Prayer - Lesson 5

Professor James Houston

Prayer

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Approaches to Prayer

Lesson Transcript

As we continue in our meditations on the sheer mystery of prayer, we should be aware that there are no techniques, nor is there efficiency in those techniques in the life of prayer. This was perhaps one of the sad events that happened to Thomas Merton, that people in a previous generation so admired, but he was as a hermit wanting to live a more meditative life. And so he was - I can only call it seduction - seduced to go to an international interreligious congress in Bangkok to compare the notes of how Buddhists and Tibetan monks do their meditation. And of course, it was during that conference that he himself was tragically electrocuted in his own bathroom with his shaving machine.

There is no such thing as efficiency in techniques of prayer. Prayer is not simply learning new styles and new skills for meditation. It's like saying that I'm looking for new techniques for friendship. How absurd. It's not how, as Dale Carnegie wanted to have a technique on how to win friends and influence people. That’s a technique. But of course, it's a salesman's technique; it's not friendship. And so one of the dangers that we all face in this technological world is that our prayer life can be intruded upon by the tech consciousness that we were talking about in a different course.

But what does help are two things. And one thing that helps is to have a prayer companion because dialoguing in prayer with another companion gives us two pairs of eyes instead of one [sic 00:02:22]. And we have emphasised in other courses that what is so wonderfully basic to the life of prayer is also the life of friendship. So it’s a friend that helps to understand my emotions. It's a friend who helps me to understand those emotional blockages that I may be having in my own prayer life. It's one person relating to another person where there's a bread supply. And that’s what prayer is about. It's a beggar in need that finds there's someone who can assist him in his need before God.

The other thing that I think is also very helpful for us when we take our own life of communion with God seriously and that’s to keep a prayer journal because then I'm reflecting in the vicissitudes from one day to the other how I'm feeling. And so the prayer journal can be a kind of inner mirror of the soul that enables us to express so honestly this is how I felt today and this how I got stuck in my prayer life today, or this is how I found emotional blockages when dealing with other people. So there's a wonderful intimacy that we can have when we’re really journaling with God, we might say, in our life of prayer. So these two things I myself have found very helpful, but I certainly have found perhaps more helpful than even my own journaling, just my friendship with another Christian as we seek to pray together.

So now what I want to focus upon then is the result of how these two different approaches open us up to understanding our own emotional prayer life. What are the barriers to prayer in terms of my emotion? Well, I think that perhaps one of the first that immediately is obvious is that you can't pray when you're angry. You can't pray when you have an unforgiving spirit. And often we don’t know the inner anger that we have until we get stuck over our prayer life. So a litmus test that helps us to say well, am I concealing an anger here? Is this really why I can't pray? Because you see, the one that we pray to we have to have an appropriate consciousness to his consciousness to be able to commune together. And he's the forgiving God. He has no resentments.

And so sometimes the barrier and the sterility of our prayer life is a resentful spirit. You begin to say is there someone that is blocking me from my prayer life? And the answer is yes. No, I haven't forgiven. I've kept for years and years and years that resentfulness about not being able to forgive that person. They stabbed me in the back. And the worst stab in the back is from a friend, from a fellow Christian. That really hurts. And many of us have had those kind of hurts. But then you say well, I have to forgive that person. I was naïve enough to call upon two people who have both stabbed me in the back very grievously to have lunch with me. And that was a big step to even speak to them. And so we had lunch together and I said to them, you know, by God's grace, He's given me the motive to forgive you. And they looked at me and said oh, what have we got to be forgiven of? In other words, when I say I forgive you, I'm really saying I judge you. And so it's impossible for us to forgive vocally because a vocal forgiveness is a sense of judgement and if they don’t feel they’ve done anything very wrong then they're not going to accept your forgiveness.

So we realise that Jesus was right when He said who can forgive sins but God. God is the righteous judge. And perhaps even when we got stabbed in the back, we did something offensive to them that we have been quite unconscious about. So we don’t realise that it takes two to make a quarrel. And so we’re always self-protective and we’re always a knight in shining armour and that’s a problem. So that we don’t really see the reality as it really is. So that’s one of the problems that we face, but then there are other obstacles that we may face about prayer.

