Series: Spiritual Disciplines - Prayer

Series: Reflections on the Spiritual Disciplines; Disciplines of Engagement.

#3 Prayer

I was reminded recently of something that spoke deeply to me in a fiction book by one of my favorite authors, Lois McMaster Bujold. She writes most evocatively about the divine, through the medium of the fantasy genre. In the world of her books the gods take the form of five aspects of the divine: Father, Mother, Sister, and Brother, each associated with a season of the year, Winter, Summer, Spring, and Autumn, and the fifth aspect is the Bastard, the god of the unacknowledged, of unintended consequences and desperate causes. At any rate, one of her characters, a Divine of the Bastard's Order, names the five theological aims associated with a devout pilgrimage as "service, supplication, gratitude, divination, and atonement." I was struck acutely by these words, and I’ve found considerable insight in reflecting on her list, most particularly in the first purpose, "service."

The Roman Catholic Church divides prayer into four kinds: Adoration, Contrition, Petition, and Thanksgiving. The Episcopal Church offers these: Adoration, Praise, Thanksgiving, Penitence, Oblation, Intercession, and Petition. At least they include "service" as "oblation,” which is defined as "an offering of ourselves, our lives and labors, in union with Christ, for the purposes of God."

I've struggled to understand what prayer means to me, and why it is that I can never seem to translate my prayer into spoken words. To me, prayer is best described as a state (or condition, or attitude, or stance, or orientation) which involves my whole being in some integrated and fully evinced way. Unfortunately, I have not had much luck with forming my awareness of this "condition of prayer" into words, especially in the event of being asked to bless a meal, or open a meeting with prayer. I am always tongue-tied. I am constantly reminded that this verbal blockage is uncomfortable for me, and open to being misinterpreted by others.

I try to hold myself in harmony with this discomfort, but I often feel quite inadequate.

I suppose that, if I attempt to hold myself in harmony with the catechism as with my discomfort, my customary form of silent prayer would fit into the category of oblation. It still seems inadequate to me. I suppose there are really no words to describe my kind of prayer, except metaphorically. Martin Laird in his book Into the Silent Land quotes R. S. Thomas:

 

“But the silence in the mind

is when we live best, within

listening distance of the silence we call God….

It is a presence, then,

whose margins are our margins; that calls us out over

our own fathoms.”

 

At the risk of bludgeoning you with my enthusiasm for Bujold, I offer another instance of prayer by that same Divine of the Bastard’s Order, who was disconcerted by his own speaking of this prayer, as he experienced it as coming from some source beyond his conscious volition:

"...grant us in our direst need, the smallest gifts: the nail of the horseshoe, the pin of the axle, the feather at the pivot point, the pebble at the mountain's peak, the kiss in despair, the one right word. In darkness, understanding."   (From "Paladin of Souls” by Lois McMaster Bujold)

 

In darkness, understanding.  Amen.