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

by Tyler Staton

We must keep in mind, though, that when we make fruitfulness the goal, leapfrogging intimacy, we make a well-intentioned but tragic mistake. When we try to carry out the mission of Jesus without grounding every action in intimacy with Jesus, we will often come out of the gate strong. A lot of social good has been done in our world through gritted teeth and the caring heart of a serious activist. However, more often than not, this motivation does not end in kingdom fruit. Even though it often starts that way, it tends to end in exhaustion and resentment.

One of the greatest tragedies I’ve observed in the church is that those who in the name of Jesus become the most dedicated to social activism often start with pure hearts, but somewhere along the way, many end up cold and judgmental toward the church. The work of mercy is often taken up by those most unmerciful to their brothers and sisters. The problem is not the work of compassion, mercy, and justice; rather, the problem is...

When we pray with Jesus, we—almost accidentally—start doing the sorts of things Jesus did. It’s like we can’t help it. Intimacy in prayer is the way to lasting fruitfulness. Our lives are about intimacy...

Begin your prayer by reminding yourself of this humble but profoundly dignifying identity. Let go of all self-inflation and flattery. Equally, let go of all dejection, self-doubt, and insecurity. You are a servant, and you belong to the Lord himself.

Wherever you recognize God at work in your inner life, thank him for it, and ask that he will complete the work he has begun, remaking you into his image. Wherever you recognize his Spirit inviting you to act, say yes. Commit to go, to give, to forgive, to include, to slow down, to rest, to see, to hope, to believe, to serve, to speak, to listen, to wait, to love.

We have an appetite for spectacle; God has an appetite for new life. We can’t resist public spectacle; God can’t resist the secret labor of prayer.

Either God is not powerful enough or God is not good enough. Either way, it felt like the only choice I was left with was to diminish my view of God.”

Likewise, prayer is primal language, instinctively emerging from us in the face of pain and suffering. Need first drives us to our knees, but relationship keeps us there. That’s what Jesus was getting at—the deeper invitation hidden in three simple verbs—ask, seek, and knock.

We are happily humming along, content with our fragile, elusive sense of control over our lives when all of a sudden we are gut-punched, mugged in broad daylight, and robbed of the life we thought was so securely “ours.” When we find ourselves in a story we don’t recognize, with no way back to the plot we thought we were living, we pray. We “ask.”

By using the word seek, Jesus pointed the way along the path of prayer: we come asking and discover relationship amid the mess. We come seeking gifts, and we often get them! But the greatest gift, the One we’re really after and the One we’re guaranteed to receive, is the Giver himself.

To dine with someone back then was not merely to tolerate their company while getting some much-needed nourishment. To share a table was the greatest affirmation of their character and the truest and deepest form of intimacy.

“Prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God’s gift of himself. Ask and seek, and your heart will grow big enough to receive him and keep him as your own,” writes Mother Teresa.2 We come for gifts, and we get the Giver. And we find ourselves seated at his table, welcomed, accepted, and loved, being fed, being listened to, relaxing in the warm presence of the loving God.

Jesus’ telling of the story of a widow advocating for herself in a court was confrontational to some in his audience and ennobling to others. At this time in history, tragically, a woman’s testimony was not permitted in a court of law. The place of women in society was so low that their word was not considered trustworthy in matters of justice.

These three words—ask, seek, and knock—are written in a Greek verb tense we don’t have a grammatical equivalent for in English. It implies not a single action but an ongoing action, one that takes place in the present and into the future. The most literal translation of Matthew 7:7 is, “Keep on asking and you will receive; keep on seeking and you will find; keep on knocking and the door will be opened to you.” In fact, many English translations translate it that way, word for word.

“Prayer is not begging God to do something for us that he doesn’t know about, or begging God to do something for us that he is reluctant to do, or begging God to do something that he hasn’t time for,” writes Eugene Peterson. “In prayer we persistently, faithfully, trustingly come before God, submitting ourselves to his sovereignty, confident that he is acting, right now, on our behalf.”9 Where does this confidence come from? From the assurance that we are his “chosen ones,” as Jesus names us in the same breath. What’s God up to right now? He’s weaving history into a redemptive, good future for his chosen ones—that’s you, me, and all who call Jesus “Lord.”

Our persistence in prayer comes from the promise that we don’t pray to a reluctant, half-interested, can’t-be-bothered judge, but to an unfathomably loving Father who collects our prayers like love letters and our tears like fine wine.

Here’s what I do know: God works slowly out of compassion, not apathy. I know God puts up with a ton of corruption, and his slow, loving way of redemption asks of us patience and endurance in suffering. I know that when I read Acts, I see a seasoned, resilient faith—a praying people who dance with God through miracles and bear with God through mystery.

Lost in the background of the action sequences and miraculous montages of Acts is this—a community that gathered to pray, even after they had tried it once before only to watch darkness win, at least from their point of view. They kept on praying in the face of unanswered prayer. They persisted in prayer.

Can we become again a persistently praying kind of people? Can we recover the legacy of our ancient ancestors, lost somewhere along the way? Can we preserve it, enflesh it in our bodies, express it in our lives?

Say It Like You Mean It Don’t begin with grit or faith. Start with disappointment, naming your pain and need to God. He collects our tears, and we begin by doing the same, dragging up our painful experiences of his perceived absence, silence, or rejection. Tell God your disappointments in prayer, and don’t water it down. Forget your manners. Tell it like it is.

Invite God to show you the question beneath your disappointments.

