i don’t pray

I’m participating in a blog series hosted by Ally Spotts called Confessions of a 20-Something Christian, where 20-Somethings get honest about their lives, loves and regrets. My confession is: I don’t pray.

They are a quiet people, made of creaking pews and stained glass. They have a rhythm in their bones when they genuflect toward the altar and bow as the cross passes by. They speak softly of hope and grace and murmur verses known since youth. And I am among them in this beautiful, aged sanctuary, early each Sunday morning, becoming made of creaking pews and stained glass myself.

This was not always true.

I was but three when I announced to my mother while she pushed me in the shopping cart through Target that I wanted “to accept Jesus into my heart.” It was a handful of years more before my parents felt comfortable enough with this profession–which, I have been told, was made repeatedly with earnest–that I was baptized. My father officiated it in a YMCA swimming pool, because the church he was pastoring had sold its building and was in transition.

I had practiced baptism by myself so many times in my bathtub I could’t even begin to give count. I held my nose, plunged myself back, and stayed as long as I could beneath the water before I willed myself to push back and break through the surface of the water once more in soapy, silly triumph.

I still do this every time I take a bath, but I think of it less as baptism now.

But when my father baptized me, he didn’t wait very long in the transition. I was under and then I was pulled out, quick and terrible, terrible in the wonderful sense, in the awe sense. I was down and then pulled up before I even knew what was happening. “Buried with Christ,” were the words, “And raised to walk in light of His resurrection.”

From that point on, I was a good Christian. I did all the right things and said all the things you should say. I genuinely loved God, thought I had a very good understanding of the Trinity, and contented myself with a life oscillating between righteous indignation and heart-aching service. I was the child of a pastor and, as they say, this is to be expected.

I was raised well by beautiful parents who love a beautiful God.

But there is a disadvantage to this sort of story. It’s like reading the end of a book that you have just been handed or sitting down with calculus without ever having something beyond basic algebra. You can feel out a lot of it and sort of keep afloat, and if you’re a good speaker, which here could be read as “liar,” not many people will necessarily notice. You can even fool quiet a lot of people in the end.

I did this spiritually. I had read enough, heard enough, felt enough, and had been genuine enough times to keep me floating at just above average when held up against others in my peer group. If the measure of faith was a progress bar that all of us were supposed to be on, each issued the exact same one, I was just enough ahead to look impressive.

And it wasn’t faking or being deceptive on purpose, it was seeming to enjoy the harvest of discipline without the discipline to merit it. I, in fact, loved the Lord very much. But that love was in the appreciative, glory sense. I recognized His awesomeness, but I did not commune with Him and give myself holistically.

For this is my confession: I don’t pray.

The fundamental, rudimentary, basic part of our beautiful fabric of faith I lack. When pushed, I will pray over a meal or in a group, when in the midst of deep joy I am likely to offer a word to our Lord. But for many years I passed by week after week with but a handful of words to the Father.

I’m not sure why. I was the child of people who prayed. Prayer was real and vibrant and encouraged in our household. But somewhere in that time of being buried with Christ to breaking the surface of the water, that death before the realization of life, that moment, I have found, is a little bit longer than we realize. It is now. It is in this broken, aching cosmos as we await our resurrection which we shall share through Christ’s. (Romans 8.) And in this space between, in this moment of death, prayer sometimes seems a silly thing.

God is always listening, that was never doubted. God is always caring, this too was known. But the formulation of words and sentences, though for some seasons came quick and full, for many did not. I was left with the disquiet of my mind, always chattering away, but never directed toward the One unto whom all things should and rightly do tend.

But this, by His mercy, changed.

In October of 2009, I pulled into the parking lot of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church early one Sunday morning. I had been driving around the city, actually finding it in my desperation and brokenness to pray. I cried out to God, despairing over what seemed to be the fragments of my life, and by Providence ended up in a church parking lot right before their early morning service. I threw denominational caution to the wind and went inside. I opened the Book of Common Prayer and followed and prayed along with this old congregation made of pews and stained glass, until we came to the place in the order of worship where we were to pray for the whole state of Christ’s Church–the universal body of Christ–and the world.

Paragraphs of prayers all written out and one challenging italic at the end:

The congregation is invited to offer their own prayers at this time.

There was my challenge. Not to simply hide myself in the comfort of written prayers handed down, but to take written prayers and to authentically pray them so that when I came to this moment when my own words were to fill the silence left to welcome them, I would have something to say.

And in its season, God wove into my story the presence of someone who I pray with, who pushed me to speak aloud the things lain in my heart, and to find words once more. Then there was another and another after.

That was a handful of years ago, now.

I would like to tell you that I am, today, someone who finds no trouble in fulfilling the words of St. Paul when it comes to praying constantly. This is sadly not the case. But I have found that keeping the monastic hours–appointed prayers to mark the major times of the day–and attending evening prayer services and attending the small Episcopal church each Sunday (I would prefer Anglican, but this is a topic for a different day), before I go onto a Baptist service thereafter, has ushered me into a space of renewed creativity and hunger.

It is a funny thing to be a writer and to feel at such a loss to speak. It is a funnier thing to be a Christian and to feel at such a loss with God. But through the rhythm of the appointed prayers I have felt and staggered my way into comfort, to set the table to invite our Lord to dine. I find it easier in my day to offer up a quick word, here and there, because the words have been woven around me throughout the course of my day as the appointed hours shift my mind, again and again, back to its resting place in Him.

There are some days where words are few and pain is deep and the words already given are seemingly best: “Give peace in our time, O Lord. Because there is none other that fighteth for us, but only thou, O God.”

And there are days when joy is far too abundant to speak and all there is to say is, “Glory be to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever, world without end, amen.”

While this way and manner shall not be right for every Christian, it has birthed anew a relationship with our Lord within me. I have found a peace between the lines of set prayers to craft my own, to come to the pauses where I place my own voice apart from the thousands who have spoken these words before me, and make there a song of my own.

I used not to pray, now it is the rhythm of my day. I am becoming creaking pews and stained glass. This is such a mercy.

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