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

by Tyler Staton

think it’s this: for most of us, prayer doesn’t resolve our anxiety. Scripture teaches, “Don’t be anxious. Just pray.” Maybe we don’t because prayer comes with plenty of reasons to be anxious. Prayer itself makes us anxious because it uncovers fears we can ignore as long as we don’t engage deeply, thoughtfully, vulnerably with God.

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.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.

How should we pray? The most straightforward response is to talk to God about what’s on your mind. That’s it! You talk to God like a friend. You vent. You ask. You laugh. You listen. You unload. You just talk. You don’t try to sound more holy or pure or spiritual than you are.

“Be still.” The Latin term is vacate, from which we get the English word vacation. The invitation of prayer anytime, anywhere is this: Take a vacation. Stop playing God over your own life for a moment. Release control. Return to the created order. Be still. Prayer begins there. But that’s only the beginning.

Isn’t there profound symbolism in the fact that our artificial lights drown out the heavenly lights? Unless you get a particularly clear, dark night, we’ve found a way to darken the stars, a way to pretend that all we see here on the ground is all there is. The stars are still there, but in the city—the lights of our offices that stay on late, bright advertisements vying for our attention, the yellow glow of so many lamps in so many apartment windows—it all works together to drown out the lights that remind us of how small we are. It all works together to convince me that the world from behind my tiny perspective is all there is. City dwellers are in danger of missing what David saw—our lives against the backdrop of something bigger.

Jesus was intentional, and yet he was equally interruptible. Sure, he slipped away from the crowds, but he also allowed himself to be interrupted—mid-mission—to heal Bartimaeus on the outskirts of Jericho, a hemorrhaging woman in a crowd, and even to appreciate the faith of a Syrophoenician woman. 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.

When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, the scandal wasn’t only the name he chose for God. He didn’t teach them to pray to “my Father.” He said, “Our Father,” a claim about not only who we are to God but equally who we are to one another—sister and brother. All of us, siblings in one family, one bloodline.

“Teach us to pray,” the disciples say to Jesus. And he responds, in essence, “Start by remembering who you’re talking to.” Biblically, we are commanded to “remember” more frequently than to “obey,” “do,” “not do,” “go,” or even “pray.” Remember. Because in the long journey of the spiritual life, we tend to forget. We tend to lose the plot of our own redemption story. When Jesus teaches us to pray, he picks up on that same thread. “Remember who you’re talking to.” Remember who God is. Remember who you are. Remember who we are to each other.

“It is relatively easy to meet God in moments of joy or bliss. In these situations we correctly count ourselves blessed by God,” observes psychologist David Benner. “The challenge is to believe that this is also true—and to know God’s presence—in the midst of doubt, depression, anxiety, conflict, or failure. But the God who is Immanuel is equally in those moments we would never choose as in those we would always gladly choose.”19 “Hallowed be your name” is always most powerful in the most unlikely places.

And I’ve also found that God has flooded my life with people who have been right in the thick of an identical secret struggle because it’s our wounds that God often uses to heal others, not our competencies.

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.

“Why are we here?” To state it theistically, “Why were we created?” Genesis offers a surprisingly direct answer to that weighty question: Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” (Genesis 1:26)

Anyone thoughtfully reading the Genesis origin story should immediately be asking the obvious question, “Where did it all go wrong?” If God’s plan is for people to rule over his creation as his image bearers, we are doing a subpar job, and that’s putting it politely. The environment is falling apart to such a degree that scientists are predicting end dates on an earth that can support human life.

If we pray for only big things, exclusively limiting our conversation with God to the objectively noble requests, we live a cramped spiritual life, with little room for the actual God we meet in Jesus. Gratitude is the God-given reward for those who can stomach praying for small things.4

Give Us Today Our Daily Bread It is so freeing that in the middle of a prayer about heaven coming to earth and struggling against evil, Jesus throws in something as common as today’s lunch. So let’s honor him by bringing our everyday, ordinary requests, knowing he treasures those too.

Ask vulnerably, with enough specificity that God has the chance to disappoint you or surprise you. Ask boldly, with enough empowerment that you wonder if you’re allowed to be this forward with God.

Biblically speaking, inner prayer and outward compassion are inseparable. The Hebrew term for personal righteousness is tsedaqah, and the Hebrew term for outward justice is identical—tsedaqah. That’s crucial because it implies that the historic biblical understanding of devotion to God was this: to be righteous is to care for the poor, and to care for the poor is to be righteous, which is why prophets like Isaiah and Amos got so worked up about people who were inwardly devout but outwardly disengaged. In the ancient Hebrew understanding of righteousness, a community of pious, private spiritual practice without equal devotion to costly public compassion was not only dysfunctional but oxymoronic.

Prayer and mission fit together, hand in glove. To pray is to be invited to uncomfortable mission. To pray is to be led by the hand to broken places, broken people, and broken parts within yourself. Jesus feels at home in the company of the misfits, marginalized, oppressed, and outcast, so if you spend time in conversation with Jesus, you better believe he’ll invite you to come with him where he’s going. N. T. Wright writes, “The Christian vocation is to be in prayer, in the Spirit, at the place the world is in pain.”15 Proximity to pain lends credibility and power to our prayers.

In the words of J. Edwin Orr, “Whenever God is ready to do something new with His people, He always sets them to praying.”19

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.

“Praying is loving. And learning to pray means learning to love.”5

What if you were to spend your commute home or the final moments before you fall asleep at night recounting the magnificent and minuscule ways you saw heaven pierce earth today?