Not about me: prayer is the work of a lifetime

OUR NEIGHBORS were visiting a cathedral in Italy with their three-year-old son. He saw a woman kneeling in one of the pews and asked what she was doing. "She's praying," he was told. "She's asking God for things." A few minutes late,- his parents found him kneeling in one of the pews. In response to their query, he replied that he was asking God for--gelato!

There's something right about that prayer. After all, Jesus teaches us to pray for our daily bread, if not exactly for gelato. But it is the prayer of a three-year-old, a beginner in the school of prayer who is not yet ready even for kindergarten. I remember reading a list of the five elements of prayer: praise, thanksgiving, confession, petition (for self) and intercession (for others). It triggered a shocking recognition: the most important part of prayer is the most difficult. I feel reasonably at home with the last fore items on the list. But praise? It is the one item in the list not concerned with benefits for me or those I care about, Here we have that disinterested delight (to cite Evelyn Underhill) in the bare goodness of God (to cite Luther) that escapes the self's preoccupation with itself.

Praise presupposes, I believe, a prior kenotic gesture, an inner posture from which all five elements of prayer most properly emerge. It is the willing decentering of the self. Ironically enough, it is utterly fundamental to what is increasingly called centering prayer. For centering prayer is anything but positing the self as its own center; it is rather a movement from oneself toward God both at and as the center of one's being.

Three specific prayers might teach us this gesture. Let us begin with the prayer of Samuel in 1 Samue1 3. Putting together his responses to Eli and then to the Lord, we get our first prayer: "Here am I, for you called me. Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening." While this speech act is an expression of Samuel; freedom, there is more heteronomy than autonomy in it. He does not originate the conversation but is called, called forth, even called into being by a voice not his own. The meaning of the situation in which he finds himself is not determined by his horizons of expectation, which are simultaneously surprised and shattered. Nor is it just his situation that is changed; his very identity is changed as he becomes no longer merely Hannah's son or Eli's helper, but the one who stands coram deo, in God's presence.

This challenge to our autonomy has the form of authoritative asymmetry. In response to the voice, Samuel identifies himself as the servant (ehbed, bond-servant) of the Lord, anticipating the many New Testament epistles that begin with the author identifying himself as a slave (doulos) of God and of Jesus Christ, and the Pauline identification of the self-emptying (kenosis) of Christ as "taking the form of a slave" (Phil. 2:7). Thus "Here am I" signifies not merely presence but putting oneself at the disposal of another, an act confirmed and specified in Samuel's "Speak, for your servant is listening."

We can learn three things about prayer from Samuel. First, we learn that prayer is the task of a lifetime, so that even those who have been praying all their lives may not have gotten much farther than kindergarten. For Samuel's prayer is the presentation of himself to God as a listener--and that is easier said than done. It is an act that can scarcely be said to be performed more than to a certain degree. We know from merely human conversations how enormously difficult it is really to listen, to be fully present to our interlocutors. So we only kid ourselves, like the tyro who reports that he learned to play golf yesterday if we think we have finished learning how to listen to God as God deserves to be heard. The praying soul seeks to be fully present to God, but that is the always unfulfilled task of a lifetime.

Second, we learn why silence is such an important part of prayer. It is those who seem to know the most about prayer who emphasize this most strongly and now we can see why. We cannot listen very, well to the voice of God if we are chattering ourselves, or even if we merely keep ourselves surrounded by noise, almost as a barrier to protect us from hearing the voice of any other. As the 14th century mystic Johannes Tauler puts it, "And therefore you should observe silence! In that manner the Word can be uttered and heard within. For surely, if you choose to speak, God must fall silent. There is no better way of serving the Word than by silence and by listening." Prayer needs silence, not only external but also internal silence; for our minds and hearts can be, and usually are, very noisy places even when we emit no audible sound.

Finally, we learn why scripture and prayer are so integrally intertwined, why prayer can never be separated from some form of lectio divina. God speaks in and even as silence, to be sure, but prayer cannot grow in a purely apophatic soil, if for no other reason than that in such a context no God personal enough to speak is to be found. If we are engaged in prayer rather than yogic meditation, it is the God who speaks in scripture to whom we listen. The very call to which we may respond, "Here am I," can come as a mysterious voice in the night, but it typically comes through the words of scripture, either directly or indirectly in preaching, hymnody, liturgy and so forth. Before prayer becomes a fivefold speech act on our part, it is listening to the word of God as found in scripture.