Friday in the Twenty-Fifth Week after Pentecost
Friends,
I’m trying my best at a cafe this afternoon to work rather than people-watch. I’m looking out over a partition to the street. Folks with dogs, folks trying to parallel park and giving up, folks going about life as best they can, with cares and concerns of their own.
There are three enormous panel windows like an underwater gallery at an aquarium, and there’s a word printed on each window.
‘coffee’ - tea’ - ‘goods’
The lettering is flipped from my view since I’m inside.
‘ƨdoog’
There’s something to me about personal prayer that’s like the reversal of perspective.
We look at the world and bring to God whatever we’re feeling and hoping for and what we believe is best, asking God’s plan to enfold us and our friends and loved ones, those recovering from a sickness or interviewing for a new position or traveling or beginning their first semester of school or having enough to cover rent and groceries.
This is real prayer, after all, which means prayer that’s honest, however selfish or childish or insubstantial what we pray sounds. There’s the passage I love from Peter’s first letter: “Cast all your cares on God, for he cares for you” (1 Pet 5:7).
There’s another angle to prayer that’s like sitting inside peering out at the world through the windows.
Herbert McCabe, a Dominican scholar, once wrote, “If you will be honest in prayer, acknowledging that you are not very altruistic, that you do worry about your own interests, if you will just try to be, and admit to being, as you are, the Holy Spirit, I promise you, will lead you a deeper understanding of who you are and what you really want. For prayer is not only a matter of asking, it turns out to be about learning as well, about growing up, about discovering yourself. When you lay your desires, your true desires, before God you begin to see them in better perspective. Quite often you find that they are not, after all, the things you really want most of all.”
It’s easy enough to think our prayers need to be loftier than they are, and what we discourage of as distractions in prayer are probably more often really our true desires pushing through what we think we ought to be praying for. We spend a lot of time praying for the things we think we ought to want that we overlook the things we actually want. Prayer holds up our desires to the light of God's love, trusting that God sees us more clearly than we see ourselves.
The reverse, then, or at least a view from another angle, is the acceptance of the unexpected, trusting what we may never have thought the answer may be, even what feels contrary or backwards. God hears every prayer from the heart, lovingly, even when what we desire and pray for is bogus, so we also offer ourselves knowing that God sees us for who we really are and from an vantage we can’t see. And God says, I hear you but go with me this way instead, for I know the road ahead. If God knows us better than we know ourselves, there’s still good reason to pray for what is on our hearts. And prayer teaches us to see beyond our perspective.
God is teaching us how to see and to trust him enough both to offer him our cares and to listen for his voice and perhaps to realize that what we’ve wanted all along more than anything is God himself, from whom every good gift comes.
Yours in Christ~
Fr. Peter
Herbert McCabe, God, Christ and Us (London: Continuum, 2003), pg. 8.
