Using Scripture in Prayer

This kind of prayer is also very frustrating, especially if the pray-er is not good at rational analysis. It can also be very fatiguing, especially for someone who spends most of the day working in the head. These people tend to value the worth and strength of prayer on the basis of the keenness of the insights discovered about whatever one is "praying" about. This kind of prayer is very common and encouraged by our culture, which values mastering the world through the intellect. We live with a sense that everything can be understood in clear ideas. What can be understood can be controlled -- everything from the structure of the atom to the mystery of God.

The crisis of prayer and spiritual growth is that our minds are filled with so many ideas about God, but our hearts are far from God. The spiritual fatigue and the emptiness of prayer are at base often a matter of the absence of religious experience in a person's life. Religious experience is at the heart of the spiritual life and is the very "stuff' of spiritual direction. How can we understand prayer that will help us be conscious of our religious experiences?

I suggest that the kind of prayer that opens us to religious experience and that is most conducive to conscious growth in our relationship with God is a kind of contemplative prayer.  By this I mean the kind of prayer that first listens, pays attention, and opens our hearts to the deeper dimensions of our experiences where we meet God. This is the kind of praying that nurtures a relationship with God. God is always present to us, but we are not always attentively present to God. Contemplative praying helps us be attentive to God.

Since this contemplative prayer depends on, and is for the sake of, our relationship with God, we can expect it to have some of the same dynamics that establishing and maintaining any relationship would have. Similarly, we can expect it to be as hard or as easy as forming any enduring, trustworthy relationship with another person. Whatever we need to do in order to establish and nurture a friendship, we can apply to praying in a contemplative mode. In friendship, as in prayer, we spend time together, we share stories about what happens to us and about what we care about most deeply (especially with regard to each other), and we listen with the heart.

Let me tell a story. Once upon a time, John and Marsha were walking along the beach enjoying a beautiful day in the sun, sand, and surf. As they walked along they were sharing stories about their own lives. While talking, they kept walking. But when John began to tell Marsha how much he loved her, they stopped walking, faced each other, and John spoke more slowly and clearly while Marsha looked lovingly into his eyes and listened intently with her heart.

That was a contemplative moment. There was no looking at watches to check the time, and no planning what had to be done after they left the beach. There was absorption in one another and a forgetting of self. There was paying attention with the heart by taking a long, loving look at the other.

Our life of prayer must have those moments, too. We must, from time to time, stop and look lovingly at what is really there in our lives, and pay attention to it with our hearts. Only then will our words and our actions be faithful expressions of the relationship we are experiencing.

The good pray-er is first someone who knows how to pay attention. Paying attention is hard. It takes effort; it does not just happen. When we pay attention, we have to stop being preoccupied with self and make the effort to let the other take our attention. When we pay attention, we first have to pay attention to what is outside us; then we have to pay attention to what is going on inside us as a direct result of paying attention to what is outside us.

Paying attention means stopping long enough and being quiet enough to let go of our preoccupations so that something outside takes our attention. Those who have ever been so absorbed in listening to music, reading a book, or being with a friend that they lost track of the time know what this contemplative experience is like. It is really an experience of transcendence, since we go out of ourselves and become absorbed in something else. Paying attention also involves noticing the affective reactions that arise spontaneously within us from being absorbed in something outside ourselves. This is the kind of discipline we need to bring to our prayer for profitable spiritual direction; and this is the kind of discipline we need to bring to our listening while doing spiritual direction.

One of the tasks of a spiritual director is to help the directee develop a contemplative attitude and contemplative skill. This attitude and skill are difficult to acquire, especially for people who are too absorbed in themselves, or who have a strong need to be in control of others all the time. Being able to forget self and become absorbed in the other is not easy. One way of helping others acquire this attitude and skill is to encourage them to engage in some activity they enjoy doing that has a contemplative aspect to it. For example, for some people this might be listening to music, or walking through an art gallery. For others it might be walking through the ocean surf, or through a redwood grove, or simply lying on a hillside and looking at the clouds. After such activities, they can reflect on the experience, that is, pay attention to what happened. Asking questions like, "What happened when you looked? What did you experience happening to you when you did that?" can help them along the way to acquiring the skill of praying contemplatively.