The Individual Spiritual Life: Skilful Means
+In the Name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In this second talk on the role of individual prayer on spiritual life, I want to start by backing up to look at the big picture of prayer, and then, like one of those guys on a TV tool show warning us always to wear safety goggles, I will have to repeat a caution about the use of skilful means of prayer.
When I say "the big picture," what I have in mind is the theological setting of prayer. It's natural enough for us to say that prayer is a conversation with God, or a process of making requests of God--something like that. And for the ordinary means of prayer, as a sort of first approximation, that's close enough. But on the Christian understanding, it's not quite accurate, and when we begin to look at skilful means of prayer, we become more and more conscious of the inaccuracy. As Christians understand it, there is a sort of prayer that is simply conversation with God, or speech directed to God. I mentioned the other day, when I was talking about ordinary forms of prayer, the angels' hymn of adoration to God, "Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God of Hosts." That hymn, when the angels sing it, is speech directed to God, and God is well pleased with it: it is part of the unfallen Creation that God declared to be "very good" when he rested from all his work.
But in that same story of the angels singing to God, we also see the prophet Isaiah as a typical human being--or, rather, more than typical, since he is a priest of God at God's holy Temple in Jerusalem. But even Isaiah the priest realizes that he can't really adore God the way the angels do. He is, he says, a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips. That is to say, even though he is a priest in the Temple, he is still part of the fallen creation, and an angel comes with a burning coal from the heavenly altar and burns his lips before he is pure enough to proclaim the message God has for God's people. God obviously hears the prayers of his beloved people of Israel as they gather at the Temple, and yet there is something wrong, something fallen, even with those prayers: and the prayers of the Gentiles--the non-Jewish nations with all their gods and all their sacrifices--those prayers are not merely fallen but perverted.
The Christian hope, the Christian Gospel, however, is that God's intention is to restore that which is fallen--or not merely to restore it, actually, but to make something new that is even more glorious than that which fell. And the way in which God renews prayer is by changing its basic nature. Even the unfallen prayer of the angels was still speech directed to God, from the outside. But God in God's own transcendent eternity--God in the depths of the mystery of simply being God--God in Godself is always engaged in a conversation of love and adoration, the mutual courtesy of the Holy Trinity of God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Now the basis of Christian restoration and renewal is that through baptism we become part of the Body of Christ: and so Christian prayer is not conversation directed at God from the outside, but rather it is prayer "through Jesus Christ our Lord," part of the Holy Trinity's own mysterious internal exchange. Saint Paul says that it is the Holy Spirit which cries out "Abba, Father" in our hearts, and he doesn't just mean that the Spirit provides the word "father": he means, rather, that in and through us the Spirit speaks to the Father.
All of that big picture may not be on our minds as we go about our typical ordinary daily prayer (though I suppose it might be a good thing if it were): but the skilful means of prayer particularly work at making us conscious of--or, rather, leaving us open to--the internal conversation of God that flows through us. John the Baptist said about Jesus, "he must increase and I must decrease," and that is the message that the skilful means of prayer give us, as well. These are means of prayer that remind us that prayer is ultimately about God, and not about us.
Now, as to the safety goggles warning: if you are going to engage in skilful means of prayer, you should probably have some sort of a spiritual advisor, just as you shouldn't start an intensive athletic training program without professional advice from a doctor, coach or trainer. It's not that these forms of prayer are dangerous in themselves--though some of them, if you didn't observe the rule of moderation, might not be good for growing adolescent bodies--but the mere fact that we're consciously doing something special in our prayer lives is in itself an invitation to pride, and if I start to be proud of my praying, I'll soon be in worse trouble than when I started. Then, too, some of these forms of prayer can become sort of obsessions--a person can get stuck on the means of the prayer, and lose track of the point, the attempt to be more open to God. And, finally, it may be that some or all of the skilful means don't happen to work for you. A good spiritual director can provide us with guidance about what works and doesn't work, so that we don't come away from a particular form of prayer so discouraged that we want to give up praying altogether. So, by all means, do try this at home, but find a spiritual coach--or, at the very least, a spiritual friend to act as a spotter when you begin lifting spiritual weights.
