NCNYUMC.ORG |Spiritual Discipine 2

It is not generally perceived that Jesus of Nazareth had, on occasion, an acid tongue. That is, he could cut and slash with His opponents in effective ways. That sharpness is on display in the opening of the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 6, where He illuminated the terrains of His own soul with His withering critique of those who pray in order to be seen. Vanity.

At any rate, after delivering the above critique, Jesus then noted that the very first thing to do in order to pray is to go to one's own closet. This intention means seclusion. To be by oneself. By itself, this is a very restless and uncomfortable experience for a lot of people. It is meant to be.

Unless there is discomfort at the outset, the arts of prayer are not brought to work the way they should. God is not approached and experienced on the cheap. There are no shortcuts. Authentic prayer is work, the hardest work possible.

One may remember the scene in one of the footnotes in the Gospels where Jesus literally sweat blood because of the intensities He brought to His prayer life. The hardest work possible.

The work Jesus sets forth to begin the arts of prayer in the Lord's Prayer consists of 1) praise and awe of and to the Creator (The Creating? Making a noun of a verb? A verb of a noun?) of all that is, a recognition of one's dependence and mortality in the face of Creation Itself; 2) the awareness that there is an awful lot of work to be done in this world in order to bring into life, and/or celebrate what already is, the Kingdom of God.

Jesus speaks of "Thy Kingdom come", using the present tense, the Now, instead of the past and/or the future. Thus Jesus has this uncomfortable way of shoving one's face into the work yet to be done, and/or the recognition of the work that has preceded one's own life, work upon which one can build further work.

He then moves to the issue of dependency, our total dependency on Creation for bread ( "ousia", in the Greek), a double-meaning word that contains not only literal bread for food, but also food of the Spirit that informs our souls with "happiness"(Mat. 5), for which we should be giving thanks. It is no surprise that "ousia"should show up in Holy Communion as well.

The next step Jesus offers in His prayer concerns our sins. The word sin derives from archery. To sin simply means "to miss the target."When the prayer reads, "Forgive us our sins", it is urging us to look at our relationships and their conditions.

The target being our relationship with God, and with God's people. Here, we look at old wounds, grudges, outright hatreds, jealousies, matters that keep us separated from people. When we speak of forgiveness for our sins by God, Jesus takes another forceful step in our faces by saying that our sins are forgiven as we forgive those who sin against us.

I like to call that second step the "as we" hook - you don't get forgiveness unless you for-give. It is in the act of for-giving that substances of grace begin to appear, changing what was in the beginning a stark and tasteless experience into gentleness and sensitivity, basic conditions of loving relationships.

Having said that much, Jesus closes His prelude to prayer (for "prelude"is what Jesus's prayer is about, prelude to the deeps of personal experience of the Presence of God) with the confidence in God's Presence in hearts properly attuned to the Presence that evil will not defeat us.

We need reminding all the time of the above; the Lord's Prayer, when properly used, stands at the center of Christian worship in word, picture and song, illuminating how fragile, desirable, and enduring it all is. As prelude to prayer.

Key II: Methods

When I use the word " routine", I don't mean boring or listless. As with all of life, and as I have noted earlier in this work, we are creatures of habit and routine. Were we not, we would not be able to live. Prayer is no exception. My view on this is that little by little, we accumulate the qualities of the inner strength and inner peace we need in this life by the quiet and faithful efforts of calling ourselves into focus so we may partake of the gifts of the grace of God, especially when they are most needed.

There are no shortcuts in this. A friend of mine once remarked that the choice and difference is between fast food or slow food, slow food being ever the more nutritious.

In a sense, prayer at this level - the everyday, routine prayer - is a continual putting of oneself in the way of good things. Thus, we don't and won't get blazing returns on most of our efforts at prayer. Those prayers usually amount to brief commentary within one's soul about one's gratitude to God for any number of matters that are important to us; many times, if not most, those prayers are wordless. Prayer becomes an attitude, as another friend puts it, which follows our spiritual feet, wherever they may go.

