobbery, or something else. Either way it’s collecting something: namely, your intention and desire, your reflection and attention, your gratitude, and your need for containment.
The collect is a form. It is a declaration in the first person, as well as a hope for a conversation with others who’ve found room in the structure of the form. It’s a shape. And the hope is that a shape can hold. There are old questions – in literature and theology – about whether one can be free within a prescribed form. But better to learn from than be restricted by those arguments.
THE COLLECT HAS FIVE FOLDS:
1. Name the one you’re praying to
2. Unfold the name of the one you’re praying to
3. Name one desire
4. Unfold the desire you’ve named
5. Finish with a bird of praise
1. God
2. unto whom alle hertes ben open, and unto who alle wille spekith, and unto whom no privé thing is hid:
3. I beseche thee so for to clense the entent of myn heart with the unspekable gift of thi grace
4. that I may parfiteliche love thee, and worthilich preise thee.
5. Amen.
Basically, it’s:
1. Address
2. Say more
3. Ask one thing
4. Say more
5. End
As a form, it’s elegant, asking for attention to the second and fourth folds. Why are you praying to the one you’re praying to? Who are they anyway?
Why are you asking for the single thing you’re asking for? What’s the heart of that desire?
I’ve taught this collect form in many groups: clergy, poets, young people, fiction writers, retreatants, agnostics, devout. For each, the form issues a call. To the devout, they may find themselves suddenly wishing to address a collect to a character like Pilate. “Am I praying to a despot?” they may ask, and it’s less about the despot and more about the direction. They may be uncomfortable addressing a prayer to anyone other than their God.
Another person, a fiction writer, say, may write a collect to their minor character in their story and suddenly find a long conversation emerging through an ancient form meant for prayer. Someone else might write a collect to someone who has died, or someone else might find themselves addressing God in the name of their favorite phenomenon in nature. “Glorious Sunrise,” someone said once, and someone objected, saying it wasn’t good enough. “Lord” is pretty weak, if you ask me, coming from a colonized country. Every utterance of language is a failure; nothing encompasses everything it can mean. The question is how our language – in poetry or prayer – can fail in new ways.
If a prayer is to have meaning for a public audience, then it needs to manage some complicated things with elegance. A collect can’t be too long. It needs some space. It needs to make life recognizable, and somehow conjugate a life into the pronouns it employs for its purpose. I always like choosing a text – from one gospel or another – as a conversation piece within a collect. In a way, a collect is shaped within the form of a dialogue. It’s a fragmentary response to a fragmentary excerpt. Isn’t that the truth though? Everything’s a bit of everything. There’s no pressure to make language comprehensive. To imaging that language can say everything might mean that it says nothing. It can speak from the particular. And that particular may have a wider audience than we think.
A COLLECT
by Pádraig Ó Tuama
Jesus at the table, which one are you? The one asking for the bread, or the one passing salt? The one listening, or laughing, or asking awkward questions? Every table is a possibility of encounter. Help us make it so, with questions and answers, with listening and change, with food and drink, with love and soup and invitation. Amen.
GIRL PRAYING | George Tooker
THE SWAN NO. 1 | Hilma af Klint
WHISTLING SWANS
by Mary Oliver
Do you bow your head when you pray or do you look up into that blue space?
Take your choice, prayers fly from all directions. And don’t worry about what language you use, God no doubt understands them all.
Even when the swans are flying north and making such a ruckus of noise, God is surely listening and understanding.
Rumi said, There is no proof of the soul. But isn’t the return of spring and how it springs up in our hearts a pretty good hint? Yes, I know, God’s silence never breaks, but is that really a problem?
There are thousands of voices, after all.
And furthermore, don’t you imagine (I just suggest it) that the swans know about as much as we do about the whole business?
So listen to them and watch them, singing as they fly. Take from it what you can.
SILENT PRAYER
by The Right Rev. Martin Shaw
“I am constantly looking for ways of improving my attention in silent prayer.” So wrote the Right Reverend Martin Shaw, acknowledging the debt he owes to the prayer below by Frank Happold. “This ‘entering’ prayer has become a constant friend,” he goes on. “It begins with the focus of the attention. Whether it is distractions, feelings, thoughts, imaginings –something is going to be there. I am not asking to have them surgically removed, but I am asking that I may be gently ‘drawn past’ them. If one perseveres with this prayer, even the darkness and emptiness are part of the waiting on God. This attentiveness in prayer, this waiting, is work.”
Serene Light shining in the ground of my being, draw me to yourself; draw me past the snares of the senses, out of the mazes of the mind. Free me from symbols, from words, that I may discover the signified, the Word Unspoken, in the darkness that veils the ground of my being.
