on prayer, ritual, and relationship

Prayer. Arguably the most important practice in Christianity. Arguably the most forsaken.

Prayer is how you become a Christian to begin with, right?

I remember the day I accepted Jesus into my heart, as a five year old, praying with my Sunday school teacher, Ms. Sanders. She asked us if we wanted to receive Jesus and I was so eager to please Jesus, so eager to please Ms. Sanders. I wanted them (Jesus and Ms. Sanders) to be happy with me and think that I was a good girl, and I raised my hand.
She said a prayer and I dutifully repeated the prayer, hands clasped below my chin, asking Jesus to forgive me from my sins and come into my heart and live there "forever."

I prayed a prayer with words too big for a five year old to comprehend, confessing the sins of a child, asking for “forgiveness” and accepting Jesus Christ as my “savior.” Even though I wasn’t quite sure what he was “saving” me from at five, I knew it had something to do with the vivid pictures of fire and charred bodies, gaping mouths, and silent screams that stared at me from the pages of the illustrated children’s Bible I had. I did not want to be burned, that’s for sure. And I didn’t want Jesus to come take my family away to heaven in a “rapture” and leave me here on earth all alone. So I said the words and I hoped that this would be my insurance against the burning place and the lonely place, and that was my first real experience of prayer.

I remember as a child confessing my sins regularly to Jesus through prayer and having a fear that if I forgot and fell asleep, I would never wake and my unforgiven sins would destine me for the burning place, so I tried very hard to make sure I prayed before bed, and because I am a story teller and a conversationalist, my prayers eventually became wandering conversations, long and meandering as I told God what I was thinking and questioning.

I would ask God for “miracles” through prayer (it was highly encouraged in my faith tradition to “ask and [ye shall] receive”), however, the “miracles” I asked for were of the mundane garden variety and almost always a sure thing:
“Lord, please let the sun shine tomorrow.”
“Lord, please don’t let my mama die on the way home from visiting Granny. Please don’t. I can’t be motherless.”
“Lord, please help me find my Tom Sawyer figurine’s fishing pole. I know it’s not that important, but it fell out and now I can’t find it. I would like your help, if you don’t mind.”

And, the Lord I prayed to answered my prayers (or didn’t act in disaccord with them at least), and I was very, very careful to protect the Jesus that I loved from the possibility of failure… so I didn’t ask for the big things or the hard things. Because what if he didn’t answer? Or what if he didn’t hear? Or what if all this praying was in vain? It would have destroyed my carefully constructed sense of God, and therefore I protected him from the possibility of failure by not asking.

I wanted a horse badly growing up. I loved horses and I loved to ride and although we didn’t have land or a barn, I wanted a horse. My mother told me to pray for a horse because she heard a story of a little girl who wanted a horse so badly and prayed for it every night for a year, and one day someone gave her a horse. I wished that little girl was me, but I never prayed for a horse, because what if God didn’t come through on it? Then where would I be? A girl without a horse and with a God who didn’t hear, or worse, just didn’t CARE.

As I grew older, the church I went to emphasized prayer, particularly in the “other tongues” variety. People prayed loudly, softly, silently, clearly, authoritatively, mumbling quiet nonsense words under their breath, thundering words in other languages with hard accents that no one understood but everyone appreciated.
And I did my best to keep up, and learn the words, and pray the right way.
And most of all, I used prayer to make sure that I would not be lonely or in hell.

I never lost my sense of conversation when I was praying, though, and I would find myself praying throughout the day – just having a conversation, basically, with an invisible person. I would pray for people on the road, I would pray for people I saw on the news, I would pray for the environment, and then I would talk to God about what was going on in my head, my heart, and my life. I would tell him the things I was facing, and in this way, my conversations with God began to be more like conversations with a friend.

As I grew from a child, I got a very clear sense of God’s words back to me. In retrospect, I supposed this was probably just the genius-to-near-genius brain of a child who had heard the words I said and had logically figured out the “correct” answer, so maybe God’s portions of the conversation were more my own voice and the voice of the people who were over me, than anything else.

The voice of God was strange to me during the years as I grew from pre-teen to teenager, sometimes condemning and critical, sometimes gently rebuking me, and sometimes the voice I heard wasn’t even a voice, but an intuition and a feeling. As I nurtured the intuition, it grew, and before long I began to see things about people that they didn’t see. I understood things about people from the first moment I met them, and when I became an adult, I voiced these things sometimes and people were surprised and taken aback and often teary-eyed, proclaiming me to have heard the voice of God about them, proclaiming me a “prophet” in some sense.

Looking back, I know that I wasn’t always hearing God’s voice…Sometimes, it was simply my intuition, my ability to know things about people, my connection to them. Sometimes it was just the records in my head of the God-things I received and stored away. The condemning voice, the hateful voice reminding me of my shortcomings, the voice that said I would never be good enough – none of those were God, those were just recordings of the world around me. But in a charismatic world where the voice of God is regularly “heard” and spoken, it seemed to me that God was saying these things to me and in that way, I grew to fear God. Not only his punishment and his wrath, but I developed a deep insecurity about pleasing him.
Above all, I didn’t want to disappoint God.

When my relationship with God became very personal, I became not a parrot of what I had heard, and the choice was mine. The dark voice I had heard so many times roared up in indignation and I silenced it, and for a very long time I didn’t hear anything. When I prayed, I did not listen for a reply. When I yelled at God, when I screamed in anger and hurt, I did not listen to what he said back because I could not hear it. I had turned down the volume of God’s voice because I was so afraid of what he would say.

When I silenced that voice and started thinking on my own two feet, I determined what I personally believed about God. I read and I searched and I listened, but instead of accepting half-baked theology, I measured what I heard against what I knew of God. What the Bible said about him, what Jesus said. I measured what I thought about God against the 23rd Psalm (The Lord is my SHEPHERD. He cares for me, he loves me, he protects me), against the Lord’s Prayer (he is my FATHER, he will give me what I need. He will not abandon me). And when I started seeking God, I found a very different God than I once knew. I found that instead of poking around, looking for God when it was convenient for me, or when he happened to smash on my windshield like a bird in flight,
I was actively chasing him, determined to catch him and demand my Jacobian blessing.

The conversations became two-sided again, over time. Now when I speak to God, I listen closely to his response, and I make sure that it is not a scratchy record pulled from my closet of canned “God Responses.”

Now when I pray, I am not fearful of his disappointment because I think he likes me. I think he gets a kick out of my responses to life. I think I surprise him, in the ways that God can be surprised, much in the same way that I am surprised by my own children when they say something that makes me smile and ponder and feel a swell of pride in my chest.

Prayer, so fundamental, so foundational to Christianity, has become less a ritual and more a relationship with me these days, and I’m GOOD with that. I think God is too. It surprises me to realize that a lot of my life has become prayer to me… a lot of my life has become an open, ongoing conversation with God.

"Ongoing conversation with God opens us towards others without force, resentment, or the expectation of reward, while being attentive and responsive to others carries us right back to God. At the final judgment many will be shocked to learn that every facet of their lives had become prayer."

— from The Little Way of Lent