Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools

Mary Karr, Lit: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 239.

The middle is where the mystery lies. The middle is where all our questions about prayer are littered. Is prayer really necessary? If God is all-powerful, that means he accomplishes what he wants, when he wants, right? So why does he need me to ask? Why does God sometimes seem to answer prayers, but only after a long, long period of asking? If the

That love I can’t seem to outrun—it’s the only thing powerful enough to change me.

So when Jesus says to the invalid, “Do you want to get well?” it’s like he’s saying, “I want to hear you say it.”

Julian of Norwich, a thirteenth-century English anchoress, described God as “completely relaxed and courteous, he [God] was himself the happiness and peace of his dear friends, his beautiful face radiating measureless love like a marvellous symphony.”7 She imagined God grateful and at peace in the company of friends, content to love them, his love

Simply and clearly ask that God’s kingdom will come where it is absent—friends

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

What if it’s awkward or disappointing or boring, or what if God stands me up altogether? When we’ve got that much to lose, prayer might be scarier than the avoidance of never being alone with God.

Instead, even in the church, our prayers don’t exchange overwhelmed lives for transcendent peace. They simply drag God into our overwhelmed lives, and the only way we can make him fit is to shrink him down to a reduced size. We keep on praying, but we lower the bar of expectation and power in prayer.

Prayer is how I discovered God. Prayer is why I became a pastor. Prayer is the source of my life’s greatest celebrations, most heartrending disappointments, and most confusing (and still unanswered) questions. Prayer is not a soft place to lay our heads or a workout routine for burning spiritual fat. It’s a wild, unpredictable adventure that only t