Whether you know it or not: Prayer and a lover greater than thoughts or words ~ Ephesians 3:14-21

 

Let’s try a thought experiment

What’s your best friend’s or spouse’s birthday?

What city were they born in?

What’s his or her favorite movie?

How much do you love them?

What does it feel like when they walk into a room?

How do you know when they want to do something like leave a party or laugh, or if they’re angry, but don’t say it out loud?

I’m sure the first questions were answered quickly – these are important facts that are unavoidable and significant for growing and deepening a relationship. You can’t have a good friendship or good marriage without them. You won’t cultivate a relationship of love if you forget a birthday or serve a loved one a food they hate or are allergic to. And yet, the later questions, which you most likely struggled to articulate, reveal that facts aren’t enough and that “knowing” goes much deeper. You know these things but you discover that you don’t always know “how” or can’t adequately express them with words. For Christians – the parallel is knowing doctrines about God that are critical for cultivating a deeper relationship. In fact, we’ve been talking about these facts, thoughts, and theologies, throughout this series. All of them are important but facts aren’t necessarily the same thing as “knowing” God, or “trusting God,” or “loving” God. The demons know facts, James says, but that doesn’t mean they have a relationship. And the kind of knowing that Paul is talking about ironically involves a knowing that surpasses knowledge.  

 

To think Christian is to move ever deeper into a relationship that must go deeper than thinking – that surpasses our rational mind. It will move us into a wider and deeper space of love where God is unknowingly at work and in which we need only to say, “Amen!” To think Christian, in other words, must eventually give way to a God who is more loving, than we could ever think. That knowing can only be had in prayer.

Prayer is a kind of silent trust and consent to a God who roots and establishes us in mind-blowing love in order to fill us to the full with love. It’s a surrender, a trust, to a God who is unimaginably good and loving toward us and whose love is so great it baffles the mind. Let’s return to our passage:

Prayer, for Paul, is the deep recognition of God’s contribution and ours to the spiritual life.

God’s contribution (Look for the Green):

1)    

 G  God strengthens us in our inner being through his Spirit so that Christ will dwell in our hearts

 

2)     God roots and establishes us in love so that we can grasp love that surpasses knowledge in order to fill us with the fullness of God

 

3)     God will do more than we can ask or imagine.

So prayer begins with God and works because God is at lovingly work and involves God anchoring us, strengthening us, with love so that we can become like Jesus (the fullness of God, cf. Col. 2:6-9) Prayer is an invitation to be loved by God – fully – no strings attached – and from that love become love in return. 

That’s God’s contribution. Prayer is the like 2^nd grade science experiment showing how plants absorb water by using colored water that colors the plant.

All of that is God’s contribution. And what’s our contribution (Look for the green)? 

 

 

Our contribution is one word: “Amen.” Amen is such a good word: It’s one part “That’s the truth!,” one part “Yes!,” and one part, “May it be so”. It’s affirmation, surrender, and thankfulness all wrapped in one word and the only contribution that we must bring to the endeavor. All that love requires is our consent – because that’s all that love demands.  It’s as simple and difficult as that. But we struggle. The fruit of the tree of knowledge still wants to make us think that life and God are all about what we can consciously know, label, describe, articulate, and argue. It’s hard to trust in a love that is greater than our thoughts.

I want to offer an ancient and simple means of inhabiting and experiencing Paul’s prayerful description of God’s transforming love – called contemplative or centering prayer. It’s a wordless, trusting, opening of self to the divine presence. It’s the kind of prayer that Jesus spoke of when he said: “go to your inner room, close the door and pray to your Father in secret” (Matthew 6:6). It emerges from the natural desire to be with God and say, “Amen” to his loving work within. That’s it. There’s no agenda and no need to ask because you already know what God wants to do and already have been told you can’t even imagine all that God might lovingly do in your inner being.

Steps of centering prayer

1.     Like Paul’s “Amen,” choose a sacred word or surrender.
Choose a word that can draw you into prayer. It’s a symbol of your consent, your “yes,” for God to strengthen you in your inner being with God’s love. It will be like a compass in your hand that helps call you back to interior silence and attentiveness. Paul uses the word, “Amen” but you can use any one or two syllable word or phrase you like, such as “Jesus,” “be still,” “mercy.” The word is not as important as your intent to surrender to what God wishes to lovingly do.

2.     Sit comfortably with eyes closed
Find a comfortable place where you can sit with a straight back and your hands open on your lap. You should be poised to receive but not rigid, relaxed but not slouching. Close your eyes as a sign of letting go of the world around you and making yourself available to God – attending to God’s presence within. I use a Centering Prayer app on my phone which shuts off notifications. The average sit is 20 minutes but start with what feels comfortable.

3.     Introduce your word
When thoughts and distractions arise that steal your attention, very gently introduce your sacred word in your mind, let the thought go, and return to a loving, attentive surrender to God. Persist in this state of openness to God until your alarm draws you from prayer. When your alarm alerts you, thank God for what God has done and let your mind, spirit, and body reacclimate to your surroundings. You can also finish with a reading of Scripture or the Lord’s prayer.

4.    Trust God to love you in your prayer
It’s easy to worry that your centering prayer was a waste of time. Did I do it correctly? Should I have done something else? Why did I get so distracted? These are all temptations. When looking back at your centering prayer, keep three things in mind. 1) Read Ephesians 3 and remember that you already know, can’t know, and don’t possess the capacity to know, what God’s love is doing in your life. Amen! This prayer doesn’t demand effort or intelligence only trust. You don’t have to know or understand what is happening any more than you have to understand how the sun moves to experience a sunrise or how a computer works to be able to surf the internet. 2) Discover that being distracted twenty-thousand times becomes the gateway for twenty-thousand blessings. You may be overwhelmed at times with the monkey mind experience of thoughts jumping around in your brain, distracting you from a loving attentiveness to God. If at the end of your time, you’ve said your sacred word twenty-thousand times, consider that you have consented and surrendered, offered an “amen,” to divine love twenty-thousand times. 3) Give your brain a rest. God knows what God is doing and love never fails. It’s tempting to want to analyze what’s happening, to think about the myriad thoughts that pulsate through your mind.  But remember Paul’s words  - God’s love surpasses knowledge and is immeasurably more that all we can ask or imagine – so drop your tape measure. What goes on in those silent depths during prayer is no one’s business, not even your own; it is between your innermost being and God; that place where, as St. Augustine says, “God is closer to your soul than you are to yourself.” Your own subjective experience of the prayer may be that nothing happened – except of letting go of thoughts. But in the depths of your being, in fact, plenty has been going on, and things are quietly but firmly being rearranged. You trust from Scripture that God is rooting you in love and filling you with all the fullness of God – whether you know it or not. All you need is to make room. All you need is to say, “Amen.”