My Book of Prayer

I was reading a book on prayer by a noted author yesterday. I heard in her words hesitancy and the acknowledgment of some fear in beginning the book. The writer drew back just a bit as she realized that she was stepping into a huge topic about which so much has already been written.

I felt her trepidation. It was as if she were saying, "What do I have to say that hasn't already been said? Why should my words on prayer count for anything?"

As I read her hesitancy, in my mind I said to myself -- and to her, from a distance -- "You DO have something to say. You have YOUR book of prayer to write!" And I'm so glad she went ahead and wrote her book.

No sooner had that thought run through my mind, though, than the next thought came:

"And Jerry, what is YOUR book of prayer?"

It's another thing that keeps me hidden and private . . . the notion that whatever I have to say about the spiritual life has already been said. But just the raising of that question led me into an afternoon of considering . . . "What would be MY book of prayer?"

So I sketched out what prayer has looked like in the different seasons of my life. I thought of the ways I have failed at prayer and the ways that I've connected with God, some of them traditional and some very counter. I spent the afternoon mapping out Jerry's book of prayer.

And not only Jerry . . . but you have a book of prayer, too. We all have our own book of prayer, the book that records how we have done it well, how we have been frustrated, how we have been stretched and grown, how we have come into new depths in our prayer.

One day I may -- or may not -- get around to putting mine to paper.

Whether you write out your book or not, the important movement may simply to be acknowledging that you have your own book of prayer, and that you give some attention to what it might look like.

Protected from Nothing; Sustained in All Things

I offered a Benediction today for some folks who had gathered together around some common soul-yearnings. Some in this particular gathering had come by themselves from many miles away in hopes of finding a moment's-worth of companionship for the inner journey. A few of them live and work on spiritual frontiers that cause them to feel a deep aloneness. Some were walking through difficult and dark days.

I was asked spur-of-the-moment to offer the final words that would send the group back out onto the next life-road, so I had not rehearsed an eloquent or challenging Benediction. I was caught a bit off-guard when I was called upon to offer the parting words of blessing.

Really, I'm not sure what all I said in that Benediction. I wanted to keep it simple, yet give something that the folks could carry onto the road that lay ahead. So I said a couple of rambling things.

Then, as I closed, I had one of those moments -- I suppose we all have them at various times -- when in a split second I decide whether I'm going to say a particular thing or not. In that fraction of a moment, I consider about two dozen really good reasons not to say what I had thought of saying, but also one or two really good reasons to leave those particular words with the group.

In that moment, I decided, "Yes, I need to say this." So the words jumped out.

They are words that have become a kind of personal mantra for me in recent months. I heard James Finley make a statement a year and a half ago, then I paraphrased his words for myself, and now almost daily use the words to remind me of how God is present to me and in me. With these words I ended my Benediction:

God's love protects us from nothing; but God's love sustains us in all things.

For today, this statement speaks to what I believe about God, God's love, and my life. (I say "for today" because I find that as the questions shift for me, so do the things I can say with assurance.) I believe this. It lines up true to my experience and to the experience of others with whom I walk.

I've come to this out of a religious system that believed if I did the right things and said the right things and lived the right way, then God would protect me from all the bad and hurtful things in life. That fantasy got shattered for me a number of years ago. A huge part of my personal pain through those years came from having the illusion shattered . . . the illusion that God would protect me from hurt, pain and the "bad things" of life.

Slowly I began to trade in my "worthiness-system", especially when I noticed the intensity with which many of the saints and major spiritual figures throughout history suffered. I've yet to find a single canonized "saint" who did not undergo intense suffering, physical maladies or persecutions.

I am not shielded from anything that is common to the human condition. Nor are you. At the same time, I have never been more convinced that despite the fact that I am and you are subject to everything that is a part of the human condition, we are sustained, upheld and given hope in all things. Nothing -- not a single thing -- stands outside God's care. The iconic image of the cross says in imaged form what words fall short at saying . . . that God takes even the worst that can happen in our human experience and sustain us in love. God sustains always.

I have to confess that while I believe this statement is true to the nature of God, and while I believe it is true for myself, it is sometimes very difficult to believe for someone I love. When I sit with a dear friend who feels devastated by news that has come and who faces an unknown future, everything within me wants to scream out, "God, protect him from this!!!"

When I talk with a friend who is sliding into a pit of depression, and it's clear that the hole is going to be deep and long-lasting, I want to yell my prayer, "God, don't let this happen!!"

