On Practicing Prayer

Prayer is hard, and it is rather easy not to do. But we are told to pray, and we should even on days when we feel like we are only speaking to ourselves in an empty room.

Leo Tolstoy described a man told to lift a handle up and down without further instructions. The man could have scoffed and refused, but instead he began lifting the handle up and down. Nothing happened. But he continued. Then he noticed water coming out the other end; it was a water pump with a spout. He continued. Then he saw that as the water gushed out of the spout it was spreading across the ground. He saw plants, flowers all around him. He was in a garden, and as the water continued to flow the garden flourished. Then he was moved on to another task: gathering fruit. As he moved from lower to higher tasks, he learned more about the structure of the establishment and participated in it.

Prayer is that way. We are told to do it; we could scoff and refuse. But instead we do it; following the pattern of the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, our vision is widened; we begin to see ourselves, others, and the world differently. We continue. This is not blind obedience because as we do it we learn what we could not learn without doing it. Sometimes initial obedience is a pathway to discovery and full participation.  

Dietrich Bonhoeffer explained that when we pray for particular people it is rather difficult to hate them as we pray for them. Prayer when it is a habit changes us even when we think our prayers are like trees falling in a forest without ears. But we are not merely to pray for anything; we are to pray the Lord’s Prayer and to shape our prayers accordingly. We are to appeal to God’s own character, and when we do we may very well find ourselves being shaped into the image of God. We become “perfect” like God by loving our enemies, and we learn to love them by first praying for them.

In this way, the practice of prayer is not merely about “prayer closets” and “small group bible studies.” Prayer is relational; it spills into all areas of who we are in relation to others. Their concerns become ours and ours become theirs. Prayer creates embodied community that reflects the righteousness of God. And as such, prayer must be inherently connected to public action. If we keep the water cupped at the spout, the garden will most certainly wither. The wounds of the world are far too deep and wide to be plugging the spout.