Frank Happold – (1893–1971) an educational pioneer, tenured headmaster, author, and decorated British army officer.
Excerpt from HOLY THE FIRM
by Annie Dillard
“Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors.”
OCEAN POND, FL | Buck Pittman
LEARNING TO PRAY
(by James Martin) review by Ian Peoples
As I journaled my thoughts upon finishing Father James Martin, SJ’s new book, Learning to Pray, I was struck with a consoling realization. It dawned on me that I was reviewing the new book of a writer whose books played key roles in both my faith life and in my discernment to enter the Jesuits over six years ago. I simultaneously shook my head and chuckled as I thought, “God, you’re so good.” What a privilege to dive into the newest writings of someone who has been so influential in my prayer life and vocation. Accompanying this epiphany was a fresh reminder of the foundations of my prayer life, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Learning to Pray returns those more experienced in prayer back to their roots, and it provides a sure base for those at the first exploring a regular practice of prayer.
The first book I read by Father Martin was Becoming Who You Are: Insights on the True Self from Thomas Merton and Other Saints. The core insight of that book continues to form me: God desires for me to be completely myself. Yes, God calls me to conversion, but it’s a conversion to the original vision by which God created me.
The same is true for all of us, and I believe Learning to Pray is a helpful guide for us to become truly ourselves. That’s because prayer forms us. We go to God in prayer to learn who we are.
Father Martin acknowledges at the beginning of this extensive book that some people (even many people) can feel like prayer is reserved only for “holy people.”
The worthy goal of this book is to assure the reader that this isn’t true. Prayer is for all people, especially for those of us who feel we have a long way to go in approaching holiness (myself among them!).
Using his own extensive experience as priest, pray-er, and spiritual director, Father Martin simplifies the approach to prayer. He does this by referencing spiritual masters, both classic and contemporary, and by breaking down questions about prayer into digestible answers. What is prayer? What happens in prayer? How do I know I’m not just talking to myself? What do I do if nothing “happens” in prayer?
Father Martin addresses all these questions and more with simplicity, clarity, humor, and humility.
In the opening pages, Father Martin explains his book is written for people of all faiths and none. He is writing to explain what happens in the process of praying, rather than describing the fruits of prayer, upon which most books on prayer tend to focus.
The first question Father Martin poses is simple: why pray? That may sound trite to the believer, but prayer is a cornerstone of our life of faith, and we should have an answer. Father Martin responds that the reason is not so much about us. Rather, the answer is about God. We pray because God desires to be in a relationship with us. That is a wonderful reality worth praying over in itself.
I read this portion of the book just after I had a conversation with one of the young men I provide pastoral counsel to at a local prison, where I work as a chaplain. He said that he was surprised with a thought that popped into his head, seemingly at random: “What if I tried to live closer to God? What would that be like?” I shared with him my conviction that this thought was not random at all. Rather, it is a call from God! Whereas some people would write off such an experience as a fleeting thought, Father Martin remarks on these sorts of experiences in his book: “How else would God speak to us other than through our own consciousness?”
One of the most helpful aspects of Learning to Pray is all the lists Father Martin puts together as systematic answers to the questions of prayer. In this way, he makes what could be otherwise complex and hard-to-understand answers into organized, pragmatic steps. For example, Father Martin asserts that God indeed speaks to us through our own consciousness. But he adds an important clarification: this doesn’t mean everything that pops into our head is from God! To help us discern the difference between God’s voice and our own, Father Martin provides and expounds upon the following criteria, posed as questions:
(1) Is it from the evil spirit? (2) Does it make sense? (3) Does it lead to an increase in love and charity? (4) Does it fit with what I know about God? (5) Is it a distraction? (6) Is it wish fulfillment? (7) Is it important? I find his list-making to be a helpful, concrete method to approach the sometimes ethereal subject of prayer. Other lists in the book include: 10 reasons believers don’t pray, gifts to pray for in prayer, how to understand surprising emotions in prayer, why rote prayers are good, and many more.
One of my favorite parts of the book, besides the down-to-earth writing, is the explanation of what actually happens when a person prays. I’ve been in religious life
for the better part of six years, and this is the first time I’ve seen the phenomenon of prayer laid out so simply. I already know this will be the part of the book I return to most often for both personal help and to teach prayer to others.
Father Martin breaks down what happens in prayer into eight categories: emotions, insights, memories, desires, images, words, feelings, and mystical experiences. This is a lengthy section of the book, and it alone makes the book worth picking up. But one of the most consoling sections was the explanation of the role of memory in our prayer. That struck me so deeply because memories are central to my own prayer.
