Lost Prayer

Lost Power

It’s probably going to get me in trouble, posting this written prayer, but I’m running with the adage of “it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.” The composition is ca. 2010, so he’s passed through the gauntlet of adolescence and teen-hood and, if I reckon right, not in danger of losing his alpha currency since that’s pretty well established by now. I sure hope I don’t reckon wrong.

About the time I was able to read, I remember sitting on a hardwood floor, warmed by the sun through a west window in my oldest brother’s bedroom, reading and re-reading two shiny little hardcover books of prayers written by children. I tried hard to find those little books online to share with you but all I could muster were mostly prayers “for” children written by grownups. Not as good. For some reason, the prayers of other children had me entranced in a way adult prayer has rarely done since then.

Rote and Witness

The only prayers I can remember knowing by that time were ones we routinely used. For example, at mealtime: “God is Great, God is Good, Let Us Thank Him, For This Food.” It always bugged me that “good” and “food” don’t actually rhyme unless you force it by pronouncing one of them awkwardly. Then there was: “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, I Pray Thee Lord My Soul to Keep; If I Should Die Before I Wake, I Pray Thee Lord My Soul to Take.” A little dark, that one. The third one I recall learning early was Jesus’ model prayer - the Lord’s Prayer, or the Our Father. This one has remained a fixture of Christian devotion and liturgy for a couple thousand years. Impressive shelf life.

All of those prayers were rote devices that had become well-worn, almost meaning-shorn forms of habit that were just perfunctory murmurings attached to regular junctures of the day or weekly church. Maybe I became rapt by other children’s prayers because they were fresh, unscripted, sincere little pleadings and gratitudes in one-to-one personal chats with God. The fact they were published also allowed me to participate in what had once been a secret and sacred exchange, which felt like a scandalous honor. Publishing my love-struck son’s letter to God is in the same spirit of witness, which is how I experienced those published prayers of little children; disclosure as testimony to belief and faith for all the world to see. I share his prayer with you as an honor and witness.

Imperceptibly, I think my child-self understood those prayers as what I’ll call “real” prayer, the kind borne of an unattenuated honesty and vulnerability which tends to fade more with every approaching year of adulthood. It’s different than the kind of rote ritual prayer of collective practice (not to diminish the value of collective prayer). My son’s prayer was as real as a prayer gets, unwavering in its confidence that we can ask for our desires and expect God to hear and manifest them for (with?) us.

Lost Prayer

I struggled with this post; started it at the beginning of May and could not seem to get traction each time I came back to continue. The inspiration to speak and share about prayer would flare and then wither into a kind of vagary of too many abstract bits and reflexive, meaningless jargon, followed by a confused frustration and then giving up to abandon the effort after cycles of writing and deleting too many times. This — I realized — was a perfect metaphor of what happened to me with my personal prayer life.

About the time I drifted from the certainties of institutional religion, my prayer began to drift more and more, until I lost it pretty totally. I didn’t want to lose it, but every time I started, the bits and abstractions and jargon I had practiced for decades would crowd in and compete in the space like imposter divas and I would become aware that I was staging something as if God couldn’t tell it was a dishonest production. It wasn’t real prayer I was doing anymore, and maybe had not been for longer than I knew. It was evacuated of any power that a faithful prayer would have reason to claim. And maybe that was a key: a loss of faith (not entirely, but too much) meant a loss of real prayer for me, the kind that witnessed so purely to me through children so long ago. With the loss of prayer, I had also lost access to the power of the cosmos - the kind of power responsible for miracles and manifesting the desires of my heart.

Closing the Switch - Receiving the Power of God

Here is where I have to surrender so many good options for how to talk about my understanding of the relationship of prayer to power. One Substack can barely scratch the frozen outer layers of the tip of the iceberg. Left behind are such good explorations as what happens when we say “Amen” (clues in the Septuagint with the use of genoitos and its effect to actually create and manifest real stuff) or what invocation means, or why using the name of Christ expels demons. You get the idea.

