YEARNING TO PRAY

Yes, it does say "yearning" to pray and not learning to pray, though goodness knows I need the later as well. I want to write briefly about the feeling that comes over me from time to time that I need to pray. It's not that I feel like I need something and want to ask God to provide it. No, I just feel the need to pray, to pray without wanting anything but prayer.

That's a strange notion to some. Prayer is often thought of as a means to an end. One prays in order to get something else. What I have learned after all these years is that prayer is it's own end. Well, maybe not exactly. Prayer is a means of communication with God so it is not entirely an end in itself. God is the end we ought to long for. We long for God not in order to be rewarded or to escape punishment, but simply because we desire God for God's own sake. That's what brings me look at prayer as it's own end.

I've tried to explain this to some people with little success, but this is the solution to the problem of unanswered prayer. If what we seek is simply to pray, then praying is the answer to our prayer.

Anyone who has approached prayer in this way knows of the dry period when prayer won't come. One solution is simply to tell God, "I don't feel like praying," which, of course, is a prayer. The other solution is to develop a habit of prayer, so that one prays whether one feels like it or not. Now I know that a lot of people find that hypocritical. How can you pray and not really mean what you say? What good is saying prayers mechanically by rote? Ah, they are every good. We are to pray as we are able, not as we ought. I don't know if that's something I've read or if it's something from one of the Benedictine or Cistercian Monks I have listened to over the last 10 years, but it's good advice.

Maybe the underlying truth is that all prayer is a work of the Holy Spirit. What a strange concept–God within us prays to God outside us, or something like that. To make a habit of prayer gives the Spirit a chance to work with us, even though it may not feel like we are accomplishing much. I pray the Psalms in my Morning Prayers. It's part of the strange inversion of things that we can take Scripture–God's revelation to us, and use it as our way of speaking to God.

A lot of the time I push myself to say Morning Prayer. Sometimes I don't push hard enough, but if I keep at it day after day this strange thing happens–a yearning to pray rises in me. I just have to pray, because I have to, that's all. I have to say (or sing) the words of the Psalms or Biblical Canticles. I have to have time to meditate on Scripture. I have to add my feeble attempts to put in words what can only be expressed in "sighs too deep for words."

Well, that's my rambling for the day. By the way, the picture above is of a cross my cousin sent me. It's from Maria Lach, a place in Germany known for it's very famous monastery. They do a LOT of praying there.

May the Lord bless you on your journey, and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne


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