Editor’s Note: This the second part of a three-part essay drawn from talks given at a men’s retreat. The first part may be found here.
Part II
Becoming Men of Prayer
So we want to become men of prayer. I should point out that everything I say should be hedged about with caveats, and principally the caveat that this is all based on my experience, for whatever that’s worth. I can only offer you what I have. And what I have is limited, including my experience of prayer. Please don’t think that I am a master. I’m not. At best, I’m someone who pays attention and is trying. I’m moving along the path of epektasis. But that certainly does not mean I have arrived, nor even that I am particularly advanced.
So what is prayer? The 1979 Prayer Book has a handy definition: “Prayer is responding to God, by thought and by deeds, with our without words” (p. 856).
Note that deeds can be a kind of prayer. What kind of deeds? What I have said hitherto should suggest some kinds of deeds, which, if undertaken as a way of “responding to God,” would be a kind of prayer. Like the marital relation. Your marriage can be a prayer. Even, and perhaps even especially, in a deep and mysterious kind of way, your sex life. Your fatherhood, in all its particularities, can be a kind of prayer. Your labor — no matter what you do, so long as it’s not sinful, if you do it in a spirit of obedience to God, and in order to provide for your family — your labor can be a kind of prayer. This is suggested by the Benedictine motto, Ora et labora. Your recreation. Your rest. Your eating. Your travel.
That might sound peculiar. But think about it. There are concrete and overt ways of making, for example, traveling for a vacation into a kind of prayer. You could go on pilgrimage to some sacred site. Christians did this sort of thing instinctively for many centuries. They went to Lourdes, or Fatima, or Rome, or Jerusalem, or Canterbury, or Walsingham. They still do. The writer Paul Kingsnorth has recently concluded a series of essays on holy wells in Ireland. They’re all over the place, hundreds of them, all ancient sites of Christian pilgrimage.
I’m afraid that we, as a culture, are losing the instinctual spiritual consciousness that makes the consecration of travel, and every other area of life, possible. It’s all a matter of your intention. You can sanctify your vacations.
You can sanctify your eating habits by paying attention too. By feasting when the Church suggests that you feast, as in Christmastide, the great 12-day feast that (again) Christians kept instinctively for many centuries, and which many Christians still do. And a very important aspect of the sanctification of our eating is not eating, in other words, fasting when the Church suggests you should fast. The Prayer Book (p. 17) lists fasting days: Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, the weekdays of Lent and Holy Week, and Fridays throughout the year. The season of Advent was, in past centuries, a period of fasting in preparation for the Nativity feast. The feast makes less sense without the fast.
The broad point is that what and when you eat can (and should) become something undertaken in response to God, in obedience, and therefore a kind of prayer. Your whole life — all of your activity — can be like this. If it’s not sinful, it can be sanctified — it can be a kind of prayer. And even sins, though they cannot be sanctified, can be brought into the economy of the spirit by being forgiven. Thus no area of life is outside the penumbra of prayer.
When we think of prayer, we usually think about saying something to God. Or if we’re a little more sophisticated, we might be aware of silent kinds of prayer, like meditation. I will say something about that in due course. But first let’s talk about saying things to God. That’s a perfectly legitimate, basic, and scriptural aspect of prayer.
The Prayer Book (p. 856) lists seven “principal kinds of prayer,” namely: adoration, praise, thanksgiving, penitence, oblation, intercession, and petition. I like to think of four because I’m a simpleton, and because it’s easy to remember the acronym ACTS: adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication. Let’s talk about those four categories of prayer, in that order.
Adoration is when we praise God, when we worship him. You can even do it silently. It’s rooted in an awareness of God’s transcendence, majesty, and goodness. We praise God because he’s praiseworthy, so it’s really a matter of justice (which is rendering to people what they are due). When you adore God — when you praise him, or worship him — you’re acknowledging what’s true; you’re rendering to God what he is due. Praiseworthy things should be praised. What is superlatively praiseworthy should be praised … a lot. This is why David danced before the Lord “with all his might” (2 Sam. 6). His wife got annoyed with him. He didn’t care.