One of the memories I return to most often is my first eight-day silent retreat in 2013, two years before I entered the Society of Jesus. By that time, I had read Father Martin’s Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, as well as some other Jesuit stuff (including articles here on The Jesuit Post!). I began to feel drawn to a Jesuit vocation, and that prompted my parish priest to advise me to go on a retreat at the local Jesuit retreat house. During Mass on the fifth day, after the priest preached on how “with God, nothing is impossible,” I experienced an utter sense of clarity. I recognized God’s desire for me and my own deepest desire were the same thing: I wanted to be a Jesuit. God’s presence was so tangible in that moment that I began to cry right there in the middle of Mass.
Even though the clouds of doubt slowly moved back in after that moment, and sometimes still do, I return to that memory in prayer as often as needed to remind myself of God’s call to me. From this experience, I have to agree with Father Martin when he writes, “Memory is one of God’s greatest gifts, because it allows us to return to a past filled with grace.”
Reading Learning to Pray didn’t just help me return to the foundations of my own prayer life. It also taught me more about prayer. And perhaps most importantly, it made me want to pray even more. I bet it will have the same effect on you.
THE WEIGHT WE BEAR | Thom Buttner
PRAYER
By Thom Buttner
Prayer can be many things. For me...
Prayer is the Art I make like pouring myself into a vessel, allowing light to flow through my hands from my heart to another’s.
Prayer is the act of creating the best work I know as an offering to our creator.
WOMEN AT PRAYER | Wilhelm Liesl
from
HELP, THANKS, WOW:
THREE ESSENTIAL PRAYERS
by Anne Lamott
Prayer can be motion and stillness and energy – all at the same time. It begins with stopping in our tracks, or with our backs against the wall, or when we are going under the waves, or when we are just so sick and tired of being psychically sick and tired that we surrender, or at least we finally stop running away and at long last walk or lurch or crawl toward something. Or maybe, miraculously, we just release our grip slightly.
Prayer is talking to something or anything with which we seek union, even if we are bitter or insane or broken. (In fact, these are probably the best possible conditions under which to pray.) Prayer is taking a change that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen and do not have to get it together before we show up. The opposite may be true: We may not be able to get it together until after we show up in such miserable shape.
But in any case, we are making contact with something unseen, way bigger than we could ever imagine in our wildest dreams, even if we are the most brilliant, open-minded scientists and physicists of our generation. It is something we might dare to call divine intelligence or love energy (if there were no chance that anyone would ever find out about this.) Prayer is us – humans merely being, as e. e. cummings put it – reaching out to something having to do with the eternal, with vitality, intelligence, kindness, even when we are at our most utterly doomed and skeptical. God can handle honesty, and prayer begins an honest conversation.
Excerpt
MATTHEW 6:7-15
From The Message Bible *
7-13 The world is full of so-called prayer warriors who are prayer-ignorant. They’re full of formulas and programs and advice, peddling techniques for getting what you want from God. Don’t fall for that nonsense. This is your Father you are dealing with, and he knows better than you what you need. With a God like this loving you, you can pray very simply. Like this:
Our Father in heaven, Reveal who you are.
Set the world right;
Do what’s best –as above, so below.
Keep us alive with three square meals.
Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others.
Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil.
You’re in charge!
You can do anything you want!
You’re ablaze in beauty! Yes. Yes. Yes.
14-15 In prayer there is a connection between what God does and what you do. You can’t get forgiveness from God, for instance, without also forgiving others. If you refuse to do your part, you cut yourself off from God’s part.
* The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language is a paraphrase of the Bible translated from the original Greek and Hebrew scriptures into contemporary English written by Eugene Peterson an American Presbyterian minister, scholar, theologian, author, and poet. Thoroughly reviewed and approved by many biblical scholars, The Message combines the authority of God’s Word with the cadence and energy of conversational English.
I THANK YOU GOD
by e.e. cummings
i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes (i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay great happening illimitably earth) how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any – lifted from the no of all nothing – human merely being doubt unimaginable You? (now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
JOY
by Hafiz
I sometimes forget that I was created for Joy. My mind is too busy. My Heart is too heavy for me to remember that I have been called to dance the Sacred dance of life. I was created to smile
To Love
To be lifted up And to lift others up.
O’ Sacred One Untangle my feet from all that ensnares. Free my soul. That we might Dance and that our dancing might be contagious.
CATHEDRAL QUARTERLY EDITORIAL BOARD
Owene Courtney
Laura Jane Pittman
The Rev. Dr. Linda Privitera
ADVISOR
The Very Reverend Kate Moorehead Carroll
jaxcathedral.org
