Danielle Klafter

Prayer as a Way of Being in the World

I’m going to pen the following word: prayer.

I’m curious, what does that singular word conjure for you? What associations, memories, emotions, sensory landscapes does it bring up?

I imagine some may hate the word. Perhaps experiences with abuse or hypocrisy taught them to view it as a farce, or a way to wield power. Others might have nothing but comfort and love at the thought, prayer having been a sanctuary in their own story. If you are anything like me, the associations might be a mixed bag. I’ve done a lot of thinking about prayer over the past decade. Some of that thinking has happened retroactively, because prayer was something I experienced first and only later looked back to realize what it was. My spiritual journey has drastically altered my view of prayer and even the way I think about passing it on to my children. I will attempt to give you just a slice of my musings on that journey.

Much of my earliest experiences with prayer were tactile and concrete. They often involved asking for things:

God, would you do this.

God, would you make that happen.

God, would you heal this person.

God, would you provide money.

God, would you save someone.

After leaving the cult, I largely stopped asking God for things. One of the reasons was that it felt too vulnerable. If I asked, I opened myself up to not receiving what I wanted. I opened myself up to more loss and pain. The prospect was too daunting. It was easier not to ask. But somewhere in the muddled mess of that pain, my view of prayer also shifted in a more profound way.

Prayer is a practice in intimacy and vulnerability.

Even at a young age, I felt most connected to God when I was authentically expressing my emotions, my desires, my heart. These were times when I was closeted away in an attic alone, with no one to impress, rather than the times I was expected to perform a prayer or pray for a specific thing with a group of people listening. Prayer became me sharing the raw vulnerability of my being and perhaps God sharing back as well. I found there is a big difference between acknowledging pain to God in prayer and asking Him to fix it.

This kind of prayer doesn’t ask for anything—other than presence. It asks:

Do you see me?

Are you with me?

If I show you my full unedited self, will you still want to be with me?

It is a prayer that ultimately asks for secure attachment.

In The Awakened Heart, Gerald G. May writes, “I think most people have trouble with prayer because prayer is really an act of love, and therefore demands vulnerability. As with the love, the more we try to control prayer, the less prayer can happen. Yet the desire to defend and protect oneself is understandable. Prayer is where we most directly face the truth of ourselves and of the world: it is a risky business indeed. When I feel the fear associated with this vulnerability, I find it reassuring to remember that the word prayer comes from the Latin word precarius, meaning to depend upon grace. From this root also come our English word precarious” (60).

Prayer is also a practice in surrender.

That word—surrender—is a complicated one for me. It was used over and over on the farm to justify abuse and ask for blind acquiescence. I was told, God just wanted me to surrender more. But I’m slowly starting to reclaim that word, and the practices of centering prayer and welcoming prayer have helped me do so.

About surrender, Cynthia Bourgeault writes, “We usually equate the word with capitulation and consider it a sign of weakness. But surrender, spiritually understood, has nothing to do with outer capitulation, with rolling over and playing dead. It has everything to do with keeping the right alignment inwardly that allows you to stay in the flow of your deeper sustaining wisdom—to ‘feel the force,’ in those legendary words from the first Star Wars movie. In that state of openness you then decide what you’re going to do about the outer situation. Whatever you do, whether you acquiesce or vigorously resist, your actions will be clear” (The Wisdom Jesus, 174)

I’ve observed that often people think they know what God’s will is, so they pray it confidently. Perhaps there are times when someone is that wise and can do so appropriately. But more and more I find myself humbled by not knowing. I’m not God. I don’t know what God’s will is for another human being. Half the time I’m still trying to figure out what “God’s will” is for my own being, let alone someone else’s. I know what I would choose for the person I’m praying for—essentially what I want—but I can’t know if that’s what God wants. How do I know that my prayer isn’t just my attempt to control a situation to get what I want, rather than what is best for the other person? Am I praying to ease my own discomfort? Considering this, I retreat to prayers that I feel confident in. I suppose this just reflects my overall journey and theological outlook over the last decade or so.

I don’t often know if it’s God’s will for someone to be physically healed. Could it happen? Yes. Will it? I have no idea. I suppose we can ask. But we can’t demand. And we can’t assume that what we ask is the will of God, or our interpretation of the will of God. I have a dear friend who lost his beloved wife to cancer a handful of years ago. He prayed and prayed for complete and utter healing. One day long after the funeral he was sitting at his kitchen table angrily telling God this wasn’t what he asked for, when, as my friend would say, a holy spirit zinger came.