And there's the obstacle of timidity. And timidity may be a fear of facing ourselves. It may be a fear of pain. It may be a fear of self-reflection. It may be a total refusal to look at our interior life at all. All of these things create barriers of great magnitude for our prayer life. Perhaps one of the most significant barriers to our prayer life is our spirit of woundedness. We've got wounds that have never healed. We come to Jesus like the woman with the issue of blood. We've tried many physicians to staunch our wounds, but they keep on bleeding. So sometimes it's a prayerful companionship that will gently help to take the bandages off and show us that we’re still wounded. The other person can see it and we don’t.

And so one of the things that’s very common for us therefore is to have prejudice about other people. And our prejudices are also blocking our relationship with God. Why is it I get so mad about so-and-so and they’ve done nothing except that I'm very prejudiced about them? So it may be distrust. I just can't trust that person, but I don't know why, but I don’t. And again, what they're doing is so often they're scabbing me and perhaps the reason why I'm prejudiced is because they're scabbing the wound and I don't know it.

I found very early on in teaching at Regent that in mentoring young men, there were some men who didn’t give me the time of day. They just passed me in the corridor with their heads high and never looking at me or greeting me. Was I offended? Yes, it's natural to be offended. But I learned to see that they never had a father figure and I was a father figure and that’s why they obviously were reacting against me, you see. But It's all unspoken. It's all unconscious. They're not aware of what they're doing themselves. So these are the depths of how intrinsically God has made us to be relational beings. Nothing is more profound than the mystery of being relational. Nothing can be more hurtful than being relational. That’s the dilemma that we face. And nothing can be more relational than prayer. So right at the heart of all our relational wounds are these obstacles that we have, all unspoken, about our difficulties that we may have had.

Of course, one of the difficulties that many of us have is that our prayer life is still being obstructed by the emotions of early childhood. We were never able to understand those emotions. We still don’t. But they're there and they're blocking us in our life of prayer. And so, often our prayer life is dictated by our need of healing and that’s why, for example, if I never had a good relationship with my father then the fatherhood of God, praying to my Father in Heaven, is a huge comfort. And at one level, it's a wonderful comfort. But in some ways, it can be a distorted prayer life because it's dictated by the wound. And so we have to recognise that the check for our woundedness is our focus too much on one person of the Trinity. We pray to the Father, through the Son, by the Holy Spirit and the bias to pray to one person is as if we’re dealing with a dysfunctional family. So that’s how we get a bit confused sometimes.

So there are some who are all for the Fatherhood of God, in denominations as well, some who are all for Jesus Christ and they focus all upon Him and there are others who focus only on the Holy Spirit, but the nature of the Holy Spirit is that He's the stay behind God. He hides himself. The purpose of the Holy Spirit is not to be prominent in our lives, but the purpose of the Holy Spirit is that He gives glory to the Father and the Son. And so Trinitarian prayer life is a check to the distortions of our emotional life. Something deeply to think about, because it's deep within us to have these distorting images or biases that even in the holy of holies of the sanctuary of prayer we can have these wrong images.

The same is, of course, true of our ministry. Our ministry can be distorted by exactly those emotions. I remember some years ago meeting an Anglican worker in Soweto in the horrible slums of Johannesburg. And he had been a bastard. His father had never acknowledged his existence. He was brought up by a single mother. He always felt rejected. And how did he react in compensatory behaviour? He was constantly putting himself in the line of fire. He was deliberately, in a sense, to hide the pain of rejection seeking to have more rejection socially. It was dangerous. So he was always really in grave danger of losing his life because of the way he acted. And of course, to do this in the name of Christ made it all the worse, all the more confusing. So these deep, negative emotions can be very distorting, both for our prayer life and for our ministry

One of the things that I've recently been sharing with a number of friends is what is the basic relational wound that you remember as a small child. And often that basic wound is conscious from about the age of six to about 12. That’s the common period when you're conscious of a relational wound. You may be unconscious of an earlier wound and it's very difficult to understand what you really felt as a baby, though some people even remember that. But it's very common to have an awareness of a relational wound.

Then secondly, the question that I asked my friends in our prayer group that meets every Wednesday morning at 7.00am - we've had it since 1973 - was to ask them last year, 'And what has been your compensatory emotion?' And our compensatory emotion is always acting as our own redeemer. And when we have a strong compensatory emotion, it gives us rewards in the society because that’s how we succeed. So often our great strengths or what we call our talents are really the result of the fruitage of compensatory behaviour.

