Prayer - Lesson 2

Professor James Houston

Prayer

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Centrality of Prayer

Lesson Transcript

It's ironic that it's the secular neuroscientists who've been showing to us in our generation that meditation is a very healthy thing for the development of the brain. A professor of medicine at Harvard University Dr Herbert Benson (of the Benson-Henry Institute), when he was doing research in the 1960s on issues of heart stress, he was the one that explored the fact that when we exercise an overdrive of the left hemisphere, the cognitive, more rational side of our consciousness and we have what we might call cognitive tyranny in our consciousness, then we suffer emotionally. The right hemisphere, which is more intuitive, that's more creative, that's more imaginal, gets squashed. And so he was arguing that exercise of meditation, giving more exercise to the right hemisphere - more use then of beta brainwaves - is, in fact, to reach a highest sense of consciousness. That, in fact, there's more ecstatic creativity that we can then have in the use of our minds with greater joy and more peace.

And so it's been suggested that for maximum brain activity, mediation is itself a very creative posture and that the meditative posture is the one that more effectively harnesses a balance between right and left hemispheric activity. So it's an irony of our generation that young people today are fanatics at exercising yoga and evangelicals are not exercising prayer. Isn't that an irony that they realise the benefit physically when we should be exercising relationally the significance of meditation?

So as we now enter into understanding more about the struggles that we have about prayer, we realise that the struggles we have about prayer are much more about the whole transformation to be made in the image and likeness of Christ than just simply praying. So what we're going to recognise in this lecture is that prayer is what’s comprehensive of being a Christian and that being, or becoming, a Christian - because being is not enough - we’re still in the process to the end of our life of becoming a Christian. It's the deadliness of our self-centredness. It's the flesh that struggles with the spirit. It's the heritage that we've not been redeemed from. All of those things have to be transformed. So if you feel impatient that you haven't grown enough in your prayer life, don’t be impatient, be gentle about it, because it's going to take you all your life to grow more and more to be Christ-like. And to be growing Christ-like is to pray. Link them together and don’t think of it simply as a spiritual exercise.

This is where I part company with Richard Foster, whose book was immensely popular on prayer as a spiritual discipline. Frankly, that’s a Quaker attitude; it's not an evangelical attitude. And so as you look back on that book and compare it with what hopefully we’ll guide you to see more deeply, it's far, far more than just simply saying that as Christopher Robin saying his prayers in the morning. But of course our pragmatism and our impatience and all the other things that make us modern men and women is what is distorting our attitudes to prayer.

As Augustine in his Confessions would tell us, the best disposition, he says on one occasion, for praying is feeling desolate, being forsaken, being stripped of everything. Prayer is our exposure of our vulnerability before God and our vulnerability before God is that we’re sinners. God be merciful to me, a sinner. We’ll talk about this Hesychastic posture of prayer that some of the Early Fathers exercise as well. So it's a trusting relationship and it's a relationship of far more emotional honesty than often we can ever expose. We need the spirit of the Lord to give us that transparency. Even Mark Twain said as a boy that you can't be dishonest and pray at the same time. It doesn’t work.

And so the need for personal honesty or transparency is absolutely vital. And to be honest before God is to start by saying I'm a miserable failure in my quiet time. In fact, the evangelical quiet time is a kind of closet of don’t intrude into my inner life because the door's closed. And so often the evangelical exercise of the quiet time has been precisely the place where we get so stuck that we’re not prepared to really disclose what's going on because perhaps not very much is going on. In the Philokalia, which is a great anthology, a rich anthology, of Eastern Orthodox prayer life, one of the 18th century men of prayer was Theophan the Recluse, who speaks of the prayerless person, the man or woman who is alone in self-centeredness, which is what he defines prayerlessness to be. He says such a self-centered person, 'is like a thin shaving of wood curling up around the void of his or her inner nothingness, cut off alike from the cosmos and the Creator of all things.' That’s a very powerful indictment of being prayerless, isn't it? You’ve probably seen these shavings that are sometimes used for making little carvings and what a vivid picture it is. But a self-centred person that is a thin shaving of wood curling around his inner nothingness, cut off from the cosmos and from the Creator of all things is a very powerful image of our prayerlessness.

