Some years ago I embarked on a long retreat with a new spiritual director, and at our first session he asked me how and how often I pray. Seems like a reasonable question for a spiritual director to ask, but somehow it made me feel a bit like I do when the dentist asks me how often I floss my teeth. “Well, pretty well. Most days. I guess.” Was he testing me, I wondered? Had he noticed my spiritual plaque, and was trying to get me to own up to it? I stammered a bit describing my prayer, until finally he interrupted me and said: “let me tell you how to pray.”
“Listen,” he said. “Sit there and listen until you can hear God call you by name.” And so I did. Sometimes it took me quite a bit of sitting until I was actually able to listen. But by the time I could hear my name—Julia—in some mysterious way everything else that was on my heart to pray about had already been answered. Because I had just been called by name by the Lord of the universe. I was known. All my cares and concerns were known too.
In those moments of prayerful clarity, I also came to understand that experience was nothing special. Everyone else’s cares and concerns are known and loved. The God who would call me by name is calling you and everyone else by name too, and just waiting for each of us to listen to and know the particularity and depth of God’s love. When I reach that point of awareness in prayer, and am able to rest in it, I realize that everything I really want is already given. I don’t want to suffer and I don’t want anyone else to suffer either, but—to the extent that is part of the human condition and happens—I want to be assured that God is profoundly in the midst of it with me and with all of us. And prayer reminds me that I am.
Still, we are a people in immediate need. Like those disciples, we want bread, we want a fish or an egg, or their 21st century equivalents. I think that its significant that Jesus used these commonplace examples in the Gospel we heard today, because the chances and challenges of our everyday lives is where our authentic prayer begins. Of course we should also bear each others’ burdens and intercede for the whole world and this fragile earth, our island home, as our Prayer Book teaches us. But sometimes we liturgical Christians can put so much energy into the form of our prayer that we persuade ourselves that God only answers to Anglican collects. And then we might find ourselves wondering if our prayers aren’t answered because we didn’t pray them the right way. But the Gospel tells us otherwise. Much as we might want to get our prayer right and to understand exactly how prayer works, Jesus seems most concerned that we just do it. And persist in doing it—right or wrong, without necessarily knowing how it works.
Which causes me to wonder: what if prayer were not so much a vending machine for dispensing holy favors as a stamping machine for impressing God’s own image upon us? Speaking for myself, I know that my prayers do not change what God desires to give—from beginning to end the Bible assures us that God’s nature is to be gracious—but they do change what I desire to receive. Prayer changes me.
So what might this image of God, impressed upon us in prayer, look like? Our scripture and tradition have a pretty clear answer for that: it looks like Jesus himself. From whom we learn that God’s image is manifest in presence, in companionship, in teaching, in healing, in suffering, in joy, and in trust despite all odds. Trust that God really does show up vulnerable in the most unlikely places, trust that human suffering is not the final word, trust that a resurrection that occurred some 2000 years ago is not the exception but the rule that underlies God’s redemptive intent for all creation.
But don’t take my word for it, hear it for yourself. Listen to the one who longs to call you by name. The one to whom we pray is speaking to each of us even before we think to pray. Did you hear the words God already spoke, intended just for you? Ask, search, knock, persist.
