What is prayer?
When we ask something from God: forgiveness, strength, healing, salvation? When we tell God something: our praise, thanks, sins, weaknesses, brokenheartedness, anger, doubts? When we listen to God? By reading Scripture and looking for where our circumstances line up with it, like a key sliding into a lock? By waiting in silence?
When the disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray, he offers the Lord’s prayer, which acknowledges and praises God for his character, asks for understanding and forgiveness, and requests needs be met, and strength and protection be given. But Jesus also tells them stories and gives them pictures to explain prayer. It’s more than a persistent widow whose request is granted after she doesn’t give up asking. It’s more than waking a friend up at night to give you what you need so he can go back to sleep. It’s more than a father giving his son a fish instead of a snake out of love. It is God giving his Spirit when we ask. It is knocking on a door so it will open. It is “ask and it will be given,” and “seek and you will find.”
But the rest of Scripture also teaches us that this communication with God can be lament—crying out to God to express our grief or doubts or pain. It can be wordless groans only the Spirit understands, because we don’t know what to say or do. It can be spoken blessings or curses, asking God to make our words true or, in the way that eternity bends time, for our words to express what God has already made true. Prayer can be a vision with vivid images and drama. It can be a beautiful work of ark that expresses awe of God and wonder at what he has done or made. It can be a memory, or a story, or a memorial or monument that retells what God has done in the past and trains our hearts and minds to remember his character.
Prayer can be an anointing and public declaration; it can be a healing touch for someone sick or broken; it can be incense burnt or a sacrifice made in thanks or as a request. A liturgy. A song. A chant. A promise. A prophecy. A ceremony. A poem. A thankful rest. A dance before God with all our might. The Bible offers all of these as part of ongoing conversation with God.
Prayer is a many-faced communication with God, not only words someone drones with too many syllables and old vocabulary while everyone’s eyes are closed. I think sometimes we forget these more creative forms of prayer, and how much they can involve our bodies and imaginations. They can be a lifeline of communication when we’re sick or have trouble with words, or when something besides a traditional prayer simply better communicates our thoughts or emotions or helps us listen to God. I’ve written before about how I lamented by kneading dough and baking, and how the Old Testament offers some more physical practices to embody many different spiritual disciplines. More recently though, I’ve been considering these different forms of prayer.
My last few months of prayer have been newly shaped by a trio of poets—one a poet farmer, one a legend-telling priest-poet, and one a therapist poet from a hospital bed. All have reminded me about a holy imagination, or a baptized imagination, in their own ways.
Wendell Berry just received his final Sabbath rest. He has taught me how work and rest, community and place, and humor and earnestness can shape my imagination and frame my mind so that many daily acts can be prayer: appreciating creatures and growing things, silent contemplation in a field or forest, making and sharing a meal, deepening a friendship, remembering a heritage. For a mind and body that follow Jesus, these acts of obedience and awe and mutuality make us members of a community upheld and held together by God’s love. And each act can receive and return that love as a sort of worshipful prayer that weaves us together by acknowledging the God who gave us the love and the people and the place in the first place.
Malcolm Guite recently wrote ballads about King Arthur. His musings about the stories and their spiritual depth reminded me that sometimes symbols, images, and mythologies play the deep chords of our history and identity. If our imagination has been baptized by the Holy Spirit and framed by God’s Word, those legends and symbols can proclaim truth that braids our identity and history up with the Great Storyteller’s stories. God loves to layer the same themes in our lives and the Bible’s stories and redemption history. Those symbolic images or imaginings from our favorite stories, Guite explains, are windows that beckon us to look through them to see redemptive meaning. The holy grail, Joseph’s cup in his brother’s sack, the cups taken from the Temple and defiled when Israel went into exile, a cup of God’s wrath, our communion cups on Sundays, Jesus’ wine at the last supper, the vinegar he was offered on the cross, a glass we raise as a toast, a horn of plenty, the widow’s oil that never ran out, a spring of living water that overflows to abundant life, Lucy’s healing cordial in the Chronicles of Narnia, a wizard’s magic goblet in a story—all are windows that ask us to look through them to see the truth of spilled blood that revives us, a crushed grape that gives joy, a holy death that gives holy life. These symbols and so many more in our baptized imaginations can be prayers, pictures of truth that communicate between us and God.
K. J. Ramsey has reminded me that prayer can be poetry, imagination, and noticing small alignments of humor or kindness or circumstance that all speak to God’s love holding us up. When she has been too sick to think clearly, her prayers have been poems; visual collages as little memorials; using a gift while remembering the giver with gratitude; yearning toward and holding up someone you wish for God to be with; imagining those nearly invisible lines of connection or circumstance that give meaning or solidarity or symbolism. Her prayers notice love that ultimately comes from God, weaving in and around and through us and holding us up, giving us hope and strength, and welcoming joy and sorrow with both hands. Here again, a holy imagination furnishes everyday objects and sometimes unexpected images to give form to our prayers. If God showed the biblical prophets women in flying baskets, giant wheels of fire in the sky, valleys of bones that knit back together, colored horses, and dragons, then K. J.’s mycelial webs of joy and collages of mushrooms and medical paraphernalia are tame by comparison. When our prayers are breathed by the Spirit and framed by what God says in his word, then hoping with and holding up someone in our imagination is as much a prayer as any other.
I took a spiritual retreat early this summer, and I practiced prayer in many of these ways. I took walks full of fascination for creation and the Creator. I created beautiful and delicious food thinking about the Bread of Life and the Living Water and Eden’s Gardener who made and grew my grains and fruits and vegetables. I practiced Sabbath silence and rest and solitude. I listened to birdsong, giggled at the gift of sun on my skin. I exercised, prayed with my steps, wrote stories from life in my prayer journal, meditatively collected tokens of life and death from a green and flourishing world around me. I laughed at funny-shaped flowers and brash monkeys and the silliness of birds. I appreciated good stories I read and watched and listened to, and the likeness of their characters and symbols to those in our Christian canon. In my imagination baptized by my Savior, these acts of noticing and standing in awe and meditating and appreciating and being—they were all part of a prayerful conversation with God.
I practiced visual arts by gathering and arranging. Like KJ taught me, I contemplated sickness and health, life and death, lament and joy by making a collage of what I had collected and thought over several days. I lamented the death I felt in my body still broken in some ways from a ladder fall two years ago. But I also joyed in the abundant life God brought through that death, and how all creation groans with me as wait expectantly, imagining when all things to be made new. And like Wendell Berry taught me, I practiced resurrection, remembering that my body and the creatures and creation around me will still be recognizable and even more wholly ourselves when God finally renews us.
I hope that you may try some of these types of prayers I’ve shared. I’ll include my collage and some pictures from my prayerful contemplations, to prompt your imagination toward new ways to pray. May you lament, and imagine, and dig into the rich soil of stories to give your prayers pictures and themes and connected community. May you gather, collage, eat, garden, dance, rest, bake, listen, sacrifice, bless, and remember. And may they be prayerful.
— By Miss Cellanea 