This the fourth of a series of blogs on the Christian life prayer and self-knowledge.
I
Prayer plays a vital role on the Christian journey. This is especially true as we come face to face with the demands of gospel integrity. However, in the end, prayer only identifies and clarifies God’s presence in our life. Life is where we encounter God. Life is the greatest grace. Prayer enlightens, enables and draws us into this true mystery and goal of our existence, to be one with God.One of the primary tasks of prayer is to enlighten us through the Word of God. This process slowly lets us see that our grasp of Jesus’ message in the Gospels is quite shallow. A few personal examples will help make this concrete. As a young teenager I thought it was an outrageous sacrilege for girls to play sports. Likewise, I believed that the African Americans were perfectly happy in their neighborhood. There was absolutely no understanding of the intensity of the overcrowding, the poor and decrepit housing stock, the underfunding of the segregated schools, the lack of medical services and a multitude of other expressions of racial injustice.
Faithfulness to prayer slowly expanded my awareness of my captivity to a culture that was intensely sexist and racist. That journey continues full speed into the present. This is one of numerous ways prayer enhances our self-knowledge by attacking our false consciousness.
II
Most often when people pray, they have a plan. They want God to respond to their strategy for happiness. But God also has a plan. God wants us to respond to that plan. Here is the conflict: the two plans, God’s and ours. This is a significant problem with prayer. Growth in self-knowledge is a major factor in resolving this apparent discord.For most people, a good part of their spiritual journey involves this transition from one’s personal plan for happiness to God’s plan for our happiness. We are clear with what we want and what we think we need. Most often it is dominated by the deceitful values of the false self. However, through the experience of life’s many trials, we gradually see the need to ease off of our agenda and let go. We gradually come to see and embrace the need to let God! Our growth in a more righteous self-knowledge is a major contributor to this positive experience.
In the Catechism of the Catholic Church there are several definitions of prayer. One from St. John Damascene states: Prayer is the raising of one’s mind and heart to God or the requesting of good things from God.”
Our “good things” often conflict with God’s “good things”. A significant part of the Christian life is learning to discern the difference and importance of our self-perceived “good things” and the “good things” of God. More often than not, our “good things” are rooted in the false values of our materialistic and consumer driven culture rather than the values of the gospel. As we begin to break loose of the restraints
of the false self, the light of gospel shines more brightly in our heart. This is always a shift towards a more genuine self-knowledge.
In the early stages of Christian growth, we are praying for the “good things” we feel are necessary for us. Authentic prayer demands that we change rather than God change. We grasp this very slowly, if at all. The irony often is that, in the very troubles and burdens that we want God to remove, we eventually will find the hidden blessing of life on the way to the “good things” of God’s Kingdom.
The growth in Christian maturity demands that we change our ideas of God and continue to deepen our self-knowledge. In maturing prayer, we move from asking God for our “good things”, the blessings that we think we need to bring peace and order into our own created kingdom. On the contrary, when we repent and seek Jesus’ Kingdom, our heart moves to seek what God desires. We gently become aware that God is the Creator and we are the creature. God’s better plan calls us to change, to grow in self-knowledge. That change is personal conversion, a gradual and life-long process transitioning from ourselves as the center to God as the center. The eyes of our heart slowly begin to see the beauty of God’s “good things”.
III
Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk who was one of the great spiritual teachers in the 20th Century North America, spoke eloquently about a deep personal prayer. Merton defined it this way: “Prayer then means yearning for the simple presence of God, for a personal understanding of God’s word, for knowledge of God’s will, and for the capacity to hear and obey God.”In Merton’s definition of prayer, God is at the center. We search for understanding and direction in our lives that need to open us to God. We find five helpful points for this goal in Merton’s definition of prayer:
1) All prayer must raise our awareness of God’s presence.
2) We need to encounter God’s Word. The most privileged way of this engagement is with the Bible but it also is in the experiences of life.
3) The encounter with God’s Word leads us to God’s will, a call out of selfishness to generosity toward God and others.
4) In this prayer, listening is the key.
5) New insight into the reality of God’s word and will guides our way of life.