He’s a miracle-working God who sometimes opens the eyes of the blind. He’s also a divine companion who sometimes stumbles around with us in the dark, wearing our pain alongside us. He’s a master healer. Our only role is to invite and keep inviting.

That’s the kind of author God is. He doesn’t edit. He repurposes and redeems. He turns the worst moments into the irreplaceable, climactic ones. Her most obvious failure was also her greatest victory.

The exhilaration of our mountaintop experiences wears thin after a while, and we find ourselves reluctantly dragging our feet along the narrow path behind Jesus, yawning all the way.

How do we remain in that love? How do we make covenant love the constant backdrop before which the scenes of our lives play out? Prayer. “If you can’t love, you can’t pray, either,” writes Johannes Hartl. “Praying is loving. And learning to pray means learning to love.”

“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.”

The way we receive from the God who has endless stamina to offer himself to a bunch of people who prefer self-sufficiency, tight jaws, and clenched fists.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once offered a famous piece of advice to a young couple on their wedding day: “Today, you are young and very much in love and you think that your love can sustain your marriage. It can’t. Let your marriage sustain your love.”11 Prayer is about love, and that means it cannot be sustained on fluttery feelings, good intentions, and spontaneous moments alone. It needs a container, something like the fidelity of a marriage, a set of practices or rituals within which that love can grow, mature, and blossom.

The early church, whose shared life we’ve been trying to recapture for about seventeen hundred years now, lived by a daily prayer rhythm.

Acts is the biblical history book of the early church. I challenge you to read it in its entirety, highlighting every reference to “as we were going to the place of prayer” (or the equivalent phrase in your translation), and observe what comes along with a commitment to a life that is daily rooted in prayer.

Throughout the whole of the biblical drama and into the early church history, prayer was the anchor of the Christian life in community. My suspicion is that when the apostle Paul instructed the church to “pray without ceasing,”22 he had in mind both a constant state of interior being and an outward, committed, concrete rhythm. The invitation is something like “pray like a band of wild, unruly monks,” and as you do, love and power will bloom together from within you.

What anchors your day right now? Possibly your workday demands, the buzz of notifications on your phone, or your email inbox? Your next meal or the number of passing hours till the weekend? The days marked off until your time of travel begins? Something sets the daily rhythm of your life. Something marks the passage of time. Whatever that something is, you owe it to yourself to think hard about these questions: Is it making me whole? Does it love me or want to control me? Is it concerned for my deepest well-being or is it trying to sell me something? Is it shaping me into the best version of myself or is it frothing up my selfishness? Is it leaving me alive or is it leaving me exhausted? Because whatever is at the center defines you and forms you into its image. What if at the center of your every day, you placed communion with the God who personifies love? What if the waking thoughts of your day were spent dreaming with God—dreams as big as “kingdom come” and as ordinary as “daily bread”?27

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? What if your day belonged to the God who loves you without needing to control you, the God whose chief concern is your deepest well-being, who is gently shaping you into the very best version of yourself and who breathes into your exhaustion with abundant life? What if fidelity to Jesus is everything, and the way you choose it is as simple as prayer? This isn’t a boisterous call to a more disciplined, legalistic, routine prayer life. It’s a quiet rebellion, a free choice to live our lives by a different order of loves, marching to a different beat in the procession of another King.

In recent generations, a resistance to disciplined, rhythmic prayer has emerged alongside the obsession with spontaneous, experiential prayer. Eugene Peterson observes: There is a prevailing bias among many American Christians against rote prayers, repeated prayers, “book” prayers—even when they are lifted directly from the “Jesus book.” This is a mistake. Spontaneities offer one kind of pleasure and taste of sanctity, repetitions another, equally pleasurable and holy. We don’t have to choose between them. We must not choose between them. They are the polarities of prayer. The repetitions of our Lord’s prayers (and David’s) give us firm groundings for the spontaneities, the flights, the explorations, the meditations, the sighs, and the groans that go into the “prayer without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17 KJV) toward which Paul urges us.29

The modern church has forgotten the rhythm of prayer needed to nourish the spiritual life because we’ve bought into the illusion that spontaneous, memorably experiential prayer is the only authentic variety. But that view of authenticity is unrealistic and dysfunctional, not pure and discerning.

if you want to play jazz, you’ve got to learn the sheet music first. And if you want to pray with passion, spontaneity, and freedom, you’ve got to learn the sheet music.

In the ultimate chaos, with the weight of the world’s suffering on his shoulders, Jesus did not rise to the occasion; he fell to the level of his own training: “My Father . . . may your will be done.” Get these ancient, recited prayers into your bloodstream, and they’ll come out of you when you need them most.

love. A daily prayer rhythm is not a fast track to revival or a hocus-pocus solution to drum up something powerful; it’s a pathway to rebellious fidelity, to love expressed through prayer, to a commitment to keep on choosing him on all the ordinary days.

“If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus.”

During the Jewish Passover, the Israelites traditionally sang a gratitude song called dayenu. Dayenu means “it would have been enough.”40 I once heard a pastor offer this translation: “Thank you, God, for overdoing it.” Dayenu prayers sound like, “God, lunch today would’ve been enough, but you provided me with the resources to choose the type of food I wanted to eat and options to pick from.” “God, lunch of my choice would’ve been enough, but you created a world of flavor and spice and culture to make food more than fuel—to offer it as artistic and delicious.” “God, a delicious lunch of my choice would’ve been enough, but you gave me a coworker to share a conversation with over that food.” “Thank you, God, for overdoing it.”