In short, I want to suspend the laws of God's love for a moment all for the benefit of a friend. I don't want to see her suffer, I don't want him to experience this pain. But I really do know better. God's love protects us from nothing; but God's love sustains us in everything.

So today after that Benediction, a Quaker friend I had not seen in many years sought me out immediately. She's one of the wisest, most grounded women I've ever known, and in recent years has faced some challenges that have been extraordinary. She looked me squarely in the eyes and said slyly, "I heard what you prayed." I was a bit embarrassed. She continued, "And it's true. God didn't keep any of these challenges away from me, but I've been sustained through all of them."

So it is for all of us.

Merton and the Nerve to Look Honestly

Forty years ago yesterday, Thomas Merton wrote from his Kentucky hermitage about an encounter with another well-known monk. The other monk called him a pessimist, said he was too anxious and too negative. Merton wrote in his journal about the underlying disharmony and mistrust that seemed to lie beneath the surface cordiality and agreement between the two.

As Merton reflected further that day, he started to ponder who he was and what he had written to that point. He began to pull out his books and to analyze how they had been received by peers . . . "so and so is not happy with this one . . . this one would disturb most European monks . . . he thinks this one was a foolish experiment."

In the next paragraph of his journal, he started to offer his own critique of the books he had written. There were books he stood by, things he wrote that he continued to feel were important. He continued to believe in "a few things I said here . . . a good bit of this book . . . maybe a little of this one." He called other books he had written "foolish" and "a mistake."

By the end of that day's journal entry, you can almost feel Merton wallowing in the pit he has dug for himself. Not only this day, but the journal entries for the next few days suggest his ongoing struggle with who he was, his reason for writing, and the response he expected from his audience. He looked honestly within himself and noticed that which lived in his shadows, what he called his "sick drives."

It's pretty honest stuff, uncommonly raw for someone widely considered the most important spiritual figure of the last century.

I find that his honesty runs counter to our usual notions of piety, in which we image ourselves continually striving "upward and onward," getting better and better, cleaner and purer the farther we go on the path. In these journal entries Merton revealed his shadow, the dark part of his personality that doubted who he was, mistrusted the authenticity of others around him, and questioned the validity of his life's work to that point.

For Merton, at least in these journal accounts, spirituality was not about going "onward and upward" to some state of moral perfection beyond doubt and darkness, but rather plumbing the depths of shadow and despair to notice our inner landscape . . . and then to find God there.

I suppose there are ways of conceptualizing spirituality in which these doubts and questions turn to certainties and assurances. It hasn't tended to worked that way for me, though. I share Merton's darkness, his questioning of self, his inner darkness, the way he doubts his motives for what he has done and written.

Frankly, it's what keeps me from writing more . . . my mistrust of my own motives for writing . . . and the fear that one day, like him, I would say, "What I wrote there was a load of hooey!" or "I don't think I believe that any more."

I don't know that I can clean up my motives or get my belief system straight. I can, however, be more and more aware of those inner structures that tug at me, that direct me, that determine my movements moment by moment.

So Merton sat in this darkness on June 6, 1961. He wrote about it on the porch of his little hermitage in the woods near the Abbey of Gethsemani, perhaps not knowing that one day we would be able to read his words of self-doubt.

Then, the last line in his journal entry for the day:

For my comfort a squirrel just ran across the porch.


[The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals, edited by Patrick Hart and Jonathan Montaldo (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999)]

A Rilke Poem: About Attending to the Patterns of Our Days

Orchard and Road

In the traffic of our days
may we attend to each thing
so that patterns are revealed
amidst the offerings of chance.

All things want to be heard,
so let us listen to what they say.
In the end we will hear what we are:
the orchard or the road leading past.

[Rainer Maria Rilke, "Orchard and Road" from the Collected French Poems, quoted in A Year with Rilke, trans. by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 131.]


Quakers say, "Let your life speak" or, "Listen to your life." It's more than just a saying that encourages us to live large.

I realize that when I'm faced with a decision or with some choice that feels significant, something inside me already knows what to do. I think that's true for all of us. It's the part of a human being I'd call "soul," or the "God-seed" within, that part of our being that already is connected and rooted in the soil of God's goodness. The soul is grounded in the reality of all that is. It knows what to do.

[Note: Mary Oliver begins her classic poem, "The Journey," with those very words:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began . . .]

So Quakers might say to us, "Listen to your life. Let it speak. It will tell you what to do." For many of us, that may seem easier said than done.

