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

by Tyler Staton

I had started a habit of beginning each day with a period of silence, asking God to speak to me or interact with me in a way I could hear and understand.

Story is the precious gift that thrusts spirituality from the theoretical and into the grit and honesty of the everyday world.

If you are a churchgoing Christian in the West, you’ve become a sociological anomaly. The Western church is declining in essentially every statistical measure. Still, in a society losing interest in and growing suspicious of the church, prayer isn’t going anywhere. According to reliable Gallup research, more Americans will pray in a given week than will exercise, drive a car, have sex, or go to work.1 In an increasing post-Christian America, nearly half the population still admits praying daily, a number that dwarfs the nation’s church attendance.2 Any way you measure it, prayer is bigger than the church (and it’s not close). Everybody prays. Everybody always has. And there’s no end in sight. Prayer seems to be instinctive, a part of human nature.

In the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.”3 We pray. We can’t help it.

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. And yet most people, even most Bible-believing Christians, find little life in prayer. Prayer is boring or obligatory or confusing or, most often, all of the above.

I trust God to be God. I believe—really believe—that those who seek him will surely find him.4 I believe that God is loving enough that a conversation starter is all he needs to draw someone all the way home.

Most of us get about knee-deep in the Christian life, discover that the water feels fine, and stop there. We never swim in the depths of the divine intimacy Jesus won for us.

In Genesis 2, God is repeatedly called Yahweh Elohim (“LORD God,” in English). But every time the serpent refers to God, he just says Elohim (“God”), the abstract name for divinity, dropping the personal. It’s calling someone by their title instead of their name—Doctor instead of Susan, Professor instead of Darrell, Sir instead of Dad. It’s respectful, but distant, depersonalized. The more intimacy in a relationship, the less likely someone is to be known by a title. An MD’s spouse doesn’t call her “Doctor”; he calls her by her first name. My kids don’t call me “Pastor”; they call me Dad. The serpent subtly demotes God from Father to a distant, stingy dictator. Mighty in power, sure, but unknowable, untrustable.

Protestants typically call Jesus’ exemplary prayer “the Lord’s Prayer,” while Catholics simply name it the “Our Father.” I wonder if Catholics are onto something. Because every line of the prayer flows from here: “Our Father.” It all starts and ends with remembering who we’re talking to.

Eve didn’t only forget who God is; she lost her own identity as well. When she imagined God as something less than “Father,” she in turn imagined herself as something less than “daughter.”

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.

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

Prayer is the place I recover God’s true identity, my own, and, equally, the identity of everyone else. As Brennan Manning said so pointedly, “If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others.”16

Subconsciously, I tend to believe the world is a neutral place. It’s not! The world is a contested place where, almost always, a name other than Jesus is being 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,

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.

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.”

It’s defiant adoration. And that’s the most potent kind. “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.

I’ve found what Scripture calls “victory” in that area of my life. 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.

In his seminal work titled Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton called “sin” the only part of Christian theology that can really be proved.

God sees them hiding (honestly, tough guy to play hide-and-seek with), and the bottom falls out of his stomach, verbalized in two questions: “Where are you?”8 There’s a long interpretive tradition in Judaism and early Christianity that sees this first question as an invitation to confession, an invitation Adam and Eve don’t take, leading to a second question.9 “Who told you that you were naked?”10 Said another way, God is asking, “Who stole my children’s innocence?”

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 issue with sin isn’t that God has a tight moral grid, and coloring within the lines is how we prove we’re on his side. It’s that sin inhibits us from doing what we were made to do best—love—to receive love and to give it.

as Eugene Peterson defines it, “Sin is a refused relationship with God that spills over into a wrong relationship with others.”11 Sin is always personal, and it’s always against God. The way our sin hurts others is the collateral of that first refusal.

Adam and Eve left the garden walking east, but they don’t go alone; God goes with them. He’s not lowering the standard of holiness, but he is coming after us. The biblical story isn’t one of a compromising God; it’s one of a pursuing God.

the rest of the Bible is mostly picture after picture of God’s pursuing love. Here’s a summary of the whole sixty-six book compilation if you want to save yourself some time: I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that you are loved—loved right now without qualification or restriction, loved unconditionally for who you are, loved in a way you can’t lose. The bad news is that you find it very hard to believe that and even harder to experience it. Your instinct is, and will forever be, to try to drum up your own lovableness, to become lovable in some way you can define and control, to try to become in your own eyes what you already are in God’s. The good news is called grace; the bad news is called sin.

And there in the midst of my exposed shame, I hear the rabbi whisper to me what he whispered to the adulterous woman: “Neither do I condemn you.”15

our emotions are a reflection of our heavenly Father’s. That doesn’t mean every emotion we feel is good. It means there’s a way to feel every emotion that’s good, that reflects God’s character. Salvation doesn’t diminish our sense of anger, sadness, hope, passion, or desire. God’s end game isn’t to make us into robots that execute flawlessly but feel nothing. Salvation redeems every human emotion as a reflection of God’s divine image.

We live deepest from the gut, not the head. The love I have for my child, the way I felt during the first dance at my wedding, the doubled-over weight I’ve held as I stared into the casket of a lost loved one, the laughter that came as I watched my niece open a gift on Christmas morning—none of that emerges from an intellectual equation I’ve solved. It comes from somewhere deeper, somewhere more instinctive, some emotional place, something like my gut.

