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.

bending history in loving response to the prayed mumblings of a kid.

To everyone else, this is a dingy, old public middle school in need of government funding and mild renovations. To me, this is holy ground.

I’m more familiar with anxiety than I am with peace.

“Silence is frightening because it strips us as nothing else does, throwing us upon the stark realities of our life,”

When we’ve got that much to lose, prayer might be scarier than the avoidance of never being alone with God.

So what’s the fruit of that story of self-sufficiency in the life of the modern person? We’re overwhelmed.

done it at the cost of becoming overwhelmed. The story that was supposed to free us is really just swapping jail cells.

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.

Faith is the assurance of what we hope for.7 Trust is confidence in the character of God.

Without trust, we suppress the disappointment that God’s silence leaves with us.

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.

“We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.”14

Prayer isn’t a noble monologue; it’s a free-flowing conversation,

and the only way to get prayer wrong is to try to get it right.

Theology professor emerita Roberta Bondi, “If you are praying, you are alrea...

Prayer is learned by discovery.

Holy One, there is something I wanted to tell you, but there have been errands to run, bills to pay, arrangements to make, meetings to attend, friends to entertain, washing to do . . . and I forget what it is I wanted to say to you, and mostly I forget what I’m about or why. O God, don’t forget me, please, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Eternal One, there is something I wanted to tell you, but my mind races with worrying and watching, with weighing and planning, with rutted slights and pothole grievances, with leaky dreams and leaky plumbing and leaky relationships I keep trying to plug up; and my attention is preoccupied with loneliness, with doubt, and with things I covet; and I forget what it is I want to say to you, and how to say it honestly or how to do much of anything. O God, don’t forget me, please, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Almighty One, there is something I wanted to ask you, but I stumble along the edge of a nameless rage, haunted by a hundred floating fears of terrorists of all kinds, of losing my job, of failing, of getting sick and old, having loved ones die, of dying . . . I forget what the real question is that I wanted to ask, and I forget to listen anyway because you seem unreal and far away, and I forget what it is I have forgotten. O God, don’t forget me, please, for the sake of Jesus Christ . . . O Father . . . in Heaven, perhaps you’ve already heard what I wanted to tell you. What I wanted to ask is forgive me, heal me, increase my courage, please...

“You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”10 According to Willard, hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day.

“In contemporary society our Adversary [a biblical title for the devil] majors in three things: noise, hurry, and crowds. If he can keep us engaged in ‘muchness’ and ‘manyness,’ he will rest satisfied.”

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.

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.

When we stop moving, stop talking, and arrive present and quiet before God, he takes all of our disordered desires, distorted attachments, and codependencies and transforms them into love.

Stillness starts in isolation and ends in “being with everybody.”

“When” doesn’t matter, so long as the “when” is consistent, because there’s no such thing as a habit or priority that doesn’t happen consistently.

simple. It’s about giving something of yourself to God, not getting something from God.

He’s not asking Eve to eat the fruit; he’s chipping away at her trust in God.

The serpent subtly demotes God from Father to a distant, stingy dictator. Mighty in power, sure, but unknowable, untrustable.

I so easily forget the sacredness of the people I encounter in my everyday routine, treating them as extras in the background of a feature film in which I play the lead.

When our trust in God is fractured, so is our intimacy with one another.

worshiped. When you and I open our mouths and begin to pray, almost certainly, another name is being hallowed in our hearts—the names of accomplishment, success, productivity, approval from another person, comfort, easy execution of our own plans, self-will in all its destructive varieties.

When we pray, we step out of the fundamental reality of the world and into the fundamental reality of God, so we must begin by inviting God to reorder our affections.

Adoration is not always the overflow of our hearts. In fact, it rarely is. It is an act of rebellion against the empty promises of this world and of defiance in the face of circumstances.

Prayer flows from the posture of our hearts toward God, not from reaction to the world around us.

adoration when it flows from our lips effortlessly and adoration when it’s gritty, willful, even defiant.

“Hallowed be your name” is a longing to see God here and now, to know his presence in the midst of this mess.

it’s our wounds that God often uses to heal others, not our competencies.

And God did meet me, not because of me, but in spite of me.

If it’s the presence of the living God you want, confession is part of the deal—a really good part of the deal.

Sin is shorthand for any attempt to meet our deep needs by our own resources.7

“Sin is a refused relationship with God that spills over into a wrong relationship with others.”11

We do not sin against a rule or a law; we sin against our Father.

What if the parts of our stories we’d like to erase become in the end the parts we tell forever?

“co-suffer.”

Jesus is nearest to us in “our weaknesses,” not our strengths. Our hearts, corrupted by sin, are like the poles of a magnet that push away, ever resistant to grace. Jesus’ heart, uncorrupted, works exactly the opposite way. He is drawn to our sin, not intellectually like a mathematician who has worked this equation in a thousand different ways and knows that grace is the only solution that satisfies the variables.

“God does not deal with sin by ridding our lives of it as if it were a germ, or mice in the attic. God does not deal with sin by amputation as if it were a gangrenous leg, leaving us crippled, holiness on a crutch. God deals with sin by forgiving us, and when he forgives us there is more of us, not less.”21

When he realized he was naked, he didn’t pick up fig leaves; he ran to the Father.

One of the biggest mistakes we’ve made in the modern church is to reimagine spiritual maturity as the need to confess less. The unspoken assumption is, “As I ascend in relationship with God, I confess less because I have less to confess.” True spiritual maturity, though, is the opposite. It’s not an ascension; it’s an archaeological dig as we discover layer after layer of what was in us all along.