One cannot expect every experience of prayer to be exotic, revealing, thunderous or compelling. It is my experience that most of the time, most of my prayer experiences are low key, ordinary, in tune with the rest of my person. The point is that so is everything else that we do in life.

In its own way, this sense of routine is like tying the shoelaces in the morning. I don't give that process much thought; but not to do it, say, in the beginning of my day unhinges me for the day. I flop around like untied shoes, tripping over the laces.

But the prayers are not dulled by use. They are centered, as ever, on the teachings of Jesus as they apply to this broken and suffering world. I pray that in my commitment to God through Jesus of Nazareth, my perceptions and judgements will reflect Jesus'teachings in all that I do.

But not to say the words to myself, and to God, the words by which I try to live my life, is to forget the words. Lord knows, it's easy enough to forget, given all that goes on in this world. One is distracted so very easily in this life.

So I have to use words like forgiveness, and mercy, and yes, even compassion - although politically, that last word has acquired quite a bit of moral tarnish recently - words that need to be said, mentally or orally, and matched up against what I meet during my day's labors and other pursuits.

These prayers are generally marked by images from the Gospels, of the woman at the well, of Judas Iscariot, of Steven being stoned to death at the Lion's Gate in Jerusalem, the entire range of powerful experiences of Jesus'ministries that turn over and over in my mind (as do the rest of the Biblical images), and from time to time are fertilized by new insights gathered from latest biblical and archeological research - which delights me with new understandings even as I am sometimes devastated when a favorite image is shattered thereby.

So I pray to God on awakening, at breakfast with a grace, on opening the Bible and reading a daily section, on arriving at hospital to visit folks there, at lunch with a grace, in meetings with peers, at dinner in the evening with a grace, and finally, just before sleep. The just-before-sleep-prayer contains the names of all of the people I love and who love me and are intimate within my soul. On occasion, I find myself hauling the car to the side of the road and stopping for a few moments in a mostly unworded prayer about one or the other of such folks of my heart and soul.

As one can see, this is habitual prayer, routine prayer, but it always happens with a gloss, a depth of being that is comforting to me, strengthening to me, and keeps me faced with the imperatives of my ordination - "Take thou authority"- while going about my world.

I never look for answers to my prayers. This kind of prayer is a conscious sharing with the being we so casually call "God."It seeks nothing from God; I make no promises to God; I seek no bargains with God. It is a quiet, routine sharing with God of the many dimensions of the ministries that have befallen me by virtue of my commitment to God through Jesus Christ. No more, no less.

In seminary all those years ago, there was a professor whose name escapes me; maybe it was Dean Muelder, but I wouldn't swear to that. Walter had a rather tart tongue on occasion, and one day, he was dressing down one Norman Vincent Peale, he of the "Power Of Positive Thinking" infamy, who had graduated from there long, long ago.

His plaint about Peale was: "We know for whom the bell peals; it peals for Peale." After dropping that pearl, he then swung into another arena that he had thought muchly on - prayer. The way he put it was that if you are "speaking" to God, that is prayer. However, if God is speaking to you, then that's paranoia.

Routinely then, "speaking" to God is a low key exercise, a continual exercise if one is to reap the many harvests of the soul resident in the arts of such prayer. Not to be routine is to lose the edge of one's spirituality, which, in the end, is all we really have by way of resources when we encounter the world in all its thoughtlessness and brutality.

One needs no answers from God. It is more than enough to make the effort at prayer in a disciplined way, all through a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime; slowly to build a firm inner strength within oneself, and a trust in God that serves to see us through any number of circumstances.

There's an ancient story about prayer that seems fitting here that speaks a quiet truth about the matter that is undeniable. It seems that someone had died, and was admitted into the precincts of Heaven. There, St. Peter walked the person through the Pearly Gates into a room that had only two windows.

One window was already open, and through it came the harshest cacophony of sounds, screamings, the sounds of things breaking, explosions of all kinds. When the newly fledged angel asked Peter what all the noise was, Peter answered, "That's people who think they are praying."

