I've Been Thinking

I went off to college intending to become a minister. Believing that someone with this ambition should be engaged in a regular practice of prayer, I would often go to the prayer chapel at my church and attempt to pray.

My particular struggle with prayer has been distraction. At that prayer chapel, log ago, I would begin my prayers earnestly, but within seconds I would follow some alluring thought miles and miles down the road. At one point, I believed that I couldn’t pray.

Now, during that time, I tried to read “New Seeds of Contemplation,” by Thomas Merton, himself a prolific writer on prayer and contemplation. Unable to digest it then, I came back to the book decades later, while taking a class on Merton in seminary.

In his book, Merton writes, “If you have never had any distractions you don’t know how to pray.”

I didn’t reach that sentence in college. If I had it might have helped.

The Zen Buddhists have a truly marvelous metaphor for the kind of distraction that many like me experience during prayer; they call it “monkey mind.” Like a monkey swinging from branch to branch, our mind flits from one thought to another.

While my particular problem with prayer arose from distraction, like many Christians, I was led to believe that my problem resulted from inadequate faith; or, my problem arose from not having the right faith. You see, my prayers did not get me the things for which I asked. I thought I “stood at the door and knocked,” but I didn’t seem to receive the blessings that others did.

Several events and people changed my attitude toward prayer over the years. The first of these was my encounter with Zen Buddhism.

Like many Americans, my encounter was largely intellectual at first, consisting of reading books, for the most part. Later, after a retreat to a Zen monastery, I focused on sitting meditation, not reading.

The practice of Zen meditation directly addressed the issue of distraction; count your breathing and if you lose count or count beyond ten, notice that you have become distracted, don’t judge yourself and simply come back to your breathing.

Zen meditation does not involve verbalizing, neither out loud nor to yourself. Unlike the type of Christian prayer most of us are taught – conversation with God or Christ – Zen meditation does not involve mental conversation, one less way to become distracted. Zen meditation was my first step on the road to silence, for me the principle of my prayer life.

The next event involved my change to the Episcopal Church, from the United Methodist Church, and a retreat to an Episcopal monastery. Before that retreat, I knew very little about the practice of monastic prayer. I was moved by the hours of prayer, that the activities of the day stopped as the monks gathered in the chapel for prayer. And, at each “hour” of prayer the monks would read the Psalms.

I was also moved by the intentionality of the hours of prayer. The monks observed the hours of prayer every day. This was their life. They were serious about this. Prayer did not come after all of the “other” responsibilities had been met. Prayer is a monk’s primary responsibility.

I would contend that it should be any Christians primary responsibility, as well.

An Episcopal priest taught me the practice of morning and evening prayer and the reading of the Psalms at each. My own praying of the Psalms has been deepened by studying them. Now, they are a staple of my prayer life, perhaps central. The Psalms allow me to pray everything – anger, sorrow, joy, comfort, thankfulness, lamentation and more. Clearly, the range of emotion in the Psalms tells me that the God of Jesus of Nazareth is capable of receiving me “wherever I’m at.” I don’t have “to dress up” for God.

Since my first monastic retreat, my prayer life has been defined or described by monastic prayer, which describes a Christian form of silence not unlike, and in fact very much like Zen meditation.

While monastic prayer includes the reading of the Psalms, it also includes Lectio Divina, or spiritual reading. In order to pray the scriptures, it has been helpful for me to study them and find new meaning beyond the fundamentalist/literalist readings that I have heard most of my life, and that are the loudest, demanding the most attention in the public square – perhaps another reason for the decline in church attendance.

My prayer life is informed by a discipline – sometimes daily – meant to conform me into the image of Christ, to “put on Christ.” Because as Steven McCurdy has written in his article, Prayer Doesn’t Work…The Way We Want It To, “Prayer is meant to change us, not God.”