The idea of prayer filled me with dread as a kid. The faith community I grew up in was very small, very conservative, and very fundamentalist. The main church service was the Sunday morning 'open worship', which is where the men — and only the men — prayed the most. To pray in the open worship service, you had to have been baptised, and you also had to be 'accepted into fellowship', typically an automatic step after baptism. For most of my young life I resisted the expectation to be baptised, because I didn't want to be accepted into fellowship — because I didn't want to pray in front of everyone. I wished I'd been born a female, because all the women had to do was sit there in their hats and stay silent. I didn't want the hat ... but I did want the anonymity.
The 'prayer meeting' was different to the open worship meeting, and attendance was much lower, since it was held on a mid-week evening, and not even the faithful wanted to leave their warm houses and their TVs to go out into the dark and the cold and sit in a tight circle in the middle of our chapel, eyes closed, heads bowed, while the men prayed as the Spirit came over them. I'm not talking about a Spirit like the one who shows up to Pentecostal services or tent revival meetings. Our Spirit was far more subdued. No antics here, thank you very much. The most animated anyone got was an affirming 'mmm' as the man praying said something to which the others agreed: a good point of theology; a clever use of scripture; an earnest plea for the salvation of someone's soul.
Whether it was the open worship or the prayer meeting, the point of prayer was that it was done out loud. I mean, you could pray in your own head while it was bowed (to stop yourself from falling asleep), but public prayer was the thing — so that everyone could listen, and be edified, and utter their 'mmm' when you said something profound. And it was the ‘mmm’ that terrified me the most. Not the presence of them, but the absence of them. Because if you prayed and didn’t get an ‘mmm’ it meant that you weren’t doing very well at all. You weren’t hitting the beats like you were supposed to. It should have helped that it was all done while everyone’s eyes were closed, but it didn't. The darkness just made me more self-conscious, more aware of my feeble voice and the dumb things I was trying to say.
As I got older, public prayer time was where I first started to see the cracks in my faith community's ideology — which just made me more cynical about prayer. In one open worship meeting I heard a 'brother' literally thank God that we weren't like 'those people outside'. Whatever he meant, it wasn't good. During another, I listened as a reformed heroin addict prayed with spirited passion about the grace that had liberated him from his former life, knowing full well that his performance probably foreshadowed a swift return to the life he'd left behind. It started to make sense why Jesus told his followers never to make a show of it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen and heard prayer done well. I was there at St Matthew's Church in Shenton Park, Perth, the day the heavens opened and a choir of angels sang in adulation as Sydney Old Testament lecturer Barry Webb, who at the time reminded me of Mr Magoo, preached a blinder and struck the congregation dumb with his exposition of the biblical story of a crippled boy in the court of King David, then prayed for us all like his, and our, eternal life depended on it. I haven't experienced anything like it. There was no charisma, no shouting, no antics — but the Spirit moved.
And I've had my own bizarre experiences with prayer that I've never been able to explain. The night my daughter fell from the top bunk and snapped the mandibular notch in her jaw, for example — the clean break on the X-ray is still fresh in my mind. But after praying throughout the night, by the next morning the break had gone. And there wasn't a doctor who could explain it.
But in recent years, one of my more painful experiences of prayer was also the catalyst of my exit from academic life, after my close friend became my boss and pulled me into his office one day to tell me that the previous night he had gone for a walk 'to be with the Lord'. Turns out the Lord wanted to say to my friend, Ask me for anything and I'll give it you. And his response? Don't let my tenure end in scandal. And what did the Lord say to that? You'll have to get rid of David then.
I haven't prayed a lot since. Why bother, when it was prayer that caused such a demolition job to my life.
And yet ... and yet ... I hang in there, not as someone who prays but, I guess, as someone who believes there's something to it, and appreciates how other people experience it.
U2’s Bono, for example, speaks of prayer as a kind of dance of love, a moment of surrender and an act of true vulnerability, as is all genuine encounter with an other, even if, and especially if, that other is the invisible God.
In his terrific memoir Surrender: 40 songs, one story, he says this:
It's an extraordinary thing, the moment of surrender. To get down on your knees and ask the silence to save you, to reveal itself to you.
To kneel down, to implore, to throw yourself out into space, to quietly whisper or roar your insignificance. To fall prostrate and ask to be carried.
To humble yourself with your family, your bandmates, and to discover if there's a face or a name to that silence.
Later on in the book, he recounts a conversation with Brian Eno in which the master music producer says, ‘Surrender might be the most powerful word in the lexicon’. I've always thought so too. U2's song Surrender is one of my favourites for that reason, and for the powerful lyric it generates:
Oh, the city's afire
A passionate flame
It knows me by name
It's in the things I do and say
And if I wanna live I gotta
Die to myself someday
Bono writes in his book: 'I am persuaded by the thought that the only true way to be victorious is to surrender. To each other. To love. To the higher power.'
And even as I'm writing this I’m realising that my problem isn't with prayer, as much as it with surrender. That if prayer is truly an act of dying to self, as love is, and if painful experiences, or moments that engender cynicism, make us resistant to surrender, then meaningful prayer will also be difficult, if not impossible.
So, before I say anything else on the subject I need to go and reflect on the resistance to surrender that's built up inside me ... and if I can tolerate it, to confront the silence and see what comes back.
Speaking of Bono and prayer ... Bono at the National Prayer Breakfast with US president George Bush on February 2, 2006 (below) is incredible, if you haven't ever seen it, or if you need a refresher.
1%. 1% more. That is a target worth chasing.