He then closed that window and walked over to the other one, opening it. and through that window came the quiet sound of someone weeping. Our new angel asked Peter what that sound was, and he answered, "That's someone who's really praying."

And so with our prayers, in our own quiet ways, with tears and sobbing, with quiet joys and thanksgivings. The whole matter of prayer is dramatic un-drama. Low key; everyday; routine. With occasional accidental excursions into the awesome Presence; with occasional deliberate excursions into the awesome Presence.

There is a bewildering array of possibilities here in relationships, kaleidoscopes of love, if you will, that once opened, never ceases to fascinate. One's life is thus continually enriched with constant contacts with such people as the heart and soul meets or requires. In its own way, as another friend puts it, it is like tending a garden: careful planning, careful seeding and transplanting; slow feeding of the plants; careful and slow weeding of same; care with the usual bugs and other threats; letting the garden into the heart and soul until it becomes an intimate and basic part of one's daily life.

And then comes those times when the fruits are ripened, and harvest is on. Mrs. Halse and I had such an experience of harvest last year when we celebrated our 50 th wedding anniversary. About sixty people from over our lives showed up at the party; not everyone knew everyone else - for we had moved about quite a bit over the years.

But everyone there had heard of everyone there over the years. One person said the experience was like viewing a quilt, everyone connected. So rich was that harvest for me that when the time came to comment, I was speechless, which led to no end of ribbing that in itself was yet another expression of love. Some even said that the silence was welcome, after all those years of listening to the preacher.

Thus, a routine of prayer is established: every time prayer is experienced, the Lord's Prayer is slowly said as prelude, with emphasis on understanding the dimensions of the Lord's Prayer, what is being said in each section of that prayer.

That understanding illuminates the relationships that give us our meanings in life. By staying focused on those relationships, we ensure that they remain healthy.

Classically, at the end of these prayer efforts, we use the word, "Amen" to close them. A most abused word in the history of the Church, it is simply a statement of intent: it means "That's the way it's going to be. " No more, no less.

While routine, habitual prayer exercises form the greater bulk of one's lifelong efforts, and while we are mostly dependent on a step by step, slow accumulation of bits and pieces of grace thereby, there is a more profound experience of prayer, an experience of the ineffable Presence of God in life, available to the committed pray-er.

Many times, especially in a crisis, a more profound experience of prayer will happen to those who have had no instructions whatsoever in the arts of prayer. An accidental trigger, if you will. Like war, or an unexpected death, a firing from a job, a bankruptcy, a divorce, illness or death.

I've found over my years that this kind of prayer is more rare since my life, as with most others, is packed full of things to do, people to see, and places to go. So much so that from time to time, I begin to feel an emptiness in my spirit that routine and habitual prayer cannot fill.

When I sense that emptiness, or confusion of spirit surfacing in my mind, I turn to the more deliberate effort of prayer, of which the crisis experience of the Presence is an echo, but also which requires careful preparation. This means breaking out a period of time that will not be interrupted in a place that will not be invaded by anyone, or telephone, or anything.

So preparation is everything in this effort. I find myself cleaning up around my home (which is generally messy clean) to help myself get me in order for prayer. A shower, a shave, clean, comfortable clothes helping the ordering.

In this, I follow the order of Judaism in Jesus'time, where ritual bathing always preceded the times of prayer, or other rites. I clearly remember, as another example, seeing people at the Golden Dome Muslim Mosque in Jerusalem using the faucets placed outside the doors to wash their feet, hands and faces prior to entering the building. One cannot wear dirty faces, dirty hands, or even shoes in the Mosque.

As for the time involved, to me this sort of effort turns time on its head. Time even becomes suspended, with a minute resembling an hour, and an hour resembling a minute. The experience of this kind of prayer is thus timeless. As the reader will see a little later in this essay, the pray-er has no control over the time element. Time seems to be its own monitor.