Simply, I’ve come to understand prayer as an intermediate step of opening, of reception, of intentional vulnerability, that we take in order to access and add power to our lives. Stripped down of the whys and for whom, that’s what it is. It is - but is not only - approaching God and being in relationship to God. I disagree with the idea that prayer is merely when we get to talk to God, though this is partly true of course. It is more, much more, than that. It is where we also receive God and the breathtaking implications of what that means. It isn’t a one-way circuit at all. It is a closing of the switch, which opens the current between us and God and invites His power to flow through and beyond us, to where we intend things to happen or change - the things to which His power in concert with our faith manifests provision, miracles, and the desires of our hearts.

But it is not the prayer, the tool, that is the power - the “power of prayer” can’t mean that the prayer itself is the power. It is what we are bringing (remember faith?) and doing that is where the power potential really awaits, which when connected by prayer, the closing of the switch, makes all the difference. I will give you one of my favorite examples of prayer - which is not usually classed with scriptural prayer exposition:

A woman who had had a hemorrhage for twelve years, and had endured much at the hands of many physicians, and had spent all that she had and was not helped at all, but instead had become worse—after hearing about Jesus, she came up in the crowd behind Him and touched His cloak. For she had been saying to herself, “If I just touch His garments, I will get well.” And immediately the flow of her blood was dried up; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. And immediately Jesus, perceiving in Himself that power from Him had gone out, turned around in the crowd and said, “Who touched My garments?” And His disciples said to Him, “You see the crowd pressing in on You, and You say, ‘Who touched Me?’” And He looked around to see the woman who had done this. But the woman, fearing and trembling, aware of what had happened to her, came and fell down before Him and told Him the whole truth. And He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace and be cured of your disease.”
~ Mark 5:25-34, NASB (note: “well” in this passage is alternatively translated “saved.”)

“If I…I will” is a proposition of faith. She knew that her act of closing the switch by touching Him was her salvation and so, she acted on it. This is a prayer. It isn’t about repeating rhymes or forms, or many words as the scripture affirms. It is the knowing (faith), being connected to its source and the expectation of fulfillment which that embodies. “Power from Him had gone out” was the supernatural (nevertheless, natural) and inevitable consequence of her outreach and reception of Christ’s power to fulfill her need. And it was a wordless prayer. The inflow of His power stopped the outflow of her own (blood). It’s a stunning example of the power available when we find a way to pray (close the switch) even when it doesn’t begin with “Our Father” or end with “Amen.”

Do We Dare?

I have watched revered theologians and read lettered scholars contort themselves over how to explain the miracles of Jesus as “ancient inability to articulate what they were witnessing,” among other prevaricating deflections, or try to explain the apparent detachment of a God who doesn’t answer prayers the way we want or hope without sufficiently contemplating whether prayer has been miscarried over time, diluted with concoctions around its nature and purpose. Left in the dusty corners of a religion long-in-the-tooth, seemingly, is any real belief that we humans can “ask” in His name and move mountains with the tiniest seed of faith. It is either true or not true. But what if it is? Do we dare believe that we have access to such power, let alone use it? Or do we settle for the vicarious satisfaction of externalized fantasy proxies from Marvel, rather than believe the internal knowledge of “Christ in us,” the power of which six times sixty infinity stones could never overcome. Do we dare believe this?

By the time she encountered Jesus, the bleeding woman had been through hell. There was little dignity or reputation for her to worry about risking when she acted. What she believed — and what she did about it — was bold and gutsy. It took courage, not only to push through the throng but because what she did was hook herself up, without permission, to a jolt of power the scale of which she couldn’t have known she would survive - either because it worked or in case it didn’t. Maybe sheer desperation had taken her to a tipping point of “why not, what’ve I got to lose?” Are we at a point to dare ask that question and what it might demand from us?

Confession and Repentance

Come to think of it, maybe my relative comfort and not-desperate conditions eroded my recognition of the need for Christ’s power. I’ve been too sure of my own and fellow humans’ power for too long. I confess that my lost prayer was (not intentionally) a rejection and loss of Christ’s power in my life and for that, I repent. Somehow I forgot or never understood that prayer isn’t really a ritual or a form or a rubric for proving my righteousness or tracking God’s favor. It’s a step I take to open the door and declare my faith so the power of Christ — real power — can flow through. From now on, “If I…I will” and reach for the hem of His coat. I think the world needs more of us finding this kind of prayer, and God’s power — not man’s, now. Amen.