Now what we want to look at are a series of traits that we struggle with about prayer. And the first of these is that prayer is so intangible. The sheer act of praying is such a struggle for us. The intangibility of prayer is a great difficulty for us. You see, we live with a practical realism and that so-called practical realism has been hyped by the technology that we live with today in the tech revolution. You can say I'm not a good tennis player, but at least I can see the ball. I can make a shot at it. I can practise my strokes. I'm not a good student, but I will work harder and I have the tangibility of the exams before me. But the tangibility about prayer can appear so elusive and so it indicates that the essential quality of prayer is it's relational and we cannot be relational enough. That’s why prayer seems to be so intangible.

It was one of the great safeguards of the Anglican Church, and still is for many people, that they have the Book of Common Prayer. And there they have the tangibility of using the collects and using the prayer book. It's something tangible. I can take my prayer life more seriously, you say, when I have the prayer book before me. Or even a friendship is a relational tangibility: I can see his face or her face; I can see when the one or the other disapproves or is upset or is happy and loving. There's a tangible face to look at. But how can I look at the face of God? He seems so inscrutable - as Moses was told, you won't see the face of God. And so this is one of the great struggles that we start with.

A second thing is prayer is difficult to sustain. What in the world does it mean to pray without ceasing? And so this is what happened to the Messalanians in the Middle East that they said well, we've boasted that we've prayed 10,000 times today. Well, 20,000 times today. There were some who boasted that with every breathing in and breathing out they were saying a short prayer. Well, is that what we do all day? Of course that’s misguided, but it's this craving again for prayer without ceasing to be tangible as well. And as we'll see, the prayer life of different Christians has varied enormously. I mean, Martin Luther tells us he spent three hours on his knees every morning. Well, most of us can't spend three hours every morning, especially when we've got arthritis. So you realise that this is one of the things that we’re always concerned about: how do we sustain our prayer life.

Well of course, we can't sustain a wacky prayer life, that’s for sure. And this is what we find, that in the confessions of Teresa of Avila - and I would recommend you very strongly to read her book The Interior Castle, which is a great, rich treasury of the life of prayer - she tells us that when she began as a teenager in the Carmelite Order, she was a very frisky 15/16 year old who had just lost her mother and so without her mother she was a prey to suitors because she was a pretty girl and a very lively spirit. And so her father as a widower said the only thing I can do with my daughter is to lock her up in a convent to avoid her getting pregnant. Well, as a frivolous teenager to have to spend so many hours in a cell praying every day was, of course, sheer torture.

And she realised that to enter into that life was totally fraudulent, so when she thought of her being a nun, she already was a fraud: a fraud externally because the other young women there were as frivolous as she was and so what they did in their conversations with each other and what they were supposed to be doing as nuns was already fraudulent behaviour. But, of course, she was also fraudulent with God. She had a serious enough awareness that God did exist and how was He going to be tolerating all this fraudulence of her life. So feeling so fraudulent about her prayer life, she actually began to have psychosomatic illnesses and for three years she was almost at death's door at one stage of that illness. And it was all because I can't pray. I don't know how to pray. And so she says the sadness that I sometimes felt on entering my prayer chapel was so great that it required all my courage to force myself inside.

Another person who we've already talked about in another course is the struggles that C.S. Lewis had as a young boy when he's alone in a boarding school 1,000 miles from home and he's been shipped there just the month after his mother died, whom he loved so much. And so his tears were wet on his pillow every night because he was so frustrated at being able to pray properly. His father had sent him to this cheap school in order to have the right accent. How do you have the right accent when you’re addressing God in prayer? How can you pray properly with the right English accent instead of an Irish accent? That drove him crazy. And so all these attempts of 'festooning' his prayer life, as he calls it, just made it a total barrier.

It was a tremendous relief when he was 16 to have a kindly tutor that fathered him like his father had never fathered him and just told him forget all that. There is no God. God doesn’t exist. And so it was a wonderful release to become an atheist. I don’t need to pray any longer! That was the warped attitude of his emotions and it took him a long time to come back to God. He was already middle-aged when he had that transference when he was 34 years old. It was a long time to wait. And so he tells us of the struggles of that pilgrimage that he had.

And so you join a worthy company of people like Teresa and people like C.S. Lewis when you feel that you're struggling in your prayer life.