With all the preparations done, I have found that darkness lit by a single candle is the most significant setting for this kind of prayer effort.

In my mind, I approach the experience of this deliberate searching-out-The-Presence-prayer in much the same mood as the priests in Herod's Temple in Jerusalem used to. Or were supposed to, being that they were corrupt handmaidens of the Roman Empire by then. There was only one time of the year when the Holy of Holies could be entered, the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, and only the chief priest could do that. I use this as metaphor, for the work of bringing oneself to focus on The Presence carries the same sense of awe to me as, in theory, did the Holy of Holies to the priests.

For me, atonement is not aimed at one day in the year. Rather, it is a daily need and experience, a continuous exercise of examining one's own soul and relationships with a sensitive and candid honesty...via the Lord's Prayer as prelude to the experience of prayer. Prelude. At-one-ment.

Anyway, with the candle lit, I settle in a chair that won't let me relax - a discomfort of sorts that makes me work at concentrating. I use the word "work" advisedly, because I am about to enter a trial of my soul.

I am in a total silence. The next thing that needs address and control within me is my mind. It is only in such an experience that one can properly begin the process of bringing oneself to focus. By "focus" I mean running the gamut of oneself in order to gain order.

The mind sparkles with all kinds of random thoughts, in all kinds of directions, anarchies loosed. The work is to bring it all into harness, and that takes time and effort. In addition, the body is busy with its usual itches, sexual and otherwise, cramps, heartbeats, gurgles from the digestive system, threatened sneezes.

One must be very patient, until gradually, both the body and the mind calms down. It is at this point of calm that I will work my way through the Lord's Prayer, taking care to stress the basic meanings of each section of that prayer. The Lord's Prayer is prelude to prayer.

All of the above comes under the heading of "The Wall." That is, all those things running around in the mind and body confuse and otherwise serve to block entrance into the further experience of prayer, and it is not until they are gone or calmed that one can proceed further. Patience is the only key in this. After a time, with no warning at all, The Wall is no longer there. It disappears, dissolves, before one is aware of the disappearance or dissolution. It is very quiet, even sneaky in that regard.

When that awareness happens, one also becomes intensely aware of being poised on the edge of a sense of an Abyss, a Deep. And as soon as that awareness happens, one "descends" into that Deep. It is not especially a scary matter, but is rather a mild surprise, along with something of a sense of uneasiness, especially for the novice.

As the descent happens, the mind mostly shuts down. Body ceases to exist. There is a quiet comfort in this in that worry and fear as such have no role.

And then, one finds oneself at the bottoms of the Deeps.

It is at these points, at the bottoms, that I am most un-conscious of my self, my body, my mind. It is not so much a sense of loss, or dis-orientation, but rather a strong and quiet sense of comfort, of warmth that happens.

The experience is wordless. And at its deepest points, I sometimes hear what I can only refer to as "whispers", a kind of Silent Voice (I am not alone in this; one experiment I tried with high school students in a seminar I was leading found about half of their number reporting hearing something on the order of "whispers", or "sizzles"), but I cannot make out any words. This is also a comfort and warmth in ways that I cannot describe in words. It is a kind of wordless wordlessness.

The experience of the Deep lasts as long as It wants. While there, I also sometimes offer up the names of those who love me and with whom I am intimate in my soul, by cupping my hands, "holding" up the names, and offering them to God while experiencing the deeps.

One is not at all aware of the passage of time; if anything, time feels suspended, even timeless.

Then abruptly, and without warning, the experience is over, and one is back in a darkened room with a candle. Internally, it is something of a shock, but then it quickly develops into a welcome shock. Another such shock is the discovery that an hour or two has passed in what felt like a minute or two.

I generally feel a deep sense of peace within my mind and soul at this point, sometimes coupled with a restlessness, and itch for action of some kind. These latter matter generally finds me worrying about some person or other as prelude to contact with same.

I also feel refreshed within myself, energized. It's like waking up after a good night's sleep.

