Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools

“Prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God’s gift of himself. Ask and seek, and your heart will grow big enough to receive him and keep him as your own,” writes Mother Teresa.

The aim is not to get God in on what I think he should be doing. Rather, the aim of prayer is to get us in on what God is doing, become aware of it, join it, and enjoy the fruit of participation. Prayer is the recovery of our role in God’s created order, the recovery of our true identity and the relationship that defines that identity to us.

Prayer and spirituality feature participation, the complex participation of God and the human, his will and our wills. We do not abandon ourselves to the stream of grace and drown in the ocean of love, losing identity. We do not pull strings that activate God’s operations in our lives, subjecting God to our assertive identity. We neither manipulate

Jesus prays in what Eugene Peterson calls “the middle voice.”1 In the active voice, I (the subject) am the actor. I initiate the action. “I give advice.” In the passive voice, I (the subject) am being acted upon. I receive the action. “I am given advice.” In ancient Greek, the language of the original New Testament, there’s a third way of speaking—

Every last one of them praying with more desperation and desire to a god I don’t even believe exists than I’ve ever prayed to Jesus.”

The assumption of spirituality is that always God is doing something before I know it. So the task is not to get God to do something I think needs to be done, but to become aware of what God is doing so that I can respond to it and participate and take delight in it. Eugene Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor

Communication is essential to relationship—particularly because asking insists on vulnerability. When you ask anyone for anything, you risk rejection or at least disappointment.

Perfect relationship existed when there was nothing else—a completely sufficient triune God. Creation is born out of the abundant overflow of that loving relationship. The closest parallel we see to God’s desire to create is a happily married couple so overjoyed in their union that they decide to have a baby.

Charles Spurgeon points out, this rule even applies to Jesus himself: “Remember, asking is the rule of the kingdom . . . Remember this text, JEHOVAH says to His own Son, ‘Ask me, and I will make the nations your inheritance . . .’ [Psalm 2:8, quoted by Spurgeon in the KJV in his sermon]. If the royal and divine Son of God cannot be exempted from th