I have written about the virtue of listening prayer, short forgiveness prayers, writing your own prayer, all of which aim at generally better understanding how to pray, but it is also important to see the value of simply crying out to God. Jesus help me!
That, too, can be a powerful prayer.
In some ways, the cry to the heavens is the first prayer. Many people – I am certainly one – have a religious practice that becomes spiritual by virtue of great pain and anguish. Suddenly, the routines and rituals no longer work and we are thrust into a space where our own efforts – all human efforts – must come to naught.
Facing death for the first time – losing somebody I loved – did it for me. I could not manage the pain and I could not stand the fact that death seemed to be and so I turned to alcohol and other methods of self-abuse and in a matter of months I had driven myself into a hole of such misery and despair it seemed that the only way out was down. That was a long time ago now but I remember it well.
In Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve step groups, that’s referred to as a bottom. We bottom out. You can either punch your ticket to the other side or ask for help. And for me, that asking was nothing but a scared and angry howl at the darkeness. Help me Jesus.
That prayer, by the way, didn’t hinge on belief. There was nothing elegant or formal about it. Really, it could have been any words at all. What lent it meaning was its authenticity. It came from genuine pain and was not trying to gussy anything up. I was broken and I owned my brokenness and I poured it into a prayer for help.
God responds because God is always there. God is never not in attendance. So the other thing that type of prayer does is that it’s like a huge hand sweeping a table of all that clutters it. We suddenly make this big space into which our awareness of God’s presence can scatter a few seeds and pour on the miracle grow.
I am saying that our need for God mirrors God’s need for us, that they are not separate. Those prayers of desperation are sometimes the best mechanism for understanding this, and bringing it into application.
Our lives shift and evolve or at least they seem to. We’ll turn to different prayers at different times. Their goal is always the same – to bring us closer to God, to end our reliance on anything that isn’t God. There are no right or wrong prayers. There is only our need, fully acknowledged and given form in any way we can manage, to recall our identity in God.
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