Imperfect Prayers
Beyond the right words
God does not need a perfect expression of the heart’s desire. It is God to whom we come and in whom we trust, not in the quality of our prayers and the steadiness of our minds.
- George S. Stewart, The Lower Levels of Prayer, 51
When I was growing up, I was always afraid to pray in front of others (aside from my immediate family). I worried about saying the wrong thing, forgetting the name of the person I was supposed to praying for, omitting the key verse about or attribute of or promise of God. Prayer was performance, and the stronger, more confident, more “biblical” the prayer, the more mature the faith.
As a student small group leader in college, and as a seminarian later, this anxiety about prayer performance did not go away. I did have more biblical literacy, I had picked up a few clutch phrases from prayer books, pastors, and fellow students, and I was more often in leadership positions where I was expected to pray for the group. So I could do it. But I didn’t always like it.
In the first year of my job after seminary, I oversaw a small group ministry on campus. I led a group myself so I could better understand the experience I was training others for. The small group was connected to a required class about the Christian Faith, and was billed as a “lab in one form of Christian community.” (The small group was based on Wesleyan class meetings, where participants ask and answer the question, “How goes it with your soul?”)
At the end of the last small group, after I prayed for the final time, one of the students said to me, “Your praying has gotten better over the quarter.” “How so?” I asked. “Well, in our first meeting, you said ‘um’ 34 times when you prayed. Today it was only eight times.”
I can’t help it! Um is more than a sheepish device to fill the air with sound while you think of something to say. Um is a device that indicates you have more to say, and that you are searching for the right words to say. Um can be annoying, especially when its frequency becomes rhythmic—it can become all the listeners here. But um can also be a way to say, “I am stepping away but I need to gather my thoughts. Do not think I am finished speaking or ready to move on. More is coming.” Or, it can indicate that one is ready to join a conversation.
Anyway, what I mean to say is that I use “um” like a lightbulb shining above my head. I am thinking carefully about my words, I am going to speak, but I need a second.
And that can happen in prayer, too. God doesn’t mind. I bet God says “um” sometimes.
I’ve heard someone correct themselves while praying (I’ve probably done it myself):
“I pray we would have a good weekend—well, I guess if we have a weekend, if we’re not working; well—maybe work can be good, too. So yeah, good weekend, whatever we’re doing, work or play or study or hanging out.”
I’ve had to ask someone to remind me details of their prayer request, or ask a person their name in the middle of praying for them:
“And we pray for—sorry, what was your name again?—John, that you would give him a restful weekend and that he would—what were you doing again?—that he would study well for his test on Monday.”
What does God do with these kind of prayers? These lackluster, long-winded, lazy, looping prayers? I think God hears them. It is God to whom we come and in whom we trust, not in the quality of our prayers and the steadiness of our minds.
We trust that God will understand our prayers beyond the quality and capability of our words. We trust that God will understand the desires of our hearts, the desires below those desires, and the yet deeper desires underneath—the desires that emanate from the imago Dei, which we may not even be conscious of. It is as if God is speaking to God’s self through the vessel of our prayers and desires.
The psalmist says:
My mouth is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue sticks to my jaws.
Psalm 22:15
Sometimes words fail. Sometimes words are not enough. Sometimes words are a hindrance. Sometimes all we can pray with are our emotions, our mental images, our desires.
In Egypt, “the Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out. Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning” (Exodus 2:23-24).
God hears groaning, crying, prayers without words.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul says:
The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God (Romans 8:26–27).
So the Spirit groans through us, and God understands that groaning. We may not know how to pray as we “ought,” but we trust in God, not in the quality of our prayers and the steadiness of our minds.
We trust that God will understand our prayers beyond the quality and capability of our words. We trust that God will understand the desires of our hearts, the desires below those desires, and the yet deeper desires underneath—the desires that emanate from the imago Dei, which we may not even be conscious of. It is as if God is speaking to God’s self through the vessel of our prayers and desires.
Yes, I am repeating myself.
Behind the anxiety of prayer as performance is a lie that structured my understanding of prayer well into my young adulthood: the right words get God’s attention, move God to desired action, change the hearts of those listening to the prayer, and/or demonstrate the strength of one’s faith (the other factor determining a prayer’s “success”). Enough faith and the right words, and you can move mountains. Mainly, the mountain known as God’s favor toward you.
