Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools: An Invitation to the Wonder and Mystery of Prayer

by Tyler Staton

But most Christ followers spend far more hours turning over anxious thoughts than surrendering them in prayer. If it’s right there, so plain and clear, why not take God up on such a satisfying exchange? Short answer: we don’t buy it.

To pray is to willingly put ourselves in the unguarded, exposed position.

You and I have been groomed by a post-Enlightenment story of deconstruction that doesn’t trust God anymore but has plenty of reasons not to trust people either.

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.

We dwindle God down to a divine Being just as overwhelmed and powerless as we are, and our prayers to that God are understandably vague and infrequent.

Constantly overwhelmed lives should drive us to prayer at its purest and rawest, but the tendency for many of us is to pray safe, calculated prayers that insulate us from both disappointment and freedom.

Before we can have faith that God will answer a given request, we simply have to learn to trust the character of the God we’re talking to.

Jesus hasn’t revealed a God we can perfectly understand, but he has revealed a God we can perfectly trust.

I trust the God who, even when he doesn’t make the suffering go away, wears the suffering alongside me. Trusting the God revealed in Jesus means silence is real, but it’s not forever.

God is looking for relationship, not well-prepared speeches spoken from perfect motives. God listened to overreacting rage, dramatic despair, and guileless joy, and he called David a man after his own heart.

S. Lewis said of prayer, “We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.”

In the wise words of Candler School of Theology professor emerita Roberta Bondi, “If you are praying, you are already ‘doing it right.’”16

“The most important discovery you will ever make is the love the Father has for you,”

Unless our mission and our acts of mercy, our intercession, petition, confession, and spiritual warfare begin and end in the knowledge of the Father’s love, we will act and pray out of desperation, determination, and duty instead of revelation, expectation, and joy.”

True love requires personal experience.

Prayer is learned by discovery.

If you can’t pray with hope and faith, God isn’t bothered. He wants you to tell him about your doubt and disappointment.

If you can’t pray in phrases of praise and adoration, don’t fake it. Pray your complaints, your anger, or your confusion.

And if you’re more comfortable with cynicism than innocence, unsure about your motives, afraid of silence, afraid of an answer, or pretty confident you aren’t doing i...

Pray as you can, and somewhere along the way, you will make the most important discovery of your life—th...

But in a world that for the most part rejects him, ignores him, and chooses any distraction over him, imagine how much it must bless the heart of the Father to hear, “I want to be with you. I choose you, God, over every other option.”

Prayer is not the memorizing of facts or highlighting of key phrases; it’s a relational discovery.

Prayer doesn’t begin with us; it begins with God. It doesn’t start with speaking; it starts with seeing.

Before we open our lips and say a single word to God, we have to discover the proper posture. But we’ll need the right sponsor—a mentor in prayer who will take us where we weren’t planning to go to show us what we aren’t currently seeing.

The Christian philosopher Dallas Willard was once asked, “What do I need to do to be spiritually healthy?” After a long pause, he offered this (now famous) response: “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”

All the way back at the beginning of the story, Adam and Eve took and ate the forbidden fruit from that one forbidden tree.17 They sinned. Then they hid, made clothes, argued, and blamed. They dealt with their sin through what Richard Foster calls “muchness and manyness,” what Michael Zigarelli names “busyness,” and what Dallas Willard diagnoses as “hurry.” And ever since then, we’ve always found it easiest to ignore the truth as long as we never stop moving.

I go to bed worried about deadlines, bills, and to-do lists. David hit the pillow worried about the enemy camped in the hill country and waiting for the right moment to charge. And he prioritized time for stillness. He had a habit of stillness that allowed him to see his own life from God’s perspective.

The great scandal and most important work of prayer is simply to let ourselves be loved by God.

There’s a good kind of small, and it comes with wonder at the God who is big enough to fashion the cosmos with his breath and personal enough to take a real interest in the events of my day and the fluctuation of my emotions.

Stillness is the quiet space where God migrates from the periphery back to the center, and prayer pours forth from the life that has God at the center.

To turn our fast lives into stillness and our busy minds into solitude is an act of rebellion against the curse that runs through our veins.

Live like this world and this life is all you’ve got, and you’ll lose yourself in trying to be everything for everybody. Pretending you are eternal is a miserable, dehumanizing lie—the original lie.

when, by stillness, we remember our mortality, we recover who we are.

When I pray, when I see myself as I really am from God’s perspective, I behold not only my own smallness but also how valuable I truly am to God.

When you see how great God is and how fragile and fleeting you are, you equally see how profoundly you matter. The Creator has time for you. You and I are clay jars. We’re dust. But God has hidden redemption in us.

“Be still, and know that I am God.” Slow down. Remember who God really is. Remember who you really are. That’s prayer.

Jesus was intentional and interruptible. There’s a word for that posture: unhurried.

Stillness before God transforms us into unhurried love. It is in the stillness of silent prayer that God turns over the soil of our hearts, revealing our desires to us and the source of their fullest satisfaction.

God has to break our attachments to the world so we can truly love the world. God has to break our attachments to the people in it who feed our egos so we can truly see others, know others, welcome others, and love others. The place where this work happens is silent prayer. In this way, stillness is profoundly missional. Stillness starts in isolation and ends in “being with everybody.”

Be still. Remember who God is. Remember who you are. Then do your best to live without getting the order mixed up. That’ll be enough. That’s where you start changing, and as a result, the world around you starts changing too.

Resist the urge to decide if this practice of silent prayer is “working.” Don’t evaluate if you’re “getting anything out of it.” Simply trust that the practice of a couple centuries’ worth of saints, and the practice of Jesus himself, might have a place in your life too.

Jesus prayed differently. He honored the common Jewish prayer rhythm (more on that later), but he prayed with a sense of familiarity with God that no one had ever seen. He also prayed with a reverence that was more than cultural but was sincere and honest. His prayers were conversations, not just pleas, involving as much—probably more—listening than talking.

These disciples knew a God of cleansing rituals and animal sacrifices, a God of ten plagues and blood on the doorpost, a God who parts seas and floods the earth, a God with a heavy hand of deliverance and a heavy hand of judgment—awesome in power but hard to get to know. Jesus did nothing to diminish the reverence, nothing to minimize the power of God. Jesus made that powerful God knowable.

Jesus prayed to the revered God of power and judgment with the familiarity of the term Father.

Never does he say, “Here, try the fruit,” or anything of that sort. Instead, the serpent takes aim at Eve’s belief in the character of God.

As we lift our eyes, recovering a true view of God’s identity, we also recover his view of us.

the biblical use of the word saint has nothing to do with human competence and everything to do with divine grace.

Adoration is the place of prayer where we discover that God’s love is the defining reality of every square inch of creation, including me and you.

We never outgrow the need to be reminded by the day, by the hour, sometimes even by the minute, “You’ll always love me no matter what, though, Dad.”

Jesus teaches that when our lips open from the quiet, centering place of contemplative silence, the words we speak first should honor the God who is on the receiving end of our prayers.