The first category of skilful means, then, I think, is doing without one or more good things. Doing without one of God's good gifts isn't verbal prayer in and of itself. Rather, it's partly a way of preparing for verbal prayer and partly an exercise in prayer as a way of life. Note, before we get into this, that giving up bad things doesn't really count. We are obliged to give up bad habits, because they're sinful, or harmful to ourselves or others, or even violations of the civil law: but that's a different category of behavior from the sort of prayer we're talking about here.
One area in which one can give up good things is that of the ordinary activities of life. Instead of eating, there is abstinence or fasting. Technically, abstinence is restricting what you eat and drink (giving up Diet Coke for Lent, for example), while fasting is restricting how much you eat and drink (for instance, cutting back to the equivalent of two meals a day during Lent). Instead of talking, there is keeping silence, as many people do on an annual retreat; instead of sleeping, there is staying awake in a vigil of prayer, as early Christians did on the eve of any major holy day.
A person can also give up, for a while or permanently, one or more of the ordinary rights of life. Instead of the right to property, a person can embrace poverty, like Saint Francis of Assisi; instead of the right to marriage and a family, one can be celibate; instead of the right to make free decisions for oneself, one can place oneself under obedience, as monks and nuns are obedient to the elected abbots and abbesses of their communities.
The second category of skilful means is adding something, doing something new rather than giving up something we already have. Two aspects of this are constant prayer and contemplation.
Constant prayer includes, to begin with, actual verbal prayer constantly repeated throughout our waking hours as a way of centering our lives on God's conversation. I mentioned in the last sermon the Jesus Prayer--"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner," and people do, in fact, repeat this prayer constantly, all the day long: but other words could be used. Ancient monks, for example, used the psalm verses that we say at the beginning of noonday prayer--"O God make speed to save me: O Lord make haste to help me." In addition to verbal prayer, though, constant prayer can also mean that we take the daily work of our lives and offer it to God as a prayer: the great Saint Benedict, the founder of monasticism in the western world, said that "to work was to pray," and the Anglican poet and priest George Herbert wrote in a poem (quoted in the Hymnal as #592) that to offer our work--even if it's just sweeping the floor--to God as a prayer was like touching it with the philosopher's stone, turning otherwise worthless stuff into gold.
Contemplation is the most skilful of all skilful means, and probably the one that fewest of us are cut out for, in this life (though it is the destiny of all of us in the world to come). In contemplation, we aim to come to a direct conscious participation in God--or, I should say, in contemplation we try to get rid of our conscious aims in order to let our participation in God break through. Teachers of contemplation talk about two different flavors, two "ways" of contemplation. One of these is the affirmative way. It starts off from the goodness and truth and beauty of the world around us and climbs up, so to speak, to God as the source of all goodness and truth and beauty, and even, if I can put it this way, into God who is in Godself more good than goodness, more true than truth, more beautiful than beauty. The other flavor, the negative way of contemplation, starts from the principal that the world is, after all, only a creation of God, and not God in Godself. So if we hope for or desire the experience of God, we have to eliminate every influence of the created world, every thing and idea from the universe around us. One of the great German teachers of the negative way said that in the end we have to eliminate even the idea of God from our minds--for God is more than our mere created idea of God, and so long as we hold onto the idea, there is no room in our minds for the infinite vastness of God in Godself.
I would be really, seriously out of my depth if I tried to say very much to you specifically about contemplative prayer. But I can tell you something about a prayer practice that many people recommend as sort of a taste of contemplation. This is called "centering prayer," and it goes like this. You start off, as in most forms of prayer, by quieting down. Find a comfortable place and begin by just sitting. As you begin to be still, try to let your mind move toward God--most people find that it's easiest to think of this as a movement inward, into the center of the stillness, as if you were moving from the outside of a wheel, spinning rapidly around, into the very center of the axle where there is no motion at all. (This is of course why they call it "centering prayer.") As you come to the center, try to pay attention to some single sacred word--the name "Jesus," or the word "Lord"--anything that gives you a point to focus on, or anchor to--perhaps as if you were putting a tiny dot of florescent paint right at that still center point of the axle. If you sense yourself drifting off-center, gently nudge yourself back to that word. And then, finally, when you've had enough, allow yourself to move away from the center, and say some sort of brief verbal prayer. People who practice centering prayer recommend allowing about twenty minutes for each session, and suggest doing it twice a day.
So much, then--and it's really not very much--for the role of individual prayer, both simple and advanced, in the individual spiritual life. There is still one thing left to talk about, and that is the importance of rest.
