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

by Tyler Staton

Prayer invites you to learn to listen to God before speaking, to ask like a child in your old age, to scream your questions in an angry tirade, to undress yourself in vulnerable confession, and to be loved—completely and totally loved, in spite of everything.

Prayer itself makes us anxious because it uncovers fears we can ignore as long as we don’t engage deeply, thoughtfully, vulnerably with God.

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 kick like mad to keep our heads above water, all the while talking passively to an imagined God who is powerless to do most anything except give us the right perspective to make it through the day. 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. In my experience, trying to will faith into the equation doesn’t make the possibility of silence any less terrifying, but trusting the character of the listener certainly does. Trust allows us to say, “I don’t understand what God is doing right now, but I trust that God is good.”

God listened to overreacting rage, dramatic despair, and guileless joy, and he called David a man after his own heart.13 When it comes to prayer, God isn’t grading essays; he’s talking to children. So if God can delight in prayers as dysfunctional as the ones we find wedged into the middle of the Bible, he can handle yours too without you cleaning them up first. If the Bible tells us anything about how to pray, it says that God much prefers the rough draft full of rants and typos to the polished, edited version. C. S. Lewis said of prayer, “We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.”

Prayer is about presence before it’s about anything else. Prayer doesn’t begin with outcomes. Prayer is the free choice to be with the Father, to prefer his company.

A journalist once asked theologian Thomas Merton to diagnose the leading spiritual disease of our time. Merton gave a one-word answer: “efficiency.”

Jesus was intentional and interruptible. There’s a word for that posture: unhurried. Hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life. Why? Because hurry kills love. Hurry hides behind anger, agitation, and self-centeredness, blinding our eyes to the truth that we are God’s beloved and she is sister, he is brother.

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.

This observation is paramount and so frequently misconstrued: Sin, defined by the biblical imagination, is not an accusation or a condemnation; it’s just a diagnosis. It’s a trip to the doctor’s office where you describe your symptoms and discover that “there’s a name for this disease.” The trouble with disease is that it gets in the way of doing what we were made to do—namely, live free, healthy lives, using our bodies according to their design.

Dane Ortlund, a Chicago area–based pastor and author, writes, “If you are in Christ, you have a Friend who, in your sorrow, will never lob down a pep talk from heaven. He cannot bear to hold himself at a distance. Nothing can hold him back. His heart is too bound up with yours.”

Maturity is discovering the depths of my personal brand of fallenness and the depths to which God’s grace has really penetrated, even without me knowing it.

Our prayers don’t reflect the wide-eyed, blazing sense of empowerment that the Son of Man’s words engender in anyone who really believes them. We pray the safest kind of prayers—the ones so passive and vague we’d never be able to tell if God responded to them or not.

The motive behind all true intercessory prayer is love for the other. Jesus isn’t describing some real-life version of wishes to a cosmic genie that occasionally come true if you figure out the formula. He’s talking about the kind of prayers that start with love for someone else and end with inviting God’s activity into places where that love is lacking. Intercession is a willing and intentional choice to turn from the endless spiral into the self—my desires, my needs, my circumstances—to the desires, needs, and circumstances of another. To utter even a syllable of intercessory prayer is a profound act of love.

God created you and me in his image and gave us a creation to manage. This place we inhabit is our assignment—to spread his image into every square inch.

“In Jesus’ name” was never meant to become just a fitting tagline at the end of the prayers of experienced Christians. It’s the exercise of Jesus’ victory. To pray is to experience the very same access to God the Father that Jesus has. New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado writes, “To pray in Jesus’ name . . . means that we enter into Jesus’ status in God’s favour, and invoke Jesus’ standing with God.”19

Intercessory prayer simultaneously restores our world and restores the God-given identity that was breathed into us first. It is the active experience of restoring creation.

In your asking, be brief and be specific. We tend to pray wordy, vague prayers when asking, almost like we’re afraid to lay our requests before him boldly. Resist the urge to cover for God or make it easy on him. He can handle your requests. Just ask.

When the language we use in our prayers stays grounded, our prayers tend to stay grounded too. Ordinary language keeps us from lofty prayers that usher the activity of God into some far-off imaginative place and instead invites God into the here and now, into the concerns of today—what I’ll eat, who I’ll meet, what I’ll do, and how I’ll feel about it all along the way.

When we trust God with our worldview but not our current experience in the world, we are falling victim to the lure of control.

Jesus teaches us to include the phrase “give us” in our prayers. Daily, as we ask, he weans us off our addiction to independence, our insistence on living under the illusion that what we most deeply desire we can feed ourselves all on our own. Our requests are not the spoiled whining of a child or the shaking change cup of a beggar. Daily bread prayers are a daily reminder that we are not in charge, not in control.

When you ask anyone for anything, you risk rejection or at least disappointment. Until we ask God for something, he can’t disappoint or surprise us. We cannot build trust with God without asking. We can’t relate to God if we never ask. Without asking, God is something less than a free, relational Being. He is a machine delivering on our desires, maybe even before we become conscious of what we want. Asking is the means by which we build the relationship with God he designed us to enjoy.

He heard God say, “I the LORD do not change.”16 But then there’s Hosea, to whom God said, “My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused.”17 How can both of these revelations of God be equally true? Because God is a relational being to know, not a formula to master.

Dallas Willard writes, “God’s ‘response’ to our prayers is not a charade. He does not pretend he is answering our prayer when he is only doing what he was going to do anyway. Our requests really do make a difference in what God does or does not do.”

In Eden, the middle voice was the only form of communication. Adam and Eve were participants in God’s action: naming the animals, harvesting the garden, generously ruling and reigning over every other species. None of what they were entrusted to steward began with them. Everything that is exists because God spoke the first word. But neither does God ask Adam and Eve to sit back and watch him rule. He invites their participation, even designing creation in such a way that it demands participation.

It is symptomatic of spiritual dysfunction to spend time with Jesus and not be employed in the answer to our own prayers.

Wrestling with God through persistent prayer is a confirmation of true belief, not distressing doubt. Those who only half-heartedly believe don’t take offense at silence.

The Bible is not a rule book or a set of directions; it’s a love story—a romantic, courageous love story we’re invited to believe. We see that whole story captured in a single scene when Jesus defends and dignifies a shame-covered woman thrown into the dirt at his feet, but we can see it just as clearly when we zoom all the way out to the metanarrative that God has been authoring since hanging the stars in the night sky.

Like love, prayer comes easy at the first and at the last, for sinners and saints, but all the years in between are the important ones. Prayer is about relationship, and that means fidelity is the only container within which it can truly flourish.

“Prayer does not mean much when we undertake it only as an attempt to influence God, or as a search for a spiritual fallout shelter, or as an offering of comfort in stress-filled times,” writes Henri Nouwen. “Prayer is the act by which we divest ourselves of all false belongings and become free to belong to God and God alone.”

“Teach us to pray.” And Jesus responds, essentially, “Pray to God more intimately than you think you’re allowed to because this is about love, and center your life according to a disciplined rhythm of prayer because fidelity is the soil that love grows in.”

Commitments, not feelings, are how we show our love. David Brooks defines a commitment as “falling in love with something [or someone] and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.”25 Jesus was getting at the same thing when he invited us to take on his “easy yoke.”26 And that’s all a daily prayer rhythm is—a structure to support our deepest desires, even when our feelings and emotions betray us.