Praying with the Grain (eBook)

CHAPTER 2

Overcoming Difficulties

Emotional problems and prayer

So far we have considered the influence of the first factor – temperament – realizing that we are born with a predisposition to react in a certain way and that this affects our prayer life. Some pray one way, others pray another way. The same could be said of our different approaches to spirituality or the way we understand faith.

In Chapter 1 we saw how different temperaments respond to different styles of prayer and how enriching these different flavours can become in our individual as well as our corporate Christian life. We should not try to force our brothers and sisters into a particular form of praying, but respect and accept them. Nor should we let these different flavours divide us; they can be very enriching. Some features in the adventure of faith are common to all Christians, but others are unique because they belong to the personal experience of each believer.

Now we are going to consider a second fundamental component in our personality: all that is mainly the result of our biography, our past memories. It is the end product of what we have done and what we have had done to us, and comes together with another essential element in our personality: our unconscious. These two factors, our past and our unconscious, are inseparably bound up with each other. They are like the baggage we travel with on the journey of life, a baggage that is filled with all kinds of events and experiences. We must begin by coming to terms, not only with their existence, but also with the extent of their influence. Remember that temperament is more genetic; it is the biological part of our personality, to do with the raw materials that we were born with. Now let us see what has happened to and what we have done with those raw materials since birth. Our past, and the deposit of experience stored up in our unconscious, will be powerful forces in our lives as a whole, and therefore in our spiritual lives. But this influence does not mean that our responsibility is diminished, as the extreme deterministic position (that we briefly considered in Chapter 1) would maintain. We should not delude ourselves into thinking that these factors do not affect us, but likewise we must not feel that we are mere victims of their influence.

Let us start by clarifying a practical point which is sometimes misunderstood by those who are young in the faith. Some believers think that upon conversion, we can start from scratch in every area of our lives. It is as if the Holy Spirit cleans the slate of our personalities instantaneously, wiping off everything that corresponds to our past. This way of thinking reflects more an urgent emotional desire for change than a mature longing for Christ’s likeness; the person longs to be completely transformed, to shake off the past. They suffered so much in their families, in their memories, that all they want is to forget; they desire to be born again in almost a literal sense! Some people do this by means of a geographical move, even from one country to another. When this geographical mobility is frequent, it is known in psychology as “the Marco Polo syndrome”. Others try changing their name. Others change jobs frequently. All of this reflects an intense desire to forget the past and start again, to become a different person. Such people are so anxious to achieve this total change that they attribute to the Holy Spirit a role that was never his intention to play.

Without any doubt, the apostle Paul was right when he said, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). But we cannot interpret this verse arbitrarily. Does it mean that those who have blue eyes will get brown eyes on conversion? Does it mean that our temperaments will be changed and all our memories forgotten? No. If we approach the work of the Holy Spirit in this way, we will be very disappointed and frustrated. Christ gives us new life in the sense that he puts a new nature within us – we are born of the Spirit (John 3:5–6). This produces radical changes: different attitudes, a different perspective on life, a new dignity, a solid sense of personal identity, a new hope for the future – and so we could continue with our list of “new things”. But God does not promise us the elimination of our painful past or of our limitations here on earth. It is very naïve to expect the Holy Spirit to be a 100 per cent effective psychiatrist. He does not produce a total change in our personalities. The purpose of the work of the Holy Spirit within us is not to destroy a past but to build up a future – a new life, the abundant life of Jesus (John 10:10). The only part of our past that was totally deleted and cleansed is sin, not the imprints of our genes or our personality. In this sense, the precious work of the divine Comforter goes far beyond the therapy of the most competent psychiatrist!

There will indeed come a day when all our “handicaps and thorns” will disappear, but that will not be until “the day of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 1:6), when we will be enjoying the new earth and the new heaven, where “the old order” will have “passed away” (Revelation 21:1, 4). Meanwhile, we have to live in a state of tension. Faith is constant tension between two states: we are not the same as we were before, but neither are we yet what God intends us to be or what we ourselves long to become. This tension between the past and the future that we experience in the present, is a hallmark of Christian faith and will be with us throughout the whole of our lives. The aim of our Christian life is not to get rid of all the tension, or to eliminate all the thorns and handicaps, to feel better and better every day. We grow more and more every day, but that does not eliminate the constant tension between what we will be in the future and what we are in the present. We cannot wipe away the past, with its traumas and sad memories, but we do have the promise that God will use us not only in spite of our past but through it. This is demonstrated to us in the lives of the patriarchs and of many other heroes of faith.

In this sense, the life of Joseph in the book of Genesis is an extraordinary example of coming to terms with and accepting a difficult past. He had a lot of “heavy baggage” in his biography: born into a family full of conflict, he lost his mother at the age of seven, was spoiled by his father’s upbringing, was hated by his brothers, and had to face many difficult periods in Egypt. However, when he reviewed all these past events, he had an amazing sense of God’s providence. God was not only leading his steps, but using every circumstance in his life in order to accomplish good purposes. His words in Genesis 50:20 are very memorable: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good” (see also 45:5–8). If your life has been difficult so far, you should underline these words in red.1

Our past should not cripple us. Some people invest most of their spiritual and psychological energy in trying to heal past memories. I have to confess, as a professional psychiatrist, that very often this is a waste of time and occasionally it can even be harmful. It is better to stop struggling against your past and accept that God uses you, together with your past, however painful or difficult it was. When you are in Christ, you should not view your past as an enemy any more, but as an ally. An ally is someone with whom you work, regardless of whether you like them or not, in order to achieve certain purposes. God does not demand that we like our painful past, but he does encourage us to work in alliance with it. This is the essence of accepting your past and being contented with it. Our past was thoroughly cleansed when Christ forgave all our sins with his blood. The words of Isaiah 43:18 are a healing balm to all those suffering from painful memories and difficult life stories: “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing!… I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.” Therefore, if we really believe in a God who provides, who is Lord of our lives, the weight of our past takes on a new dimension. If God is for us, what or who can be against us?

The apostle Paul himself had many reasons to regret his past persecution of the new-born church; yet he states with great emphasis in Philippians 3:13: “But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead…” Undoubtedly it was his experience that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Romans 8:28). Therefore instead of struggling against our pasts, let us trust that God will use them for good. There is a tendency in some circles, both psychological and Christian, to invest too much energy in cleaning the past – but your past was already cleansed when your sins were forgiven.

What is the origin of this state of tension that characterizes the life of faith? We cannot be oblivious to the reality that is concealed behind all these obstacles: sin. We are not now referring to specific acts that are contrary to the word of God – sins – but rather to sin, in the singular, as a state or condition. The ultimate reason for our limitations in prayer, as in every other area of our Christian lives, is to be found in the condition of the human being since the fall. Paul wrote...