From
Living Theology in the Metropolitan Chicago Synod
Evangelical Lutheran Church In America
Volume 2, Number 2
Easter 1997
Spirituality
Nurturing Your Spirituality
after You’ve Said “Amen”
I once knew a man who was taught to pray by folding
his hands, bowing his head, closing his eyes and talking to God just like talking
to a friend. For years this man tried his best.Yet when the “amen” came, he
felt like a failure. He just couldn’t pray that way. He felt something must
have been wrong because he couldn’t pray like he should.
This is
likely to happen to all of us at some point in our lives. Jesus said, “Ask, and
it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be
opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches
finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:7-8).
Yet so often we ask and ask, only to wonder if anyone is listening or if there
is something wrong with us.
How is
our spiritual life nurtured through prayer anyway? Where does prayer fit into
the spiritual life? Is it necessary to pray or to pray well to be spiritually
healthy? If I learn to pray better, will my life improve? In the brief space I
have here I can merely begin to address these important questions that many
people ask.
Let’s
first of all find the place of prayer in the spiritual life. In his The
Sermon on the Mount, St. Augustine
of Hippo suggested seven steps as a kind of outline for the Christian life. I
will comment here on the first three. While it may not seem natural or
comfortable, the first step, the direction toward healing and comfort in Christ
Jesus, is the step of surrender. This comes to us as a gift of the Holy Spirit.
In the water of our Baptism God gives us the Holy Spirit to walk each day with
us along this spiritual path. Due to our sin we would not willingly follow
Jesus nor walk this path of holiness without the Spirit’s aid. Martin Luther
picks up this theme in his catechetical explanations to the third article of
the Creed.
The
great gift of the Holy Spirit is this gift of surrender to God. Surrender is
another word for refocus. The Holy Spirit calls us to turn back toward our
God--to take time for our God. but to which god are we to surrender? The god of
laws? The god of anger? By no means! The God we worship is the God of love (see
Matthew 22:34-40). Yes, sometimes love can look tough. Still, the desire of our
Lord is much more gentle. It’s like the advertising image from years back, of a
young person on a hot, sunny day,
slowly leaning backwards and falling into the delicious coolness of a
swimming pool. This may be close to what our Lord has in mind; falling deeply
and passionately in love with the God who deeply and passionately loves us. It
is only our own sin which makes this falling in love so hard.
That sad
reality leads us to the second of St. Augustine’s steps. By the Spirit calling
us to turn our attention to our God, we must at the same time turn our
attention away from something else. Many times our attention is captured by
pleasures and pains which occupy our waking moments. Giving more time and
attention to Jesus means we have less time and attention for those pleasures
and pains. Oddly enough this usually results in sorrow. Sorrow is St.
Augustine’s second step. Giving up the pleasures and pains which keep us away
from our God causes sorrow. For example, many people enjoy the pleasure of
sleeping late one morning each week. Often that is Sunday morning. In order to
give more time and attention to God we may feel the need to worship God in
church. Sorrow comes when we give up that wonderful pleasure of sleeping in. No
one said that being a Christian was going to be easy.
Giving
up those pleasures and pains that would take time away from God make time for God. This brings us
to the third of St. Augustine’s steps: the step of prayer. Prayer takes time
and requires our attention. In order to pray to God we must give up those
pleasures and pains which become a barrier to God. The surrender of step one is
met again in step three.
Prayer
has both a public and a private side. Private prayer is the daily prayer we say
as we wake in the morning or just before our eyes close at night. It is the
prayer we say when we narrowly avoid an accident or when someone needs our help
and we can’t be with them. Public prayer is community prayer—the corporate prayer
of the church. We need both public and private prayer for a full and balanced
prayer life.
Prayer in general introduces us at a deeper and
deeper level to the God who has called us away from the pleasures and pains we
mentioned in step two. In coming to know the beauty and love of Jesus our
sorrow is vindicated. We learn that our sorrow was worth it. Learning to devote
more and more time to prayer, we begin to change. It is a change for the
better. Our world begins to expand as we learn that God loves not only
ourselves, but our whole community and our whole world. The more time and
humble attention we give our Lord, the more we are drawn out of our
self-centeredness and the more the Spirit can become a blessing through us for
the sake of others. This process may not make life easier, but it will make it
better.
The way
we move through these first three steps depends on who we are. I use the
ancient personality and spirituality assessment system called the Enneagram to
describe this. According to the Enneagram we all find our own personality in
one of three different centers. These centers describe the focus of our
attention. If the center of our
attention is to ask “Am I happy?” all we do, the way we learn and the way we
love will be geared to answer that question. If we are centered on, “What do
you think of me?” we will devote ourselves to that question. The third center
asks, “Does this make sense?” and leads us to constantly try to understand what
is going on around us.
If my
own happiness is my central concern in life, the surrender of St. Augustine’s first step will not be
attractive to me at first. Only when I understand the deeper happiness that
comes from walking daily with God will I willingly enter into surrender. Step
two, sorrow, becomes understood as giving up lesser pleasures in favor of
greater pleasures.
The
second center asks what others think of me. Augustine’s step one asks me in
this center to stop asking everyone except God this very important question.
Giving time and attention to God tells me what Jesus thinks of me. The sorrow
of step two increasingly becomes regret that we haven’t asked Jesus sooner.
More often, more consistently and more deeply Jesus tells us he loves us.
The last
center wants the world to make sense. Giving up human-made models of reality in
favor of God’s story is what surrender means in this center. Sorrow is most
deeply felt when we are half way in the change-over, knowing that everything
else is shallow yet we still don’t know
enough about God to understand completely why everything is the way it is.
Moving
back to St. Augustine’s step or prayer, we might ask how people in the first
center find strength in their prayer life. Many ways to pray may be used, but
the prayer of silence is especially appropriate for those centered on seeking
happiness. Silent prayer is very simple. Just find a quiet place, repeat a love
word to God softly and let it go. Then simply remain in silence, waiting for
Jesus to speak. The voice of our Lord will be just as silent: a word spoken
deeply in the heart.
Prayer
in the second center is a conversation with God deep in our own soul. There are
many ways to do this. One way is to close our eyes and imagine meeting Jesus
anywhere we want. We come close to Jesus in this scene. We sit down and wait
for Jesus to speak. This begins that deep inner conversation that helps people
in this center who want to know what others think of them.
Finally,
people in the third center need to focus on something outside of themselves. That’s
because third center people live too much in their heads. Closing our eyes
makes it very hard to quiet the active mind because the mind is no longer
distracted by the outside world. Such activities as praying through icons and
praying with music uses that external focus to quiet the mind so that we may
clearly hear the voice of our Lord talking back to us.
May God
bless each of us as we begin again to be nurtured, strengthened, and loved by
our god through prayer.
Tim Hubert
Pastor, St. Matthew, Itasca