--John Wm. Houghton
+In the Name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In this second talk on the role of individual prayer on spiritual life, I want to start by backing up to look at the big picture of prayer, and then, like one of those guys on a TV tool show warning us always to wear safety goggles, I will have to repeat a caution about the use of skilful means of prayer.
When I say "the big picture," what I have in mind is the theological setting of prayer. It's natural enough for us to say that prayer is a conversation with God, or a process of making requests of God--something like that. And for the ordinary means of prayer, as a sort of first approximation, that's close enough. But on the Christian understanding, it's not quite accurate, and when we begin to look at skilful means of prayer, we become more and more conscious of the inaccuracy. As Christians understand it, there is a sort of prayer that is simply conversation with God, or speech directed to God. I mentioned the other day, when I was talking about ordinary forms of prayer, the angels' hymn of adoration to God, "Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God of Hosts." That hymn, when the angels sing it, is speech directed to God, and God is well pleased with it: it is part of the unfallen Creation that God declared to be "very good" when he rested from all his work.
But in that same story of the angels singing to God, we also see the prophet Isaiah as a typical human being--or, rather, more than typical, since he is a priest of God at God's holy Temple in Jerusalem. But even Isaiah the priest realizes that he can't really adore God the way the angels do. He is, he says, a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips. That is to say, even though he is a priest in the Temple, he is still part of the fallen creation, and an angel comes with a burning coal from the heavenly altar and burns his lips before he is pure enough to proclaim the message God has for God's people. God obviously hears the prayers of his beloved people of Israel as they gather at the Temple, and yet there is something wrong, something fallen, even with those prayers: and the prayers of the Gentiles--the non-Jewish nations with all their gods and all their sacrifices--those prayers are not merely fallen but perverted.
The Christian hope, the Christian Gospel, however, is that God's intention is to restore that which is fallen--or not merely to restore it, actually, but to make something new that is even more glorious than that which fell. And the way in which God renews prayer is by changing its basic nature. Even the unfallen prayer of the angels was still speech directed to God, from the outside. But God in God's own transcendent eternity--God in the depths of the mystery of simply being God--God in Godself is always engaged in a conversation of love and adoration, the mutual courtesy of the Holy Trinity of God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Now the basis of Christian restoration and renewal is that through baptism we become part of the Body of Christ: and so Christian prayer is not conversation directed at God from the outside, but rather it is prayer "through Jesus Christ our Lord," part of the Holy Trinity's own mysterious internal exchange. Saint Paul says that it is the Holy Spirit which cries out "Abba, Father" in our hearts, and he doesn't just mean that the Spirit provides the word "father": he means, rather, that in and through us the Spirit speaks to the Father.
All of that big picture may not be on our minds as we go about our typical ordinary daily prayer (though I suppose it might be a good thing if it were): but the skilful means of prayer particularly work at making us conscious of--or, rather, leaving us open to--the internal conversation of God that flows through us. John the Baptist said about Jesus, "he must increase and I must decrease," and that is the message that the skilful means of prayer give us, as well. These are means of prayer that remind us that prayer is ultimately about God, and not about us.
Now, as to the safety goggles warning: if you are going to engage in skilful means of prayer, you should probably have some sort of a spiritual advisor, just as you shouldn't start an intensive athletic training program without professional advice from a doctor, coach or trainer. It's not that these forms of prayer are dangerous in themselves--though some of them, if you didn't observe the rule of moderation, might not be good for growing adolescent bodies--but the mere fact that we're consciously doing something special in our prayer lives is in itself an invitation to pride, and if I start to be proud of my praying, I'll soon be in worse trouble than when I started. Then, too, some of these forms of prayer can become sort of obsessions--a person can get stuck on the means of the prayer, and lose track of the point, the attempt to be more open to God. And, finally, it may be that some or all of the skilful means don't happen to work for you. A good spiritual director can provide us with guidance about what works and doesn't work, so that we don't come away from a particular form of prayer so discouraged that we want to give up praying altogether. So, by all means, do try this at home, but find a spiritual coach--or, at the very least, a spiritual friend to act as a spotter when you begin lifting spiritual weights.