What do you think I did? God said.

Gulp.

“That’s not what I meant!” my friend replied.

But it was technically a complete answer to prayer.

Only his wife wasn’t physically with him any longer. Being told yes was still excruciatingly painful.

Personally, I have a hard time with approaches that pray “with faith” that someone with a fatal diagnosis (or fill in the blank with any other example) will be healed right up until the moment of death. “We claim it!” some people say. “We believe!” But I would softly counter, how much of that “faith” is just denial of an awful, painful reality no one wants to face. How much better could that time be served preparing for what will come, relationally and practically. What if “God’s will” is more about ending well and being fully present to the reality of grief than it is about asking to be delivered from something hard.

Another thing I don’t know is if it’s God’s will for someone to be released from suffering or hardship. I can hear your possible protest: Doesn’t God love us and want good things for us? Absolutely. But what’s the interpretation of “good”? I’ve been through the fires of internal suffering enough to know they’ve been the most powerful forces in my life. They sucked to high hell. But they have also brought the deepest wisdom, the steadiest confidence, the hardest-wrought humility, and utter transformation within me of what matters most. Would I dare to assume that God might not want that for someone else as well? What if my prayers to “fix” something in someone else’s life might just be getting in the way of their own profound journey?

This begs all kinds of complicated questions. Does this mean God inflicts the suffering? Or just allow it? What about his sovereignty and his goodness? Doesn’t he hate injustice? All valid questions. And all reasons why knowing what to ask is beyond me. So, I stick to what I feel confident in asking.

I ask for presence.

God make yourself known to this person in the midst of what is going on.

I ask for love (but I don’t claim to know how or what that should look like).

You get the idea.

Often, my prayers stop using words altogether.

I might cup my hands and extend them, symbolically showing that I’m holding this. My heart is heavy with something. Yet it is beyond me. I extend out my hands to show that I have to trust it to someone beyond me, someone wiser. I have to orient my inner being to come in alignment with true wisdom, often without ever knowing what the external “answer” is.

At times, yoga has become an embodied prayer language for me. It teaches me to become more fully present, aware of my body, sensations, quiet the ramblings of my mind. I learn to use it as a way to say, here I am. I learn to be present, work to accept myself as I am—my body, my thoughts, emotions—to bring myself into alignment with reality, to release what doesn’t serve me and what I can’t control. This is the essence of prayer, a re-alignment. Richard Rohr describes prayer as “resonance.” He writes, “Prayer is actually setting out a tuning fork. All you can really do in the spiritual life is get tuned to receive the always present message. Once you are tuned, you will receive, and it has nothing to do with worthiness or the group you belong to, but only inner resonance and capacity for mutuality. The sender is absolutely and always present and broadcasting; the only change is with the receiver station” (The Naked Now, p.101-2).

If this is true, then prayer is anything that helps you with that tuning. It might be silence, a walk in the woods, a full-tilt run, a holy encounter with a book, chanting the Psalms, meditation, planting a garden, washing dishes, putting my children to bed with a keen awareness that makes me fully present…this list has no limit. For myself, sometimes the very act of writing is a type of prayer. For you it might be another form of creation or being in the world. It might just be showing up day after day in your marriage or at your job, saying here I am, I’m still here. It matters little what you are doing, and it matters entirely how you are.

In this way, whole lives can become as a prayer. Pray without ceasing, the scripture text says. Have you ever stopped to wonder about this? If prayer is verbally asking God for things, this admonition is impossible. Why would God give us an impossible admonition, like an impossible standard we can never live up to and dismiss with niggling shame every time we come across it. Personally, I believe the answer lies somewhere in the fact that prayer is a way of being in the world. Without ceasing, the divine calls to us, and invites us to work to attune ourselves to a higher level of consciousness, an alternative way of being in the world, a way to be more fully present and integrated no matter what physical task we are doing. I’m far from there. But I’m learning to trace the paths of the contemplatives, the mystics, the wisdom tradition, of Y’shua himself—the ultimate wisdom teacher—as illuminating the way.

Keep practicing, they say. Step where you can. Keep opening. Keep being.

Further resources that have helped my journey in this area:

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