"When you
pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the
synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them…But when you pray,
go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your father in secret.” I
imagine that most of us would rather curl up and die than to pray at a street
corner so as to be seen by others. Let alone, have a trumpet fanfare
accompaniment. Even so, the possibility of prayer being a performance,
contaminated by self-consciousness, is an ever-present danger in subtle and
pervasive ways. It can involve wanting to look good before others. Or it can
involve, more insidiously to my mind, wanting to look good to
ourselves - staving off neurotic guilt, being pleased with ourselves and our
prayer ‘performance’. Jesus is clear and unambiguous about this. No matter how
subtly, even subconsciously, it happens, when our prayer is in service of our
appearance to others or to ourselves, then that’s the reward we get - we look
good….and that’s it! There really is no such thing as reward when it comes to
prayer!
True prayer
is always open to and receptive to the gift
of transformation. It always leads us beyond the limits of our
self-consciousness and self-absorption. It’s always vulnerable---pushing us
from the solid and secure ground of the shore, where we feel safe. True prayer
doesn’t keep one eye on what it looks like or what is going on or what isn’t going on. The left hand doesn’t
know what the right hand is doing, after all. The attentiveness of true prayer
is always single-minded, one-pointed, undivided. Its horizon is always God
alone. “When you pray, go to your inner room, close the door (and I would add - don’t look behind the door, and don’t
look in the mirror) and pray to your Father in secret.” “In secret.” Hidden.
Beyond anything we can imagine or, much less, manipulate.
If this is
what true prayer is all about, it seems almost like an impossibility. Personally,
I know how intrinsically self-conscious I can be when it comes to prayer, to
leaving myself behind, to pushing off from the shore. Who is the self that is
doing the leaving, and who is the self that is being left behind? Sometimes I
feel like a dog chasing its tail. The difficulty, as I see it, is that we can’t
let go of self-consciousness by an act of the will. We can’t decide to be
undivided. No matter how hard we want to get out of the way, to hand ourselves
over to God, there always remains a ‘me’ trying to hand myself over, whom I just
can’t seem to get behind! I guess St. Paul really did hit the nail on the head
when he wrote “…the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to
pray as we ought, but the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for
words…”
Lent is a
special time for prayer, for consciously coming into the presence of God; for
letting go and making space for God to be God for us. A time for consenting,
again and again, to be displaced so that God’s Spirit can pray within us. A
time to be and to live undividedly towards God and so to release ourselves and
others from the countless reciprocities of blame and bitterness in all their
various shades. A time to grow in being increasingly content to be handed over,
again and again, with no self-protection to the sheer loving goodness of God
our Father.
Photographs by Brother Brian. Reflection by Father Damian.