The first category of skilful means, then, I think, is doing without one or more good things. Doing without one of God's good gifts isn't verbal prayer in and of itself. Rather, it's partly a way of preparing for verbal prayer and partly an exercise in prayer as a way of life. Note, before we get into this, that giving up bad things doesn't really count. We are obliged to give up bad habits, because they're sinful, or harmful to ourselves or others, or even violations of the civil law: but that's a different category of behavior from the sort of prayer we're talking about here.
One area in which one can give up good things is that of the ordinary activities of life. Instead of eating, there is abstinence or fasting. Technically, abstinence is restricting what you eat and drink (giving up Diet Coke for Lent, for example), while fasting is restricting how much you eat and drink (for instance, cutting back to the equivalent of two meals a day during Lent). Instead of talking, there is keeping silence, as many people do on an annual retreat; instead of sleeping, there is staying awake in a vigil of prayer, as early Christians did on the eve of any major holy day.
A person can also give up, for a while or permanently, one or more of the ordinary rights of life. Instead of the right to property, a person can embrace poverty, like Saint Francis of Assisi; instead of the right to marriage and a family, one can be celibate; instead of the right to make free decisions for oneself, one can place oneself under obedience, as monks and nuns are obedient to the elected abbots and abbesses of their communities.
The second category of skilful means is adding something, doing something new rather than giving up something we already have. Two aspects of this are constant prayer and contemplation.
Constant prayer includes, to begin with, actual verbal prayer constantly repeated throughout our waking hours as a way of centering our lives on God's conversation. I mentioned in the last sermon the Jesus Prayer--"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner," and people do, in fact, repeat this prayer constantly, all the day long: but other words could be used. Ancient monks, for example, used the psalm verses that we say at the beginning of noonday prayer--"O God make speed to save me: O Lord make haste to help me." In addition to verbal prayer, though, constant prayer can also mean that we take the daily work of our lives and offer it to God as a prayer: the great Saint Benedict, the founder of monasticism in the western world, said that "to work was to pray," and the Anglican poet and priest George Herbert wrote in a poem (quoted in the Hymnal as #592) that to offer our work--even if it's just sweeping the floor--to God as a prayer was like touching it with the philosopher's stone, turning otherwise worthless stuff into gold.
Contemplation is the most skilful of all skilful means, and probably the one that fewest of us are cut out for, in this life (though it is the destiny of all of us in the world to come). In contemplation, we aim to come to a direct conscious participation in God--or, I should say, in contemplation we try to get rid of our conscious aims in order to let our participation in God break through. Teachers of contemplation talk about two different flavors, two "ways" of contemplation. One of these is the affirmative way. It starts off from the goodness and truth and beauty of the world around us and climbs up, so to speak, to God as the source of all goodness and truth and beauty, and even, if I can put it this way, into God who is in Godself more good than goodness, more true than truth, more beautiful than beauty. The other flavor, the negative way of contemplation, starts from the principal that the world is, after all, only a creation of God, and not God in Godself. So if we hope for or desire the experience of God, we have to eliminate every influence of the created world, every thing and idea from the universe around us. One of the great German teachers of the negative way said that in the end we have to eliminate even the idea of God from our minds--for God is more than our mere created idea of God, and so long as we hold onto the idea, there is no room in our minds for the infinite vastness of God in Godself.
I would be really, seriously out of my depth if I tried to say very much to you specifically about contemplative prayer. But I can tell you something about a prayer practice that many people recommend as sort of a taste of contemplation. This is called "centering prayer," and it goes like this. You start off, as in most forms of prayer, by quieting down. Find a comfortable place and begin by just sitting. As you begin to be still, try to let your mind move toward God--most people find that it's easiest to think of this as a movement inward, into the center of the stillness, as if you were moving from the outside of a wheel, spinning rapidly around, into the very center of the axle where there is no motion at all. (This is of course why they call it "centering prayer.") As you come to the center, try to pay attention to some single sacred word--the name "Jesus," or the word "Lord"--anything that gives you a point to focus on, or anchor to--perhaps as if you were putting a tiny dot of florescent paint right at that still center point of the axle. If you sense yourself drifting off-center, gently nudge yourself back to that word. And then, finally, when you've had enough, allow yourself to move away from the center, and say some sort of brief verbal prayer. People who practice centering prayer recommend allowing about twenty minutes for each session, and suggest doing it twice a day.
So much, then--and it's really not very much--for the role of individual prayer, both simple and advanced, in the individual spiritual life. There is still one thing left to talk about, and that is the importance of rest.
--John Wm. Houghton