You know what confession is. It too is an aspect of living in the truth. If you’re anything like me, you screw up from time to time. You miss the mark (which is what “sin” means). You lash out in anger. You capitulate to sinful desires. You neglect your duties. Confession, as a form of prayer, means acknowledging this humbly before God. And note that we should confess our sins — not just confess that we have sinned, like we do during the liturgy (“We confess that we have sinned against you, in thought, word, and deed”).
That’s fine, but confessing that you have sinned is not the same thing as confessing your sins. And this is a part of the value of sacramental confession. God looks on the heart. Psalm 51 (v. 17) says: “The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God, shalt thou not despise.” You can’t help but humble yourself in sacramental confession, because you can’t help but notice that there’s a real, live person sitting there listening to you talk about masturbating (or some other sin). It can be easy to obscure this fact from yourself when you just confess your sins “to God.” It’s easy to tell yourself that you’re confessing your sins to God when you’re really just confessing your sins to yourself.
And what’s the point of confessing your sins? Well, to receive forgiveness. To have your spiritual debts cancelled. I recently had my student loan debt cancelled. It was a burden that weighed down my finances, something I was dragging around through the years. Getting rid of it gave me greater financial vitality.
And sin has a corrosive effect. It’s like rust on the soul. If you’re going to be a vessel fit for purpose in God’s kingdom, you need to be shiny and beautiful. You need to be purified in fire, polished and radiant. If you have an audience with King Charles, you don’t want to saunter in wearing Carhartt overalls covered in pond scum and pig poop. He might not throw you out. He might, but he might not. I don’t know. That’s his business. But as a matter of propriety, if you’re a normal person, you will want to look and smell your best.
The same is true in the spiritual life. And that’s what confession is for. That’s why it’s important. At least scrape off the pig poop before your audience with the King.
You know what Thanksgiving is. Again, it’s a part of living in the truth. And the truth is that God is the source of all the goodness in your life. Thanksgiving is the acknowledgment of that truth. Not least because you didn’t create yourself and you wouldn’t be around to have whatever good things you have if you didn’t exist. You have God to thank for that. So thank him.
And as you might know, the word for thanksgiving in Greek is Eucharist. I’ll let you ponder the ramifications of that fact.
Supplication is asking God for stuff. It’s a superficial kind of prayer, but that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant, let alone bad. We should ask God for stuff. In fact, he commands us to ask him for stuff, for ourselves and for others. Paul says to “let your requests be made known to God” (Phil. 4:6). I say it’s “superficial” because, for many people, it’s all they know of prayer. They never go deeper. It’s all I knew of prayer when I was a child. “Lord, give me a pony!”
So what should we ask God for? Ponies? New TVs? A million dollars? Jesus says we should ask God for good things. And that means things that are good by God’s standards of goodness — which may or may not be our standards — which is precisely the problem. Jesus said, “What man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matt. 7:9-11).
This is true when we intercede for other people too. You want to ask for unmitigatedly good things for them, according to God’s standards of goodness. This is an act of humility, an admission that maybe I don’t know what’s good for me or for someone for whom I’m praying. But God knows. Say someone is sick. They want to get better. You want them to get better. But maybe God wants them to be saved, and their sickness is a means to their salvation. If you’re a Christian, you should know there are fates worse than death. There is hell to consider.
God knows what’s good for us. Suffering often produces holiness, and maybe more than anything else. Our supplicatory prayer should take this into account. That doesn’t mean you should pray for suffering. But your supplication should always be qualified by a deference to God’s providence. And I think the whole point of supplication, as much or even more than being an effort to get stuff, is an exercise in learning to defer to God’s providence, to trust his standards of goodness for ourselves and others, and to make those standards our own.
Fr. Will Brown serves as rector of All Saints’, Thomasville. He is a priest of the Society of the Holy Cross, and a disciple of René Girard. He enjoys spending time with his wife and son, and is an avid hunter and fisherman.
