WOODSTOVES & WANDERERS

WARMING ONE'S WINTRY SELF BEFORE
THE CLOSE & THAWING PRESENCE OF GOD

...which is, I'm discovering, all that prayer really is...

It is coming close to the woodstove on a cold morning, doing nothing but being there, and feeling the warmth of God cover the whole of who you are. This is, in part, how retired archbishop of South Africa and Nobel Peace Laureate, Desmond Tutu, finally understands prayer in his own life. Tutu has known some cold mornings in his long life. And judging by the looks of the world that has changed because of him, he's known some covering warmths, too.

Prayer is a daily practice. It is is a daily practice of being in the presence of one who loves us deeply, who loves us with a love that will not let us go. More than anything else, prayer is - first and perhaps most importantly - a matter of listening.

Prayer, at least the way we 21st century North Americans do it (and I'm including myself in here!), is generally unattractive to me. Prayer is not an enterprise in which we seek to bargain or negotiate with God. Prayer is not about manipulating the deity toward our program. Prayer is not about peddling our product to God's door when - and only when - we are ready (or are desperate enough) to do so. While I'm hopeful that such approaches to God are at best welcomed by God and at worst amusing to God, I am still uncertain that this is what I, in my darkest most silent nights, honestly experience prayer to be.

I want to learn a new way. Am I alone in my frustration?

I have never believed that prayer has to be something you are uttering, mumbling, or declaring all the time. Instead, prayer is, I think, a way of life. It's a way of being in relationship, in conversation, which sometimes requires good listening and other times requires honest proclamation and petition. But in every sense, prayer is a way of surrendering the illusion of control. It is the subtle but certain letting go that makes for really good prayer.

As mentioned above, prayer is a coming close to a warmth that is beyond us but that welcomes us, and bids us follow.

Perhaps the "new way" I am looking for is in fact a very old way, indeed. To be sure, the practices of the early church, as revealed to us through countless manuscripts and other ancient documents, were simple, really. I would say mine are, too.

Every morning I wake up, and before the rested bottoms of my rested feet hit the hardwood floor beneath me, I etch the sign of the cross in the air just before my chest, and I say, audible perhaps only to God, "I am baptized," which is my way of acknowledging in the quiet of my resting place that I have been born into a family not of my own choosing, which is what we call adoption, and I have been turned over to God. I am, in other words, free now, at least for this day, free to be myself, a child of God. In my adoption - in my being claimed by a love beyond telling and named by one whose own name sounds like the beating of healing's wings - I am liberated, delivered, exiled toward a promised place that is nothing like the cave I carve out for myself to hold all of my insecurities and doubt. The new place is well-lit and lovely.

This way of awakening to a new day marks the start of that day's praying. I have at that moment clothed myself with hope, peace, love, and joy, and I am ready to re-enter the world that is my work, and to conjoin myself again to the community that identifies me.

You see, the disciplines of prayer, for me, are much better understood in the context of community than in the context of individuality. This marks a tremendous shifting of the plates between where I am now as a young pastor/theologian and where I found myself as a child of faith in my youth. Then, it was all about my own pursuit of individual salvation (read: getting out of this wretched place via my one-way ticket to heaven). Now it is about my participation and co-laboring with God and God's people to help bring about the world that we can see but have not yet realized, that we can imagine but not yet feel. Prayer is my quiet hoping for the dawning of the day that brings such a place to a people such as us. Therein lies our desperate need for warmth.

Martin Marty, the Pope of the Protestants for decades and a Lutheran at that, says that he is something of a spiritual hitchhiker, riding in the backseats of the faith of others. I like that. I, too, am a wanderer. Just as in music there are Beethovens and Mozarts, and just as in art there are Vermeers and Michelangelos, so in the spiritual life there are profound people, mystics, visionaries, monastics, and mothers - they are the giants on whose shoulders I stand like Zaccheus wanting nothing more than to catch a glimpse of the one who was coming to bring life. I unashamedly mount the backs of my forebears, so that, even if only by piggyback, I might find myself in a new place, closer and closer to God.

Many of you may feel some tightness in your shoulders mainly due to the fact that I, with my faith in buckets hanging from my hands, have been standing on them. Many of you are the ones whose closeness to Christ has gotten me closer, too. Many of you are the friends who have picked up the corners of my mat and have carried me, have heaved me, have lowered (if not dropped!) me into that presence. And in my chill, I have known the thawing that is the grace of God.

The praying life demands that I know that about myself, about you, and about the God into whose healing presence I most often find warmth.

That is, after all, the only thing many of us really want. To be warm. To be touched. To be real.

And so I've learned not to try to presume a persona when I pray. I speak to God the way I am. I don't try to protect myself. I don't try to protect God. I figure, anything I say God has heard before and can take it. I figure the cost is greater for not having said it in the first place. I figure the Psalmist was a lot more forthright than I will ever be. I figure God welcomes authenticity, and that, scary as that may be, pretending to be someone I am not is scarier still.

Honesty. Authenticity. Reverence. Hope. Lament. Grief-Gone-Public. Thanksgiving.

This is the kind of prayer and the kind of praying I am looking for. This is the kind of home my wandering soul most needs. This is the woodstove that might invite me to come closer and to be covered by the dazzling glow that always is.