I had this friend, who said when I was ten years old, I asked God why did You create me. And I said well, why was that such a profound wound that you had? Well, he said my parents were both from dysfunctional families and they became fundamentalist Christians. And they said well, I don't know how to father you. And the mother said and I don't know how to mother you because I didn’t have a father and she didn’t have a mother, so we'll do the best we can. We'll be honest with you. And in their simple honesty, if you believe in God, you're going to Heaven. If you don’t believe in God, you’re going to Hell. That’s very much the culture of bad religion in our fundamentalist Bible Belt culture in America. Millions believe that.

And so he said I was an inquisitive child. In my mind, I was always asking questions. And so I realised in my heart that if I was questioning God then was I believing in him. So I made two and two make four that if I'm questioning God then I don’t believe in Him and therefore I'm going to Hell. So being a smart, intelligent little boy, he then said, 'Well God, why did you ever bother to create me if I'm going to Hell?' That’s how he felt. His younger brother was smarter than he in some ways because he said well, if I'm going to Hell too because I don’t believe in God then don’t believe in God. So he went in a different direction: he became an atheist. And about five years ago when his younger brother was dying of cancer and had a prolonged dying process over four years, his older brother pleaded and begged with him, 'Oh, trust the Lord at the end of your life because who else do you have to trust when you enter eternity?' And his brother resolutely refused to ever speak about any reference to God. He died bitterly an atheist.

The tragedy of that story is that the younger sister, who had followed her brother then of course from teenage life onwards, turned her back on her elder brother, who did become a devout Christian and lost her brother for the rest of her life. And when we were at the funeral service last year, last August, and I was giving a homily at the service, she suddenly realised: but my brother wasn’t a fundamentalist Christian, he was an intelligent Christian, and all those years - more than 75 years - I've wasted because I didn’t realise who my brother really was. That’s the tragedy of what we're facing today.

And I think I can tell you another story that I heard from a lady who is still a psychotherapist working in a seminary down in the Bible Belt. She's smart as far as understanding the human emotions are concerned. She teaches seminary students about it. But she's been a very simple Christian within herself and still has believed that if you believe in God, you're going to Heaven and if you don’t believe in God, you’re going to Hell. And her son, her middle child, who's an efficient and careful and good physician, has two children, so they came to live a block away from the children. And last year, she cried to me over the phone what can I do? My son has told me that when our grandchildren reach the age of puberty in another year or two, they're never going to see you again. Why? We don’t want our children to be brought up in the poisonous atmosphere that they're going to Hell because they’ve been brought up by parents who don’t believe in God. That's the crisis of the Bible Belt culture today. Millions upon millions of people have been brought up with bad religion. It shows you how profound emotions can be in blocking us by a misunderstanding of who God is.

Well, one of the other flawed images that we have, in fact, it is being a flawed being, being a kind of mistake of life, is when Saul of Tarsus in 1 Corinthians 15 says my inner emotions about myself is I was born out of due time. In other words, the Apostle Paul is saying I'm of premature birth. I'm a gynaecological monstrosity, but by the grace of God I am what I am. In other words, God healed him of his own flawed image. I love that passage because I grew up feeling I was a flawed being. I felt that I was so insecure in the taunting that I'd received at school and being backward at school and when you're the dunce and when you are fat because of lack of exercise because I had a heart problem, then you're a monstrosity to your colleagues. I felt I was a monstrosity. I loved the words of the apostle when Dr Lloyd-Jones interprets this that Paul is talking about being a gynaecological monstrosity. It's he who uses that language.

So what was I? I was wallpaper. I was looking down on you in this room this morning and saying that’s all I am and I have to apologise for taking some of your oxygen supply. That image of myself haunted me till I was in my mid-40s. Can you imagine it? And so it's, to me, one of the greatest jokes in my whole life that God has given me a ministry of confrontation to be totally confrontational to what goes on in the culture around me. And it all happened because one day in the governing body of my college the principal, who was the economic advisor to the government - he was a member of the House of Lords; he was a highly esteemed national figure - he told the college that he wanted to divorce and he wanted to do it privately and therefore not be embarrassed publicly so he wanted to retire. Of course, he couldn’t care less about being principal of a college, that was nothing compared to what he had been in the society in the House of Lords.

