Tuesday, September 10, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Seek not prayer, but God
Jesus departed to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God.
In these days of approaching autumn I’ve begun calming myself morning and evening, lying in bed, taking several deep breaths, thinking of Jesus praying, joining him if I can in spirit, turning my anxious thoughts over to our Father. The thoughts dissolve deep in the crystal blue lake of God’s love, as the breeze blows through the falling leaves.
The Lord’s Prayer invites me with its words, and I pray them. For thine is the kingdom and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.
I’m inspired by Thomas Merton and Finley’s thoughts in James Finley’s book Palace of Nowhere:
Adopt a simple purity of heart in which we go to prayer seeking not prayer, but God. (p 86)
What better way to live the days of September? Jesus is with me and I want to know that, no striving to make it happen. He prays and wants me to pray with him, and without struggling I want that too. But still, I try so hard to measure up to what I imagine Jesus wants of me.
Stop it!
But I don’t know how!
Anyone who has given any degree of serious effort to silent prayer knows by experience just how desolate the desert of our heart can become. Just to endure an hour without running away, just to omit doing something practical, just to be silent, can involve a more strenuous effort than any external task.
Merton writes about surrender in the desert.
The desert becomes a paradise when it is accepted as desert. The desert can never be anything but a desert if we are trying to escape it. But once we fully accept it in union with the passion of Christ, it becomes a paradise. This breakthrough into what you already have is only accomplished through the complete acceptance of the cross.
I can try harder and get nowhere, but I can sit on my hands and get nowhere (an inertia which has been called “quietism”). Finley gives me a way between:
The way to avoid either error is a simple purity of heart in which we go to prayer seeking not prayer but God.
Yeah, what they said! Both those guys get at the prayer thing very well, and in many different ways.
We pray not to recharge our batteries for the business of getting back to the concerns of daily life, but rather to be transformed by God so that the myths and fictions of our life might fall like broken shackles from our wrists.
We withdraw within not to retreat from life but to retreat from the constant evasion, the constant fearsome retreat from all that is real in the eyes of God. The desert where prayer flourishes is the desert of our own hearts barren of all the slogans that we have been led to believe to be our very identity and salvation.
Prayer is a death to every identity that does not come from God. (p 24)
Finley knows how much Jesus loves us, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, never any need to hide from Jesus.
It is in prayer that we discover our own deepest reality, from which we have strayed like runaway children becoming strangers to ourselves.
Jesus does not stay alone on the mountain. He comes back to us.
Everyone in the crowd sought to touch him because power came forth from him and healed them all.
(1 Corinthians 6, Psalm 149, John 15, Luke 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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