The Greek word translated in the NIV as “empathize” is the compound word sympatheo. It is a combination of the Greek word pascho, meaning “to suffer” and the prefix sun (“with”), much like we used the prefix co- in English. This word, translated literally, means “co-suffer.” That’s how Jesus deals with our sin. He suffers with us—suffers the consequences of our thoughts, actions, and disordered desires; suffers the subtle agony of hiding and pretending and presenting a preferred self that traps us in perpetual insecurity; suffers the estrangement from God we willfully choose by “managing” a sin pattern we’ve grown tired of confessing rather than bringing it into the light of his inexhaustible love.

Jesus is a healer, yes, but he’s the kind of doctor who has dealt with the same disease. He’s a doctor treating lung cancer who also had lung cancer, felt the effects, and even donated one of his lungs for a transplant, so you’re talking to a doctor with experiential compassion for what you’re going through and a wounded body from a battle with the same symptoms. Don’t you see the profound difference in that healer? The care, sincere concern, and unhurried presence of that doctor compared to the one who just dishes out prescriptions?

How do we take Jesus up on his power to heal? Confession. Confession is how we turn to him, look him in the eye, and acknowledge his presence here with us, not to judge, but to rescue.

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.”18

Eugene Peterson writes, “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

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. Spiritual maturity means more confession, not less. 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.

When we come in and out of God’s presence in gathered communities with our deepest needs and secrets hidden, we are essentially saying, “Jesus’ victory is not enough. It’s not enough for me. Not enough for this. I just need more time. I can sort this out on my own.” How do we combat the insistent, internal narrative that was planted in us at the fall, that keeps us in a perpetual state of hiding and dressing ourselves up with our choice fig leaves? Confession.

We say we believe in grace, but confession is how we actually trust what we already believe in. The very parts of our stories we most want to edit, or erase altogether, become the very parts of our stories we’d never take back and never stop telling. That’s the kind of author God is.

Brennan Manning wrote, “Anyone God uses significantly is always deeply wounded . . . We are, each and every one of us, insignificant people whom God has called and graced to use in a significant way . . . On the last day, Jesus will look us over not for medals, diplomas, or honors, but for scars.”24 It is not by our gifts, insights, ideas, or qualifications that God is determined to heal the world, but by our scars. By his wounds we are healed,25 and by our wounds the healing is shared.

C. S. Lewis paints a vivid picture of the power of confession in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Eustace, a young boy who had traded his innocence to a deceiver when he didn’t really know what he was doing, was forced to live in a covering of dragon skin in perpetuity, Lewis’s mystical reimagining of Genesis’s fig leaves. He’d tried to pull the dragon skin off himself plenty of times before, only to see it grow back again. Finally exhausted enough to simply lie still, Eustace is approached by the lion Aslan, who is terrifying but gentle—Lewis’s depiction of Jesus. Then the lion said—but I don’t know if it spoke—“You will have to let me undress you.” I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it. The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know—if you’ve ever picked the scab of a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away . . . Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off—just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt—and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch a...

Once we’ve given space for self-examination, always in reliance on the Holy Spirit as the searching agent, we are ready to confess. Confession is as simple and unpretentious as it sounds. Whatever has been revealed to us, say it out loud to God. That’s it. When we name it to God, we “bring it into the light,”28 which weakens the power of sin and calls on the power of grace for healing and freedom. Much of the time, confession should be practiced in mature, trusted spiritual friendship, enabling the confessor to receive absolution in hearing the gospel preached back to them.

Most people go to the grave without ever confronting the false self—the deep patterns of dysfunction that govern their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Therefore, most people go to the grave never having felt the freedom of living as their true selves, never having given their true selves to the world and to those they love.

Confession is two parts: searching and naming. Searching is God’s part; naming is ours.

Prayer releases power to affect real change in the tangible world.

The question we’re circling around is this: “Do my prayers matter in any visible, tangible sense? Is God carrying on the way he would always carry on, regardless of whether or not I pray? Do my requests exclusively reform my heart in some divine equation, or do they carry the power to change real people, conditions, and circumstances in the world I inhabit? Do my prayers actually matter?”

C. S. Lewis set up the case against prayer by mimicking the voice of a skeptic: “Even if I grant your point and admit that answers to prayer are theoretically possible, I still think they are infinitely improbable. I don’t think it at all likely that God requires the ill-informed (and contradictory) advice of us humans as to how to run the world. If He is all-wise, as you say He is, doesn’t He know already what is best? And if He is all-good, won’t He do it whether we pray or not?”

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.

As a thought experiment, try to recall everything you’ve prayed for in the last week. If God answered every last one of your prayers, what would happen? With the exception of one or two particularly bold or naive people, the answer is usually very little. This place between wonder and mystery paralyzes us.

“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”6 That’s where he loses us. Prayer as a way to meditate and let go? Definitely. Prayer as a centering exercise? Essential. Prayer as a channel to be reformed from the inside out? Of course. Prayer that really works? The sort of prayer that joins God to bring about redemption and push back the darkness? Prayer that actually makes a marked difference in the visible, tangible world, in the lives of the real people I interact with and in the real issues they face? The sort of prayer that brings heaven to earth? Here is where opinions splinter in every direction. This is where he loses us.

If we really took Jesus’ invitation seriously, if we really believed in the sort of prayer that Jesus talked about, the modern church would have a hard time getting its people to do anything but pray. In actuality, we need to be motivated to pray. And that’s because most people, even the most serious, mature Christians, don’t buy prayer as Jesus described it, not entirely anyway.

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.

Human beings were made to be intercessors participating with God in lovingly overseeing the world, set apart, bearing God’s authority to rule in selfless love.