If a prayer “fails” (i.e., your desired result does not happen) then either your faith was not strong enough or you did not use the right words. Answered prayer becomes a litmus test for one’s faith. And, if you take the logical path that Job’s friends take, an undesirable outcome illustrates your own sinfulness. That is, God won’t answer your prayer because there is some sin you’ve left unconfessed or unremedied.
In college, I witnessed several “healing prayer sessions” involve this sort of spiritual mathematics. If healing occurred, it was proof of a strong prayer and faith combo. If no healing, the blame goes to lack of faith (of the one seeking healing or the one praying for healing), an unresolved sin, or a lack of the right words.
The right words means the right “biblical” promises claimed, laid before God to force God to act according to those “promises” found in Scripture. (“Biblical” and “promises” are in quotes because many of the passages cited were not technically promises or were paraphrases and therefore not technically scriptural. But taking Scripture out of context is not a sin; it’s just what we do, and the trick is to do it responsibly.)
The right words means naming the correct attributes of God to force God to remember that those attributes lead to certain actions and outcomes, usually desired by the person praying.
The right words means sticking to one of the many evangelical prayer formulas (easy to remember by their various acronyms) to make sure you have the right amount and order of things such as praise, thanksgiving, confession, petition, intercession, supplication, gratitude, etc. Miss one of those and your prayer may end up buried in God’s inbox.
The problem with this method, of course, is that it makes prayer into a wrinkled dollar bill and God into a vending machine. Hit the right letter and number combo to get the treat you want.
Jesus warns:
When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask (Matthew 6:7–8).
God knows what we need before we ask. It is God to whom we come and in whom we trust, not in the quality of our prayers and the steadiness of our minds.
We trust that God will understand our prayers beyond the quality and capability of our words. We trust that God will understand the desires of our hearts, the desires below those desires, and the yet deeper desires underneath—the desires that emanate from the imago Dei, which we may not even be conscious of. It is as if God is speaking to God’s self through the vessel of our prayers and desires.
If God knows what we need before we ask, why ask? Because prayer is not an Amazon wish list. Prayer is not a grocery order. Prayer is not a monologue. Prayer is not a diary. Prayer is not a set of commands to a subordinate.
Prayer is a two-way conversation. In prayer, we don’t just speak. We listen. Praying about what we want isn’t hard. It’s as easy as speaking our mind. Prayer that involves listening is a challenge.
It is hard to learn how to listen to God. Yet it can be done in an instant, in this very moment. Listening to God takes patience. We are so eager to fill silence, time, space with the noise of our own voice or the noise of ready-to-hand entertainment. Listening requires us to be okay with awkward, uncomfortable silence.
Listening to God takes openness. If you are not open to God, if you think listening to God is a waste of time, then it will not surprise you to hear nothing from God. But in time, with practice, patience, and openness, you will find that prayer is not just about making requests, but about stillness, listening, and peace.
Love silence above everything else, for it brings you near to fruit which the tongue is too feeble to expound.
First of all we force ourselves to be silent, but then from out of our silence something else is born that draws us into silence itself.
May God grant you to perceive that which is born of silence! If you begin in this discipline I do not doubt how much light will dawn in you from it.
After a time a certain delight is born in the heart as a result of the practice of this labour, and it forcibly draws the body on to persevere in stillness.
- St. Isaac of Syria (seventh century)
Contemplative prayer is an ancient practice of stillness and silence before God. Practicing contemplative prayer, even a little, can reorient our prayers away from wish-list-monologuing.
Some of us find that in contemplative prayer God attends to our very uniqueness and communicates a certain friendship to us. We find a new confidence in our self. What comes up to us as we sit in silence appears to be exactly the exchange God desires for us, and the exchange we want as well, although we don’t yet know the language of Silence.
- Ray Leonardini, Finding God Within, 11
Leonardini says that “consent is the heart and soul of centering prayer” (19). Consent may feel like an odd word to use in the context of prayer. But consent is the foundation of openness in any relationship. “So it is with the Divine. God wants to fill us with God’s own life by becoming present to us and working in our lives. … [Through centering prayer] our intention is to consent to God being present and active in our lives” (19).
