Moving from illusion to prayer…

I’m getting hungry. There is a desire growing inside me…

I am a closet-stubborn person. Those who know me best are asking, “you hide it?” I’ll define it like this. I like to figure things out on my own. The phrase “learning things the hard way” is kind of how I function. Too often, I water down a spiritual life to something I can schedule into an architecturally designed calendar.

Prayer is one of those pieces that I often reduce to meals, bedtime and rough days. The title for this post comes from The Only Necessary Thing. I’ve mentioned it in at least one post and I have a feeling it will be one of those that shows up quite often.

I mentioned that hunger, that desire that is growing inside me. This book is like reading a menu… Here’s what I mean:

(Moving from prayer as specifically timed and crafted conversations…)

The movement from Illusion to prayer is hard to make since it leads us from false certainties to true uncertainties, from an easy support system to a risky surrender, and from the many “safe” gods to the God whose love has no limits.

Anyone else feeling their mouth water? It’s like eating a medium rare steak. It’s a bit taboo and a little risky, but once you take that first bite, you can’t help but dive in never to return to well-done. Prayer is a life dependent on God. As I quoted before, it’s time for us to recognize that prayer is a choice to surrender to God because the necessity to pray, and to pray unceasingly, is not so much based on our desire for God as one God’s desire for us.

Will you surrender yourself to be the object of God’s desire? Will I? Or is your struggle like mine? Are your prayers such that they allow you to wrap your hands around a god that you can control? What is prayer to you?…

The Only Necessary Thing…

For those of you who have never read any of Henri Nouwen’s work, I highly, highly recommend it.

Here are a few lines to chew on from, The Only Necessary Thing.

 The word “prayer” stands for a radical interruption of the vicious chain of interlocking dependencies leading to violence and war and for an entering into a totally new dwelling place…

Our desire for God is the desire that should guide all other desires…

 I am deeply convinced that the necessity to pray, and to pray unceasingly, is not so much based on our desire for God as on God’s desire for us…

 As long as we continue to reduce prayer to occasional piety we keep running away from the mystery of  God’s jealous love, the love in which we are created, redeemed and made holy…

We complain that God does not make himself present to us for the few minutes we reserve for him, but what about the twenty-three and a half hours during which God may be knocking at our door and we answer, “I am busy.  I am sorry.”  Or when we do not answer at all because we do not even hear the knock at the door of our heart, of our mind, of our conscience, of our life.  So there is a situation in which we have no right to complain of the absence of God, because we are a great deal more absent than he ever is.   -Anthony Bloom (quoted in The Only Necessary Thing) 

Interesting words… they nail me to the wall.