Prayer is one of those things I should know about as a Bible and Theology major. I mean, I could write a pretty snazzy essay on prayer. That’s something. I could quote some great saints, quote some great Psalms, dissect a few key Hebrew words and call it a day—all of which would be a rather splendid time. I would muse and be satisfied with my musing. No one would ever know that at the end of the day, when I do what I guess you would call praying, that I always feel as though I’ve somehow missed it. And there always comes a point when musing gets old; at this point wasting one more moment musing about prayer instead of doing prayer is going to make me spit.
So my natural response this past summer was to bookmark a bunch of books on Amazon.com about prayer so I can read other people’s musings on prayer. Yeah Sarah, real productive. Let the spitting begin.
And the spitting did begin. I got about half-way through a CS Lewis book before I got tired of thinking and talking and spitting about prayer. I wasn’t hungry for a stinking CS Lewis book, I was hungry to pray. I was filling the hunger for a verb with lots and lots of nouns. Being a Bible/Theo major has involved a lot of nouns, and I've wanted to trick myself into being satisfied with only nouns.
But prayer is not a matter of mechanical logic; it’s a matter of dynamic relationship. Prayer is like a river—a river is only a river when it is alive and moving. Otherwise, it is only stagnant water for the breeding of mosquitoes and growing of bacteria and collecting of muck. Prayer only works when we are alive and moving with God. Knowing this, I would sit--in my desk chair late into summer nights--starring into the corner of my room. Or lately I turn the lights off right before I go to sleep and lie flat on my back on the floor until I can manage to still myself and silence my mind so I can finally pray—so I can stop running in circles and find the River’s current and let it sweep me away. This is my latest venture on prayer; it is influenced by a retreat I’m preparing to help with involving six hours of silent reflection of the scriptures and silent prayer. It’s been better than anything else—but that is if I can manage to corral my thoughts and shove them in my closet for a half hour or so.
But in the midst of my quest, I was blindsided the other day by a youtube video depicting a homeless man doing prayer, not just musing about it. Yeah—no books, no tricks, no philosophy—just a homeless guy singing and a not-so-homeless guy playing a guitar.
The not-so-homeless man strums casually and begins a mid-tempo worship song. As he plays, the homeless guy approaches uninvited to join in with singing, but first he removes his hood and then his hat to let his weary dreadlocks spring out. He kneels down and buries his face in his hand for a moment and listens to the song the not-so-homeless man is singing about a God who gives second chances. After a verse or two, he joins in with his own improvisation about this God he seems to know too. His word choices were painfully humble to hear: “Jahovah, remember me…Lord have mercy, mercy, mercy.” When the not-so-homeless man ends the song and gives Danny, the homeless man, a hug, he asks him if he’s keeping it real, trying to make it.
“No,” Danny says, “I am makin’ it.”
Now, perhaps Danny sees something that I don’t. It seems to be quite cold judging by the thick winter jackets and scarves the folks in the video are wearing. His clothes are tattered and he is wandering around in the park in “a really bad neighborhood,” as someone behind the camera informs us. I wouldn’t doubt that he is living out of the plastic shopping bag he sets down beside himself.
But Danny has his God, and he knows that his God is his portion. Yes, he sees a lot of things that I don’t. He understands a bit of what Jesus experienced in the wilderness as He went out to learn what it means to be hungry for God. Danny has learned that we need God more than our next meal.
His Jamaican accent beats like quick finger-taps on a small hand drum—a dume-tek-teking echoing the tension of both contentment and longing. “Hallelujah in the highest praise…mercy, mercy, mercy.” He understands to great depth both the hope of salvation and the need of his current state. God’s mercy is the only way he gets through the day. It is this great tension of his that caught my eye. His voice was so satisfied—but longing for so much more.
In preparation for the retreat I’m doing, I also have to practice fasting. Now, I won’t even go into how bad I am at fasting. “Bad at it,” is a bit of an understatement. Before this, I’ve never even had a successful fast involving actual food—you know, the not-eating kind of fast. I would always fast other things that I would say were big parts of my life. I’ve done the no-meat-on-Fridays-during-lent thing, but I’ve never actually gone an extended period without food. This brings us to the other day when I was sitting in the library studying for my science test and I was freakin’ hungry. I had forgotten to pitch my PBnJ from Friday and it was sitting in my backpack on the table next to me. But I was fasting. No more whining or excuses or bargaining (“God, don’t you know you designed me to need food?” Oh, wait, He knows). I was amazed at how the smell of old peanut butter overwhelmed me. The faint aroma of peanut butter lingered in my olfactories and I couldn’t help but notice it. I was hungry. It is only when we are hungry for God that we are heightened to the aroma of His work lingering in our olfactories. Danny, too, had a heightened sense of what it means to need God.
I once read a book by Heidi Baker, a missionary who’s worked chiefly in the African nation of Mozambique with some of the poorest people in the world. She talks about how much she has learned from them, namely what it means to be desperate for God. Reading this makes me flush with shame for being an American who has everything. The funny thing is that many people here would think that I don’t have very much—or at least the guy who cut me off in his Mercedes today might think so. I drive a beat-up chevy that makes noises and has a hole in the top of the gas tank. But I have a closet full of clothes and a fridge full of food and my own bed to sleep in. Danny doesn’t have that, and the orphans in Mozambique are only fed sometimes because God miraculously multiplies the food. I eat because the people in my household have jobs and there is a grocery store down the street.
In light of this, I usually shrink back and lose all hope for myself in becoming poor in spirit like they are. I don’t have the discipline to live on nothing, and it’s nearly impossible when the means are right in front of me and I turn on the TV to hear the tele-evangelist who tells me that God will give me riches if I ask for riches.
But Heidi said something that struck about God and His riches. His riches, of course, are far deeper than any material wealth. Heidi redefined being poor in spirit for me. “Poor in spirit is a posturing of the heart rather than an economic position. From Harvard to Mozambique, God visits those who want Him.” It has nothing to do with how much or how little I have. It has to do with that peanut butter sandwich that sat next to me and yet I refused to eat it. Why? Well, I was supposed to be practicing fasting—but who’s to say anything if I don’t? If I was good at lying I could just lie about it and say that I did. (I’m actually a terrible liar, but that’s a different blog entry). But why? Because in light of spitting at CS Lewis’ book and myself and whatever else happened to be within three feet of me when I was in a bad mood this summer, I found that if I didn’t learn how to pray I was going to end up falling apart or worse.
In Mozambique, their liturgy is simple: “If God does not show up, we are dead,” Heidi says.
If you were to ask me if I know that I need God—well of course I know I need God. I grew up in a Pentecostal church for crying out loud; that’s church where you have to need God and show it. But there was a different kind of knowing taking place when old peanut butter caught my attention. I was learning how to be hungry. I was learning how to be hungry and let that hunger be an expression of my hunger for something more, and I was physically feeling it in a way I could not ignore. I was saying that the gnawing in my stomach and labored concentration was merely chicken-change compared to the gnawing in my spirit for the River of life. If only I could let that gnawing turn into a heart-cry that would transcend that moment in the library, and take over the rest of my life.
I’m learning that I can pray until kingdom come, but unless God meets me there, I will die. It’s not this complex philosophy I have to wrap my mind around, it’s not a special way I have to speak. It’s not about knowing the right way to do the lectio divina (or even knowing what lectio divina means). It is simply that, day by day like fresh manna from the sky, I need God to show up. It’s joining Danny and the orphans in Mozambique in saying “Jahovah, remember me.”
So I’ll save CS Lewis for another day. For now, I’m learning how to be hungry.
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