There is a kind of rough, three-step model of the experience of prayer, ranging from immaturity to maturity; from novice to journeyman to master of the arts of prayer. However, the model is not as simple or clear as it looks.

For one thing, any progress in that model is built on what happens to the pilgrim. Illness, death, war, bankruptcy, divorce - the list is endless of things that can happen to pilgrims. Thus, the maturing process can only develop as these things happen. Everyone's timetable differs from everyone else's.

Further, the matter of being a master has some bends and twists in it that are not very evident on the surface. I have another friend, a clergyman, who in all honesty asked that I write this essay in order to lead him by the hand into the experience of The Presence. Apart from being a breathtaking request to my soul, there's a hitch in this procedure: that is, one cannot lead anyone by the hand to The Presence. This is because one's prayer life is so intensely singular and personal. One has to do it by oneself.

Rather, any so-called master of the arts of prayer willingly walks alongside the novice, companion in the pilgrimage if you will, comparing notes as they go, ready to honor the novice at any point for the effort and the discoveries. Such a limit seems to be built into the process. And not infrequently, it is the case that the novice, in reporting discoveries, will astonish the master with his or her findings.

The point being that any master of the arts of prayer is intensely aware that he is really but a novice. The novice may not think so, but the master knows so.

Typically, the novice in the arts of prayer takes the first step because of need, of discovery of a sense of emptiness within the soul, of a dissatisfaction with a lifestyle, or with the advent of some crisis or other.

We of the clergy have a tendency to try to frame these people within the routines of the church. "Go to church." Yet, it is not at all unusual for such a pilgrim to discover that those folks in the pews are also unaware of the deeps of prayer. Thus, such a strategy can easily backfire.

Rather, and the reasons for this essay, what I have sensed over the years is that there is no model available to teach a person to pray in a deliberate, maturing fashion.

I see the novice as an arrow to the heart of one who understands prayer. One must begin sharing what one knows, knowing at the same time that the pilgrim in question is in for a lot of confusion, stops and starts in the efforts at disciplining oneself, failures and frustrations, sufferings of various descriptions - indeed, such a pilgrim in search already has known a lot of those kinds of experience, and, lacking a framework, remains bewildered about what to with it all.

So the master offers a model, as I am trying to do here. A framework within which one places oneself, and begins the endless process of seeking The Presence. I say "endless" because there is no end to the journey until one dies. For me, that is a delight and gift that animates and illuminates my days, even as I am at the end years of my life.

The model is simple: listen carefully to a master/novice of the arts of prayer, and follow suit. At first, it will be awkward, a continuing word in my experiences of prayer. That sense of awkward can accompanied by embarrassment, a feeling that one is being "had." One sometimes wonders if one is a fool to try.

Such feelings are strengthened because so many other people don't have the foggiest idea about the matter. Oh - they run to sanctuaries when a crisis happens, as in the case of the September 11 catastrophe in New York City in 2001. But the numbers dwindle quite shortly after such a crisis, as indeed they did in New York City and elsewhere.

The only answer to such feelings of awkward and embarrass is to continue to try to pray, along the lines laid out above, of consciously building a routine of prayer within one's everyday life that eventually will become habit, a habit of reaching out to The Presence, a habit of structuring one's day, a habit of awareness of the nearness and accessibility of The Presence.

Very slowly, the results of the effort, the fruits, if you will, begin to make themselves known. Among such fruits is a slowly developing sense of comfort of the spirit. One is at peace within the self. It is evident internally, and evident to observers at the same time.

Elsewhere, I call this experience an "aura." The aura is the inevitable outcome of the commitment and practice to and of a disciplined prayer life. One knows it when it happens; one cannot not know it, for one literally " glows" with inner peace, and inner strength. Even casual passersby pick up on it right away.

The fact of aura thus is a milestone in the process from novice to master. It is not available to those who are impatient, or looking for shortcuts, or trying to force the issue.

Lengths of time of such effort are necessary before the novice slowly becomes aware that he or she is very comfortable with the discipline and the ever present aura. But everyone's timetable differs from everyone else's, so there is no master plot from which to draw. There are no comparisons to be made. Each realization is singular to the person involved.

