Prayer...

Prayer...very deep and contemplative, very spiritual if we allow it be so, by removing the unreal us, so that the one who needs changing can be. Yet, very simple; so much so that it is almost inconceivable that something so simple could be so perplexing to figure out how to do "properly". Many times we are like actors on the stage of our lives, presenting something so "not" as if it very much "were". I am as guilty as the next, and perhaps we are all guilty at some point of this trespass. But like actors, we must also learn to be in character, and by that, I mean in our humanity, to let our true character exist, not to cover it over, which is a bit counter intuitive, for if we were actors, we would call it being out of character. An analogy:

The dramatic person could not tread the stage unless he concealed a real person; unless the real and unknown I existed, I would not even make mistakes about the imagined me. And in prayer this real I struggles to speak, for once, from its real being, and to address for once, not the other actors, but - what shall I call Him? The Author, for He invented us all? The Producer, for He controls all? Or the Audience, for He watches, and will judge, the performance?

The attempt is not to escape from space and time and from my creaturely situation as a subject facing objects. It is more modest: to re-awake the awareness of that situation. If that can be done, there is no need to go anywhere else. This situation itself, at the moment, a possible theophany. Here is the holy ground: the Bush is now burning.

The prayer preceding all my prayers is "May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real You that I speak to." Infinitely various are the levels from which we pray. Emotional intensity is in itself no proof of spiritual depth. If we pray in terror or happiness we pray earnestly; it only proves that terror and happiness are earnest emotions. Only God Himself can let down the bucket down to the depths in us. And on the other side, He must constantly work as the iconoclast. Every idea of Him we form, He must in mercy shatter. The most blessed eresult of prayer would be to rise thinking "But I never knew before, I never dreamed..." I suppose it was at such a moment that Thomas Aquinas said of all his own theology "It reminds me of straw."

Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person. Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and milk. In it God shows Himself to us. That He answers prayers is a corollary - not necessarily the most important one - from that revelation. What He does is learned from what He is. We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.