Living the Question of Prayer

Blessed be God who animates our lives and calls us through prayer to empty ourselves of preconception and delusion that we might grow into the fullness of the Kingdom promise. 

Rilke writes to the young poet: Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything.

One of my good teachers reminded me this week when pondering the arrival of the presence of beauty that when the student is ready the teacher appears

And one of the overwhelming messages of the Gospels is that when we prepare our souls, empty them of extraneous matters, and orient ourselves toward God we receive abundance. Much comes from nothing.

All of these aphorisms are, like parables, inversions and subversions of societal expectations. They are in many ways wisdom sayings which assist me in processing the parcels of the lectionary today, which assist me in listening intently to Jesus and Paul’s teachings of the Kingdom.

All of them are meant to be not only statements of great wisdom but also guiding lights to the Kingdom, to another realm, to a wholeness and holiness which is closer to us than our very selves, itself a queer idea.

In Matthew the ordinary characters: Mustard seed: tiny becoming immensely large and sprawling

Pearl: discovered not only from hiding but not even known to be what is sought

Net: wholy and holy almost nothingness cast to capture almost everything

The Kingdom of God according to Matthew, according to Jesus, is like so many ordinary, small, taken for granted things which unexpectedly, because of grace, become large, vast, living and extraordinary.

The Kingdom of God according to Matthew might be nothing we can even imagine so we are drawn toward its conception not because we are asking, so much as because it is simply offered. 

Jesus wants us to know, just as he himself realized emerging from the wilderness, that the Kingdom of God has drawn near...very near. It is here and yet to come. As we live in our physical, measureable, timeable world, we might miss this realm of goodness and mercy eternal and extensive like an ocean or a sky.

Jesus invites us to live there now!

But the question to be lived into in the Rilke sense is how? It is not to go out and search fields or purchase mustard seeds or go fishing, although all are wonderful contemplative possibilities. It is to form deeper intentional appreciation for the extraordinary grace connecting the ordinary to the extraordinary, the now to the not yet, this life to the next.

It is I believe through prayer that we cultivate this spiritual communion with the holy and divine. It is through the invocation of the Holy Spirit that our seeds grow, our nets are filled and we are found by amazing grace.

Certainly, as Paul suggests, prayer can render sighs too deep for words, and even groans like labor pains. The thing is however, that pain and struggle are endemic to any real reward, any sustainable growth. 

All of Paul’s theology complements the gospels by helping us with the how to’s. Prayer, a most important aspect of Paul’s conversion and ours, is intended to do something unexpected and difficult and salvation oriented. Prayer is intended to empty us to hollow us out that we might become the vessels to be filled with grace, living water, and to be so consecrated. 

Throughout this process of salvation we are invited to listen and see and taste and touch that we might be witnesses to the ordinary aspects of our lives becoming extraordinary. We and they are saved by grace.

In these times when we are missing the physicality and sharing of the Eucharist, we are called to empty ourselves of constructed expectations of regularity that we might create for ourselves and our community new ways of invoking the consecration of our lives by the Holy Spirit, new wine skins. 

We are called to prayer and prayer the derivative of the word precarious, locates us on a threshold, to new life, to fuller life, to the Kingdom.

Thomas Merton said: “Prayer is an expression of who we are..We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment.” Sounds a lot like an empty chalice to me!

When we recognize that nothingness we then ready to receive the fruits of prayer which is the great irony: everything belongs!

The Kingdom has not shifted and is not closed. Prayer has not subsided or ceased. We still remember the salvation history of the Bible and the particularities of Jesus life death and resurrection. We still await His coming again in great glory, even if we don’t know what that looks like. We are still a Eucharistic Easter people, now more than ever as nothing is taken for granted.

So may you live the question of prayer. May you pray more frequently and more deeply. May a pearl of great price emerge from that praying. May you cherish that which God gave you even if not looking for it.

But more than anything may you know, really really know with all your being, that NOTHING, no thing,no germ, no pain, no distraction, no hardship, no deprivation can separate you from the love of God.