Eventually, the novice begins to realize deeper fruits from the efforts of discipline and prayer, so much so that he or she knows a sense of confidence that seems to come out of nowhere about the whole process.

When that confidence happens, the novice thus becomes a journeyman. The nice part about this experience is that one can look back to one's beginning efforts and see how far one has come. But, alas, it is almost impossible to explain this to a novice; indeed it is totally impossible to explain this to anyone who is not involved in the arts of prayer.

Still, there is a sense of satisfaction in knowing one has taken a large step toward mastery. Also at this point of development, there arise questions and understandings about Jesus'prayer life.

There is no doubt that He was a master of the arts of prayer, and took enormous comfort and peace from His experiences of prayer. Sadly, the records of the Gospels contain nothing of His inner thoughts and experiences of prayer to God.

In a way, this is depressing, but in another way, it simply confirms that prayer, once again, is singular. What Jesus is doing, as far as I can see, is encouraging all of us to get involved in the process up to the hilt, confident that when we do, we will understand Him the better, and will know The Presence for ourselves as did He.

Out of that knowledge come the suggestions, hints, clues, directions for one's life; what one should be doing. Missionary work, local deacon's work, teaching, preaching, chaplaincies, social activisms of all stripes and descriptions - there's an endless list of possibilities here.

What is also encouraging at this point is the knowledge of the journeyman that there is more, much more to come in the pilgrimage.

The day will arrive in the life of the pilgrim when a realization that one's life is completely suffused with the ongoing effects of a disciplined prayer life happens. Everywhere one looks, one's perspectives, one's very way of seeing life is informed in every respect by prayer.

Those who come to such a realization know they have reached mastery. There's a light touch involved in all this. Years ago, I was a passenger on an airliner landing in a blinding rainstorm in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

There were strong gusts and crosswinds as well, making for a rocky approach to the landing area. The plane pitched and yawed one way and the other; the stewardesses were well strapped in their seats, and there was an uncommon silence in the passenger cabin.

The pilot made an impeccable approach, guiding the plane through all the uproar with the touch of a genius, eventually to settle very easily on the runway, without a bump. A perfect landing.

As I was debarking the plane, the pilot appeared in the doorway to his pilot's cabin, shrugging his way into his formal uniform coat. Deeply impressed by his skill, I stuck my hand out to shake his, saying that that was the most beautiful landing I had ever experienced. He actually blushed at the praise; the crew standing in the area broke into grins of agreement with my compliment, and then he said in that slow, Southern drawl that so many pilots use, "Shucks, even a blind dawg can find a bone sometimes."

We all broke into laughter at that; at the same time we were all brushing away tears.

To my mind, such an attitude is reserved for masters. I had no way of knowing exactly how many hours of flight time he had over the years, but it was more than obvious that they were many. They were years of practice, and he flew that plane I was on with a sense of confidence that can only come with that length of experience.

In other words, he and the airplane were one. He didn't even have to think about it any more. His whole person was engaged in the arts of flying that plane, and he made the flying maneuvers unconsciously. He just did them, without thought.

He was a master of his art. It is characteristic of those who rate as master that they don't show it off; they don't talk about it much, except with other masters. Another characteristic of such masters is that they are very modest.

So too with the arts of prayer. The day comes when one is un-conscious of making the habits of praying come to life. One just does it, without conscious decision making, exactly as one laces the shoes in the morning, and the consequences of such confidence just radiate from the pilgrim. Not only is the aura alive and glowing; so too is the confidence visible to anyone.

That's when one can understand that one has become a master of the arts of prayer. And as noted above, the more clear the realization that one has become a master, the more vivid is the understanding that one is really but a novice.

And one's greatest joy in life becomes that of helping others to gain that stature of master.

There's an old adage in this: the more I know, the more I know I don't know. That is the tipoff to one's novice-hood. One is always novice, even as one advances to mastery. "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."