And I found myself confronted by 24 of the 25 members of the governing body and they were all saying well, it's none of our business what happens in the senior common room. He's an estimable man. Publicly, posterity will never forgive us if we let him go because he's negotiating for a piece of property, actually where Tolkien's house was, across the lane from where I had my office, and that piece of property we needed for a new quadrangle and it had never changed hands since the 14th century. Posterity will never forgive us if we let him go in these negotiations. And I said why is that in a men's' college the girls have to leave at ten o'clock at night? Are you saying that we’re now going to have in this college - and I couldn’t believe myself saying this publicly - a double morality: one for the junior common room and one for the senior common room? If so, I will have to resign my fellowship. I won't go into the details of what followed, but that certainly broke the enchantment of being an Oxford don. And that's how God prepared me for Regent, to give up everything.

But you see, what God does is that we don’t realise how crippled we are by the emotions of the child and how profound is the struggle that we have then in all our distorting images about ourselves and about God in our life of prayer. It's huge. Of course, to know that, as we used to sing in a chorus, He loves me with unconditional love is a wonderful, wonderful thing. How we get out of this swamp of these obstacles, these emotional barriers, because they are a swamp, is often just simply saying Lord, help me. And so the most primitive prayer, which is the most basic prayer, is what we might call an ejaculatory prayer. It's an ejaculation. It's what we might call arrow prayers: prayers that pierce the heavens. Lord, help me. Lord, be with me. Lord, comfort me. Lord, strengthen me. Those are the most basic prayers that we can ever pray. And so I then discovered that the Psalms are full of these ejaculatory prayers. And you'll find that one arrow prayer is all you need for the rest of your life. So one of those arrow prayers that's been the first pulse beat of my prayer life has been create in my a clean heart, O Lord, and take not Thy Spirit from me. That prayer comprehends everything I need. You just breathe in and you breathe out that prayer for the rest of your life. Or again, you can meditate on so many others: have mercy upon me, O God, according to Thy tender mercies and Thy loving kindness. Or as a child on its mother's breast, so my thoughts towards You, O Lord.

So these arrow prayers are the prayers that really help to change our emotional life. Very simple. Very profound.

And of course, as we then grow in our prayer life, we remember the admonition of Paul writing to the Thessalonians in his first Epistle 5:16-18, always to rejoice, constantly to pray, to give thanks in all circumstances. Just even focusing on one of these things is going to change your life. You think of the life of Corrie ten Boom and her sister, who was much more mature in her faith than Corrie as a younger sister was. She got fed up with the transcendent spirit of her older sister, who was always giving thanks for everything and so she thought one day I’ll test her. Now, says Corrie, in the concentration camp, tell me how we can give God thanks for the bugs that we itch with incessantly so we can't sleep at night for the bugs that are biting us? Oh, her sister says thank God for the bugs because they're keeping the jail warders away from us and so we can have a small prayer meeting in this big-infested place because we’re protected by the bugs. That’s being transcendent in all things.

Well, one of the things that most of all… Of course, we've talked about resentment. We've talked about woundedness. We've talked about the unforgiving spirit. We've talked about these images of ourselves emotionally. But you know the greatest barrier to prayer is pride. Vanity of spirit, all the synonyms for pride, they're a huge barrier. Let me illustrate why it's such a huge barrier. My beloved sister, who is now dying in Scotland, she had the privilege of being honoured by the Queen with the Order of the British Empire for her services to the country and so we went to Buckingham Palace. And the first thing that the visitor as well as the recipient has is that you have to be there at least an hour beforehand because you are taken into separate rooms where you're groomed. You're groomed as a guest and you're groomed as a recipient. And of course, the grooming is that you're now going to be in the presence of the Queen or the King. In this case, it was, of course, the present Queen. Prayer is being groomed in the presence of the King of Kings. So of course, if you're being groomed for Her Majesty then there's dignity and reverence and respect, so you don’t turn your back on her. You walk backwards because you're in the presence of Her Majesty. You behave with the dignity that is appropriate for being in her presence.

But we in prayer are in the presence of the King of Kings and what does His presence require? Because He is the expression of unimaginable humility. Unimaginable humility. He was rich beyond all splendour, yet for love's sake became as poor, who exchanged the palaces of glory for a stable floor, a manger. Born of a woman out of wedlock. He lived with the cattle in that primitive shelter. That’s where he was born. And so we read that wonderful hymn of Philippians 2: for you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor that we through his poverty might be enriched.

When we are speaking as I was speaking in the other course of lectures on immanence and transcendence, we were using very bold language to speak to our culture, but the boldness with which we communicate the gospel is also with utmost humility. And likewise, it's only with a humble heart that we can ever approach God. And so this is the barrier beyond all barriers that so often keep us from experiencing a true life and a true friendship in prayer.