Petition, though the foundation of our spiritual journey and usually the first way we communicate with God, does not present the full reality of prayer. It helps us learn to communicate with God. As we move beyond ourselves, and develop a greater love for God, expressions of that love will emerge, and they will be the source from which our prayer emanates. We will begin and end our prayers with adoration — our petitions will fall within the contours of adoration, allowing our love to create the form in which our prayers are said, instead of allowing our desires dictate that form. As we grow in love, we will give him our love, not because of what he has done for us, but because of the infinite goodness and beauty we see in God. He attracts us. As lovers praise their beloved, so we will praise God, according to the level of love we have developed for him. Indeed, this is so important in our prayer to God, that, although we might begin our conversation with God with petitions, petition without some sort of adoration, without some sort of expression of love, our has yet to achieve what is expected of Christians. Only when adoration is given in our prayers can we be said to have truly prayed. [1]
“Every kind of prayer that exists is set in motion through the stirrings of the soul.”[2] We are prompted out of our love to speak to God, to express to him our love. We might begin with the love a child has for their parents; we will exclaim how great he is similar to how a child will tell their friends what makes their parents special. As we mature, as we develop spiritually, we will see God differently. He will be known to us not only as a loving parent, but as the beloved of our soul. In our acts of adoration, we might begin simply, where we try to buttress our prayers to God out of filial devotion, but, if we continue and do not close ourselves to him, we will begin to say things to him out of pure love, and express to him what it is about him which attracts us, why it is we love him, without any desire for recompense.
We become open to God, and thus, open to learning about him as we pray, as Jean Danielou points out: “To pray is first to discover what God is in himself and to wonder at it.”[3] We reveal this not only with our praise, but with great thanksgiving. We know it is not because God needs to hear it from us that we speak, but rather, because we love him and want to talk to him about our love, that our prayer becomes more and more about adoration and thanksgiving than about petition.[4] God does not need our praise, but, because he loves us, he takes pleasure in hearing about our love, just as any lover loves to have their love returned back to them.[5] The love a parent has for a child recognizes that the child’s love for them is based upon the child’s dependence upon them; but the love a lover has with their beloved is one in which the love is greater, purer; it is given without expectation. Our relationship with God differs from human relationships in this way: as we mature, and grow deeper in love with God, we also continue to know God as beloved children of God, where continuously remember our dependence upon him. While we love God for who God is, for the beauty of his glorious form, we still know him also as children, and the two do not have to contradict each other. What is important is that we move beyond a love for God based upon what we see God does for us, beyond a self-centered, and therefore, impure love, and into a purer, greater love which looks to the beloved outside of any concern for ourselves. When we love God, we no longer see the world centered upon ourselves, but upon God.
“Every kind of prayer that there is consists in asking, or petition, or praise, or thanks.”[6] We have seen all of these qualities mentioned, and it is true, for the first two stages of prayer, these qualities are exactly what are found. They are what most people experience when they pray, though, as we shall see, there is something more, that is, contemplative prayer, which can be said to be prayer, though it can also be said to be something beyond prayer and that which prayer ultimately leads us to. Nonetheless, before we approach such heights of prayer, we must understand that once we have grown in our prayer, so that what we do is proper, we will always begin our prayers with some level of actual heartfelt thanks and praise of God. Also, our petitions will be transformed, and become something more, something greater than mere lists of desires. We will still petition God, and God will continue to act according to his wisdom and how they accord to our petitions, but our petitions will come from the desire to reveal our very essence to God, to lay bare to God our whole person. God desires us to do this, because it opens us up completely to him. It is the revelation of a lover telling about themselves, not because they are interested in themselves, but because their lover is. It is to show our whole being, which includes our desires, and to lay them all before God, expecting nothing in return, though we will get in response God’s love, a love which he gives for who we are as we are.[7] Our petitions can, and will, return with blessings from God; the greater we open up to God, the greater the blessings, because we have made room for them in our lives. It is not that God cannot and does not know who we are, but as a lover, he loves to hear how we are as lovers, to hear it from ourselves, to give us the opportunity to speak about ourselves in a way a lover wants to hear from their beloved about themselves.
Something quite interesting happens in the spiritual process being described. Not only do we open up and reveal ourselves to God, in such an opening up to God, we begin to purify ourselves, to rid ourselves of all that we find as offensive to our beloved. That is, we rid ourselves of sin, and all the excuses we give for it. We get to know ourselves, truly to know ourselves, so that we can no longer deceive ourselves into believing false hopes and dreams which can never satisfy our hearts. God is pleased to hear all we are willing to say to him, even when we reveal to him where we have failed in our love for him, that is, when we reveal our sins, because such action shows our loving trust in him and our desire to turn away from all such unlove which leads us away from him. “Prayer consists, rather, in an interior attention and a conversion of the heart, because what turns us away from God and keeps us from praying is less the number of words than it is the number of desires or worries that preoccupy us.”[8]
Prayer brings us to a metanoia, a change of heart, because we have learned to open ourselves up in love, to become more than an individual self, seeking only for ourselves: we become a lover whose concern is with the desires of the beloved, and we only take care of ourselves insofar as we know ourselves to be loved and appreciated by our beloved. We give ourselves to God, and in doing so, we die to the self. In return, we become alive in and through God, for it is in and through God we finally accept who we are: a person beloved by God. What God loves, we love through God. “The love that God bestows one me makes me become what I truly am, and what I will eventually be. It makes the ‘I’ become the self, the real person that God wants to see and desires to possess.”[9] We encounter ourselves through God. We are made to see both what God sees is our potential, that is, how great God thinks of us, but also, how we have failed to live out the great expectations he has for us. We are given great joy because God is willing to accept us, despite our failure, but, as we grow in love for God in return, the more we suffer as a consequence of our failing. We want to do better, and we feel pained when we don’t do so.
