Trusting Openness

Openness to God demands trust. This is far from our natural posture—in relation to God or others. The natural posture of most of us is guardedness and pretense. The invitation to loving encounter with God immediately challenges this posture; God invites us to come in faith that expresses itself in vulnerability and brutal self-honesty.

Too often faith is reduced to beliefs. But cognitive assent to propositions has very little to do with genuine faith, which is more a posture of the heart than of the mind. Faith in God is leaning with confidence into God. The opposite of faith is mistrust, not unbelief. Faith is trust in God’s goodness. This and this alone is what makes it possible for us to approach God with openness.

Prayer must start with faith because those who come to God must do so in faith. Apart from faith, Scriptures tell us that it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:6). Fortunately, however, we do not have to create this faith. It, and all else that God requires of us, is available as the gift of God. All that is required of us is the openness to receive what we can and then act on it. But we must act on what we have and be where we, in reality, are.

I have a friend who tells me that she is an agnostic—unconvinced of the existence of God and generally uninterested enough in the possibility to give it even a second thought. But, she tells me, from time to time she prays, usually when she finds herself thinking about questions of existence or the meaning of her life. I did not find the fact that she prays surprising, since I am convinced that prayer is a natural posture of the soul—something I will say more about later in this chapter. However, I was very interested in how she prayed. And so I asked her. She told me that usually her prayer goes something like this: “I am not sure if you are there, or, if you are, whether or not you are listening, or, if you are there and listening, whether I can trust you, but just in case . . .” Although my friend is not a Christian, this is Christian prayer. She is acting on the faith she has. It isn’t much, but like the widow’s mite and the generous act of giving that she displayed in the Gospel story of Jesus (Mark 12:41-44), my friend dares to give what faith she has back to God. Doing so makes it prayer. God will always hear any prayer that is born out of honesty and that expresses whatever amount of faith we actually have.

Trust and faith should frame our whole prayer experience. This is what allows us to let go of control and allow God to shape our prayer and our encounter. Prayer involves surrender to a mysterious inner process, submitting to something that God does in us. If we trust enough to let go, God will give us a gift of prayer communion that we could never create or even imagine. This is why we sometimes speak of prayer as Christ praying in us or as the Spirit making intercession for us. As the Australian Cistercian monk Michael Casey reminds us, “Prayer cannot be measured on a scale of success or failure because it is God’s work—and God always succeeds. When we believe we have failed at prayer, it is because we decided what shape our prayer should have and are now frustrated that there is nothing we can do to implement our ambition. Prayer is nothing more or less than the interior action of the Trinity at the level of being. This we cannot control; we can only reverently submit.”1

Our effort to make our prayers into the form we think they should be seriously interferes with this inner divine work of prayer. So does constantly examining our prayer to see how we are doing. The only thing we should seek in prayer is God. When we focus on how we are doing or what we are getting out of prayer, we have taken our eyes off God and put them back on our self. But since the form that our prayer takes is God’s business, we need to learn to mind our own business. Our job is to make space to turn toward God in openness and faith. God’s job is the rest.

Radical Honesty

I mentioned that honesty is part of the trusting openness that is involved in prayer, but I want to say a bit more about this very important dimension of true prayer. Part of meeting God in trust is being prepared to come to the encounter with nothing less than brutal candor. Thomas Merton reminds us that God is far too real to be met anywhere other than in reality.2 Thus, when we attempt to meet God in our places of falsity and pretense, we should not be surprised that God is nowhere to be found. Where God will always be and where God waits to meet us is in the midst of the realities of our life and our experience.

Prayer is the encounter of the true self and the true God. This is what gives prayer its transformational potential. Honesty gives God access to the truths of our life, to the realities of our existence. Sadly, however, the self that we so often bring to God is our lying, false self—the self that we have defensively constructed to protect us from the vulnerability of our nakedness before God and in the world. God understands this vulnerability and our felt need for protection, but Jesus shows us another way to be in vulnerability and trust. This is the way of prayer. It was not simply what Jesus did when he addressed the one he called Father. It was the posture of his life as he offered his life as a prayer.

In prayer we speak from the hiddenness of our heart to the hiddenness of the heart of God. This secret place is where we find our true faces. In honesty before God we discover our voice and our true identity. But we must start where we actually are.

Preparation for prayer is asking for the grace to be real before God. This is something that we cannot do on our own. It requires grace—the gift of God that enables us to do what we most deeply need to do. God wants us to pray, and the gentle movement of God’s Spirit within our spirit moves and enables us to pray. It is all of God. Our part is simply consent—opening our hearts to grace and allowing God to give us the prayer that we should pray.

Honesty before God is not simply avoiding lies. It is bringing our full self to God. Rather than trying to fix things up before turning to God, genuine prayer is turning to God in the midst of the mess that is the reality of our inner world. It is turning to God in the midst of our confusion and doubt, our anger, our hopes, our fears, our fantasies, our pain, our coping, our defenses, our struggles, our sin, and our brokenness. There is no cure for that which most deeply ails us unless we come to God with nothing held back. However, as noted by Vladimir Lossky, the good news is that every genuine presence of self before the face of God is prayer.3 In prayer we can say anything, in any way, as long as it is honest—or more accurately, as long as it is as honest as, in that moment, we can be.

When we speak the truths of our lives in prayer, whatever they are and however we are moved to speak them, we are stripped bare of the multitude of deceits that infiltrate our being. Ann and Barry Ulanov comment: “Painfully, our values, even our best . . . are often exposed as values held with such possessive force that they have built a wall in us against the force of God’s will. But the defensive use of prayer soon falls by the way if prayer really consists of honest conversation.”4 This is prayer as divine therapy, a concept we will explore in the last chapter of this book. Dare to stand before the naked God in your own nakedness and you will be changed—stripped and scourged, but healed, awakened and made whole.

The Language of the Soul

Part of the preparation for prayer is coming to understand what prayer is and what it isn’t. One important aspect of prayer that we have not yet addressed is that prayer is the soul’s native language. Created in the image of God, our natural posture is attentive openness to the divine. Walking through the primeval garden that was their home, our first parents were ever alert to the presence of the God who shared their world. Nothing was more ordinary than the extraordinary encounters they regularly had with the divine. Life was prayer. Prayer was life.

But listening to the whispered lies of the serpent turns everything upside down. Prayer no longer seems natural and God no longer seems present. So, instead of the soul’s normal language of prayer as attentiveness, we create our own prayer dialect—prayer as demand and control. Sometimes we offer prayers to invoke God’s presence or get God’s attention. Other prayers are designed to produce divine favors. And because we are not really convinced that prayer is...