In contemplative prayer, we enter into “prayer beyond words,” and open ourselves to new understanding we might not achieve by logic alone. We open ourselves to be changed by God, rather than to change God by our words. Perhaps we could say that in contemplative prayer, we do not pray for certain outcomes or even for wisdom, but we seek to deepen our love—for God, for others, for ourselves. And if this is what God desires for us, an ever-deepening, ever-expanding love, then we could perhaps say that as we pray, it is not us praying, but God praying through us. It is as if God is speaking to God’s self through the vessel of our prayers and desires.
To consent to God is to say, “Not my will be done, but yours” (cf. Luke 22:42). How easy it is to say “God’s will is my desire,” which we take to mean, “What God wills, I desire it,” but which often becomes, “Whatever I desire, I will claim it is God’s will.”
Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
and do not rely on your own insight. …
Do not be wise in your own eyes.
- Proverbs 3:5, 7
The plans of the mind belong to mortals,
but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord.
All one’s ways may be pure in one’s own eyes,
but the Lord weighs the spirit.
Commit your work to the Lord,
and your plans will be established. …
The human mind plans the way,
but the Lord directs the steps.
- Proverbs 16:1–3, 9
The usual form of monologue-prayer takes to heart Proverbs 16:3: “Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established.” When it comes to praying for one’s plans, it’s better to ask for a blessing than for an “answer.” Once my plans are established, I pray for God to watch over them, to make sure everything goes “smoothly” (that word appears in so many of my prayers!). In general, I want God to make me comfortable. I want things to go well for me (and for others). I want things to get better. I want things to go as I desire.
Even if I pray for wisdom and discernment when making a decision, I am asking God to make it clear which of my options will best fulfill my own desires. I’m punching in the right letter-number combo on the vending machine, but I’ll be okay with whichever chips God drops for me. But maybe God is asking me to reconsider how I’m spending my money. Maybe God’s answer is that I shouldn’t touch the buttons at all.
In Matthew 19, a rich young man approaches Jesus and asks, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” (Matthew 19:16). The young man is asking Jesus to answer his specific question (which, as you know if you’ve read that far in Matthew’s gospel, is a fool’s errand because Jesus never wants to give anyone a direct answer).
The young man is rich, and he probably assumes his life is his own. He makes his own decisions, he makes his own plans. But he is nervous about the afterlife. Is his life good enough? He decides he will do a good deed in order to “have” (read: possess as he possesses his wealth) eternal life. But which good deed will be sufficient? He goes and asks the popular rabbi in town.
This feels very similar to the monologue-prayer style. Sure, the young man seeks an answer, but he wants the answer on his own terms. How often do we ask God for something, and let confirmation bias take over? If the thing for which we prayed occurs as we wish, God answered our prayer (favorably, I might add). If it does not happen, God did not answer our prayer, or God said no, or God said not yet, or God said here’s something better (all possibilities I’ve heard laid out in evangelical churches).
But if I pray that I can successfully rob a bank, and then I do, does that mean God favorably answered my prayer?
Imagine if the rich young man was praying to Jesus, and as he prayed, he asked whether he should donate to charity or volunteer at a soup kitchen or go on a short-term missions trip or invest his money so that in a few decades he could donate even more to charity. Now imagine that the investment option rises to his mind with more energy and excitement than the other options. His heart even pounds a little. He feels peace, joy, resolve. This is what God wants him to do, he thinks (and feels). So he does it. He laid out the options before God, and God made one option clearer than the rest. Discernment and wisdom for the win.
Let’s return to flesh-and-blood Jesus. He doesn’t quite answer the question on the young man’s terms. “If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments” (Matthew 19:17). Notice that for Jesus, “eternal life” is not something to have, to possess, to acquire at the end of one’s earthly life. Jesus invites the young man to “enter into life” right now, starting in this moment. Eternal life is not what happens after death. Eternal life is happening all around us right now, and we are invited to enter into it.
So instead of answering the young man’s question by saying, “Such and such a deed should be sufficient,” Jesus says, “Live your life differently.” Granted, he also says, “Keep the commandments.” The young man ignores Jesus’s invitation to life and latches onto the commandments, for they sound most like the answer he’s looking for, the answer he’s listening for. “Which ones?” he asks.
Jesus names some of the famous Ten, then throws in one from Leviticus: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” No murder, no adultery, honor parents, no stealing. These might be easy to abide by. But loving one’s neighbor is a bit vague, overly broad. How to tell if I’m doing it well enough? The young man doesn’t hesitate, though: “I’ve kept all these; what do I still lack?”