The more we love God, the more we are changed and become more of what God wants us to be. This can be very subtle at first, so that we might not even recognize it in ourselves. But if we are open to God, our love will grow. When we have attained a higher level of purity, but have not found perfection, what St Isaac the Syrian says will ring true: “Every prayer in which the body does not toil, and the heart does not feel suffering, you should reckon as an abortion without a soul.”[10]Many saints talk about the great tears they have in the midst of praying. It is at once tears of joy as well as tears of grief. God’s loving grace provides peace to the soul, while our own failure to meet God’s love with our full love in return brings out our sorrow. We know that we have cheated on God when we sin, and when we think about it, we can be led to tears. These tears, when manifest, are a gift from God. His love for us has melted our hardened heart and has opened it up so that it can love and be loved. Indeed, these tears, even if they be but interior, become necessary for our full spiritual development. “Without water it is impossible to wash a dirty garment clean, and without tears it is even more impossible to wash and cleanse the soul from pollution and stains.”[11]
From the time we have achieved this stage of prayer, that is, from the time we have come to some level of love for God beyond what we think he can do for us, we have found ourselves engaging true prayer. St John Climacus reminds us that once we achieve this stage, it does not mean we will not pray with petition, but that, once we have come to some interior reform due to our prayer, our prayers will naturally take to a proper order, one which focuses on God first, and ourselves only secondarily:
The attitude of prayer is the same for all, but there are many kinds of prayer and many different prayers. Some talk and deal with God as with a friend and master, lifting their praises and their requests to Him not for themselves but for others. Some look for greater spiritual treasures and glory and for greater assurance in their prayers. Some beg to be freed entirely from their adversary. Some look for rank and others for relief from all their debts. Some seek freedom from gaol or for charges against them to be dropped.
But heartfelt thanksgiving should have first place in our book of prayer. Next should be our confession and genuine contrition of soul. After that should come our request to the universal King. [12]
Once we have achieved this state of love, we have moved beyond merely existing for-ourselves and now we live for God in God. Indeed, just as our love will be substantially different, so will our prayers be that much more meaningful, for they will have changed and become what prayer can truly be: contemplative prayer.
Footnotes
[1] Though we express our love in words, and the more we communicate with words to God, the more we will also express our prayers surrounded by words of love, this is not to say that those who do not know their true feelings or how to express them, especially as they start their journey with God and with prayer, do not express that love, even if they do not say it in words; an act of devotion, however, is itself an expression of that love, even if it comes from a very impure, selfish form of love. We begin with a love which recognizes God for his greatness and sees in it something we love (desire) for ourselves, for our own sake. Thus, though our petition is selfish, it is still encased with a kind of love, and makes room for God, who then can work with us, purify us from our ego, and help open us up to him until our egotism is gone and all we have is love.
[2] St Isaac of Nineveh in The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life. trans. Sebastian Brock (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1987), 254. “From Discourse XXII.”
[3] Jean Danielou, Prayer. The Mission of the Church, 9.
[4] In doing this, we call God to our mind, and ponder the great mysteries of the faith. The reason why prayer is so intimately related to theology is because prayer manifests our understanding of God. For some, who are learning to pray, who are just beginning in their journey toward God, this aspect of prayer is very didactic; for others, who are closer to God, it something more — it is remembrance, in the fullest sense of the word, which is going on, leading them deeper into the presence of God, deeper into his love.
[5] Talk about pleasure, joy, happiness and the like coming from God must be understood as terms which best describe our experience of God; they reveal a truth about God’s love for us, but we must understand these are human terms, and we are speaking of love in human terms. Because there is something analogous between our love for God, and God’s love for us, we can think of God’s response can be understand as something analogous to, but far greater than, the human responses being described here.
[6] St Isaac of Nineveh in The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life, 255. “From Discourse XXII.”
[7] He gives us this love, even if we do not show it to him, indeed, before we give it to him, he has given it to us, as St Paul said: “But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we are now justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. Not only so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received our reconciliation” (Rom. 5:8-11 RSV).
[8] Jean Danielou, Prayer. The Mission of the Church. , 22.
[9] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Engagement with God. trans.R. John Halliburton (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 24.
[10] St Isaac of Nineveh in The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life, 250. “From Discourse XVIII.”
[11] St Symeon the New Theologian, The Discourses. trans. C.J. deCatanzaro (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 81.
[12] St John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 275.
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