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

by Tyler Staton

Loss of control comes in an endless variety of forms—a car accident, a phone call, a financial hole we can’t climb out of, a relationship we’re unable to repair, or a global pandemic. Whatever its origin, it all leads to the same place: a search for help outside of the self.

The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Prayer can’t be mastered. Prayer always means submission. To pray is to willingly put ourselves in the unguarded, exposed position. There is no climb. There is no control. There is no mastery. There is only humility and hope.

We fear silence. But the thing that calms that fear isn’t faith; it’s trust. Faith is the assurance of what we hope for.7 Trust is confidence in the character of God.

C. S. Lewis said of prayer, “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.

Pray as you can, and somewhere along the way, you will make the most important discovery of your life—the love the Father has for you. That discovery is God’s end of the deal. Your part is just to show up honestly. Show up, and keep showing up. That’s the one nonnegotiable when it comes to prayer.

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.

Prayer doesn’t begin with us; it begins with God. It doesn’t start with speaking; it starts with seeing. As Philip Yancey writes, “Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God’s point of view.”1

Richard Foster writes, “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.”

“Solitude is the furnace of transformation,” says Henri Nouwen. “Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self … Solitude is the place of the great struggle and the great encounter—the struggle against the compulsions of the false self, and the encounter with the loving God who offers himself as the substance of the new self.”27

“Be still, and know that I am God.” Slow down. Remember who God really is. Remember who you really are. That’s prayer.

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.

Many confuse stillness with waiting for revelation. Sometimes revelation does come, and it’s marvelous. But that’s not the purpose of stillness. The purpose is consent. It is the daily practice of consenting to the work of God’s Spirit, which is deeper than understanding or words. It is how “deep calls to deep”31 from our souls to his.

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

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.

that is what the Bible calls sin—good desire channeled through the wrong means.

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

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.

Walter Wink confidently exclaims, “History belongs to the intercessors, who believe the future into being.”1

The Genesis conflict is threefold: (1) You have a spiritual enemy; (2) the weapon of that enemy is deception; and (3) the effect of that deception is paralysis.

You’re not Jesus. But if you’re a follower of Jesus, every single time you pray, you come before the Father clothed in the robe and crown of a ruler. In the eyes of heaven, you are filled with Jesus’ status and standing. When God won your authority back, God was winning prayer back.

Intercession is nothing more than ordinary love combined with sober humility.

The millennial generation, of which I am a part, is the most socially conscious, globally minded, justice-oriented generation in recent memory. We are also the most mentally ill and chronically unhappy. We are a generation of people doing exactly what we want with our lives, channeling our energy freely into chosen pursuits for global good, and yet we are completely overwhelmed, utterly exhausted, and chronically anxious. Those are the symptoms of a good desire out of order.

Mother Teresa wasn’t an activist; she was a person of prayer—prayer in the middle voice.

Biblically speaking, inner prayer and outward compassion are inseparable.

The persistent mantra of the Western world, even within the church, is a barrage of self-inflation: “You are more important than you ever dreamed. God has a tailor-made destiny for you and wants to use your life for great things!” Of course, there’s a lot of truth in that. However, in the face of that nonstop reminder, I am deeply comforted in remembering that I popped into a story where I’m not playing the lead. I’m an extra in the background of a single scene in a narrative that is grander, more complex, and more redemptive than I could fathom. This is a story about God. He is the lead, at the center of every scene. I am the Lord’s servant. And that, as it turns out, is more than enough for me.

No matter how you explain life, you’re stuck trying to fit the square peg called “justice” into the round hole called “suffering.”

Prayer is a journey that starts with need and ends in relationship.

We are all going to face painful disorientation at some point, and the challenging invitation is to trust even in the darkness.”

“Pain and suffering have the capacity to deepen you and transform you, but they also have the capacity to destroy you. I realized that this pain I carried was destroying me.”

Parker Palmer: “The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in the hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without hope, faith, and love.”16

spiritual boredom isn’t necessarily a sign that we’re lapsing in prayer; in fact, it often means we’re maturing.

Everyone wants that, but there’s a reason the writer and director of The Notebook included only the honeymoon stage and the mature love in the end. It’s the most obvious reason: all those years in between are filled with nothing but ordinary fidelity. And fidelity is boring.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer offered an infamous piece of advice to young couples in love, “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.”

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