The Days Are Coming… Reimagining Prayer

“…stand up and raise your heads…be alert at all times…”   -  Luke 21:28b, 36a

Prayer has been a complicated and troubling mystery for my enlightenment-trained spirit.  Repeatedly I have embraced one or another description of prayer discovered in a theological tome or practitioner’s witness.  Inevitably I discard it in a matter of months.

More years than not I have defaulted to an affirmation that prayer is the means to get my thoughts and actions aligned with those of the Holy One.  My searching was evident again as I read the Luke 21 lection for this week. 

“There, that is prayer,” I say to myself as I read the lection injunctions to “stand up” and “raise your head” and “be alert.”  Attentiveness to what is happening, focus on how God may be in it, and readiness to the possibilities of dramatic change – a good prayer description.  Well, perhaps, at least for Advent and those times of life characterized by troubling wonderment about what is coming at us…what to expect…how to face the “uncertain.” 

Frederick Buechner has long put words together which have pushed me out of stuck places and too-limited biblical understandings.  He did it again, recently, on a reread of an old sermon resurrected in his new collection Secrets in the Dark.  Prayer, I believed he said, like other things “religious,” is disastrously confined to church.  We come to believe “…that the most God wants of us is to be religious the way we are religious in a church… (and when we do)…we have lost touch with the living depths of our faith.”  How true, especially when public prayer leaders use their linguistic skills to try to manipulate God to act in our self determined interests.

“Let us pray,” I say.  And as the people lower their heads, I “pray” to my self that my hearers will grasp that I mean by prayer facing a challenging world as Jesus instructed: Standing up, raising heads, being alert.  When done in confidence that the Advent answer to the question, “What is coming?” is always, “Nothing but good!”  then we have prayed.