Jesus says, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me” (Matthew 19:21). And there’s the good deed the young man asked for. But it wasn’t on his list acceptable answers. He “went away grieving, for he had many possessions.” He doesn’t see this action as liberation from his old way of life, as an invitation to new life following Jesus in the company of the poor.
I think prayer could be like this. We go to God with our requests and a list of acceptable outcomes. We say our piece and leave, and when the results arrive (if they ever do), we measure them against the outcomes we wanted.
But what if, instead of requesting certain outcomes, we held up the request loosely, vaguely even, saying, “God, here’s the situation, here’s my request, what do you think?” And then, we listen. And we don’t just listen to hear the answer we want. We listen to be interrupted.
If we make our plans, and ask God to make those plans succeed as we want them to, we are living according to our own wisdom, our own insight, our own self-justification. But if we pray to be interrupted by God, to listen to what God has to say, God may change the terms on us. Instead of answering according to our plans, God may answer according to God’s plans. God may answer so that we are transformed, not made comfortable in the wisdom of our own choices. To be transformed involves discomfort.
When we pray, “Not my will but yours be done,” we are asking God to reorient, to transform our desires. We consent to God’s transformation of our lives. If we can listen to God, then prayer becomes more than line upon line of our words and our petitions. Prayer becomes a space, a room in which we meet with God. When God so permeates that space (like a cloud in a tabernacle; cf. Exodus 40:34–35), then it doesn’t matter what we say. We are there to be transformed.
God knows what we need before we ask. It is God to whom we come and in whom we trust, not in the quality of our prayers and the steadiness of our minds.
We trust that God will understand our prayers beyond the quality and capability of our words. We trust that God will understand the desires of our hearts, the desires below those desires, and the yet deeper desires underneath—the desires that emanate from the imago Dei, which we may not even be conscious of. It is as if God is speaking to God’s self through the vessel of our prayers and desires.
Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.
Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
- Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Perhaps it is enough to hold attention for another person. Perhaps that attention to another strengthens love and therefore is the transformation God desires for you. “Thoughts and prayers” may sound like an empty sentiment, a flimsy placeholder for true care. But maybe that one moment of attention registers to God as prayer. And through that tiny act of attention, God transforms the heart of the well-wisher and the prayer-for.
Attention without words may be more a prayer than a lengthy list of petitions. Attention to physical or relational or systemic pain (the Israelites groaned and cried out from their Egyptian slavery) may be more a prayer than requesting specific outcomes to a situation.
But maybe comparison is the wrong practice. Maybe there is much more God calls prayer than we do. Creation praises God (cf. Psalm 19), creation groans (cf. Romans 8), blood and stones cry out to God.
Perhaps in prayer, our attention is transformed, so that we become aware of the work God is already doing in the world, in our relationships, in ourselves—quite independently of our prayers. We become aware of God’s invitation to enter into life, to participate in, or at least witness, God’s work. The world isn’t waiting for us to pray the right thing in order to change an outcome to what we want. God is already active in the world, waiting for us to pray to become attentive to this work.
I read somewhere that “the desire to pray is prayer.” If that’s true, then perhaps our verbal prayers are actually the answer to our own prayer—that is, the answer to our desire to pray. Desire-fulfillment. We desire to pray. That desire is fulfilled, answered, by our entering into the room of prayer we’ve created in our heart. It does not matter what we say, because opening ourselves to God is the answer to whatever prayer we might pray.
It is God to whom we come and in whom we trust, not in the quality of our prayers and the steadiness of our minds.
So if you’re like me, and rally scores of “ums” into your prayers, or correct yourself, or ask questions, or doubt the efficacy of your words, or fear saying the wrong thing or omitting the best thing—peace be with you. The words are not as important as the posture of the heart, the attention of the spirit, the consent of the soul. It is God to whom we come and in whom we trust, not in the quality of our prayers and the steadiness of our minds.
Thanks for reading. You may have noticed certain paragraphs or lines repeated throughout. This is not an uncommon practice for writers. From an essay called “In Defense of Our Language” from novelist Charles Johnson’s book The Way of the Writer I picked up the phrase “reiterated topic paragraph,” which makes me think of something like “essay refrain,” and I wanted to try it out here.
I love this, Nate—I’ve thought so many of these things before but you articulated it beautifully. Prayer as a room, and as consent. I’ll be holding those images with me.