In the poem above, Rilke suggests much the same thing. "In the traffic of our days," he says, pay attention to each thing, to the movements and patterns and thoughts and reactions. Attend to what happens. Don't stumble blindly through the day, through the "traffic," as if the ordinary and mundane did not have some significance. Maybe in another day or from the wisdom of another tradition, he would say, "Live reflectively" or "Be mindful."

Because there are patterns at work within us, and perhaps there are predictable patterns at work in the world. The patterns of the world may have to do with image and conformity and popular notions of what it means to be successful; we are invited, though, to notice the more intimate patterns of our own DNA through the traffic of our days.

And to quote yet another poem that has come to mean a great deal to me, if we are not mindful of the exterior patterns or rhythms which press in upon us and to which we give ourselves and which we assume to be true in the world,

"a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong God home we may miss our star."
(William Stafford, "A Ritual to Read to Each Other")

We tend to assume the patterns others have made (the "wrong gods") and miss the patterns that live within us ("our star")! The patterns and assumptions that are woven into our essence are waiting to be heard. They are, in Stafford's image, the "star" we must follow.

In the second stanza of Rilke's poem, he repeats three times the image of "heard . . . listen . . . hear."

Then he says it: The attending and listening is so that we might "hear what we are."

It takes a radical leap of faith to trust God . . . maybe even more radical to trust ourselves and our own capacity to hear and live into "what we are."

This, however, is the ultimate vocation of every human being. This is what we are made for. This is who we are.

We begin to live into this vocation by attending to the patterns of our days.

Fruit That Feeds the Hungry

John 15:12 - 17

"My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because servants do not know their master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit — fruit that will last — and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other."


The Gospel reading for today begins and ends in "love." What stirred me, though, came in the middle of the paragraph . . . the initiative of Jesus in choosing me (because I generally think that what happens in my life comes as a result of my choices, my initiative, my influence) and then the “appointment” upon me to “bear fruit.”

“Fruit” comes at the end of the tree, literally the produce of the tree’s essence. The fruit that hangs at the end of the tree only reflects what is within the tree, what begins in the roots and is real through the trunk. The fruit that appears at the end of a branch is always consistent with what is happening in the roots and within the trunk of the tree.

Further, at the right time, the tree drops the fruit or it is picked. It does the tree no use to hold onto fruit. In fact, to do so would do great harm to the health of the tree. The tree, rather, lets go of the fruit, trusting that with a healthy root system, with bark in place, with a trunk sturdy to bear the tree’s weight, more fruit will come.

I tend to think of the fruit that grows at the outer limbs of my life as my creativity, my giftedness, and all the ways I spend myself in the world. That takes a number of forms for me, as yours does for you. Always, though, the fruit expresses what is within the root system and trunk. So the fruit is not the only thing going on. In fact, in order to be fruitful it’s more important to tend to the roots, to nourish the unseen parts of the tree than to obsess with what is seen.

It’s a metaphor that helps me understand who I am and how I am invited to express my being in the world. For the unseen, interior, more soulful, rooted aspect of my existence is my essence, my true “name.” In another analogy, it contains the song I’m to sing in the world. The fruit at the end of the branch, then, is the tangible expression of that essence in the world. In short, it is what I do or what I produce.

In the John 15 passage, I hear the invitation of Jesus to bear fruit in the world, that is, to feed the world with my unique fruitfulness. It’s not as easy as it sounds . . . for I recognize in myself a tendency to want my fruit to look like someone else’s fruit.

I see some tremendous good being done in the world and I want to be a part of that. I want to do it just that way! I want to join my life to that train, to that person, to that ministry, to that movement.

I’m afraid traditional expressions of Christianity don’t do us many favors here. We’re accustomed to hearing or reading that there are certain things we should all do as Christians, the non-negotiables of Christian life that are for all of us. It’s a kind of one-size-fits-all contemporary Christianity. There are certain things that real Christians do, and of course, certain things that those who are not Christians ("unreal Christians"??) do!

Really, though, I think that’s part of the naiveté of the religious people of Jesus’ time, and partially why he pushed back so hard against them. They insisted on laws that everyone followed and a lock-step, mindless adherence to a system for the sake of adherence to the system. The end result was a monochromatic religion in which the personal creation of each human was distilled away.

How do I – and how do you – find my uniqueness and the particular way that I’m invited to live out my vocation and spend the fruit of my life in the world?

In one of his early books, Frederick Buechner wrote that vocation or calling is that place where your deepest love/passion meets the hunger of the world. That’s still a helpful way for me to think about calling.

So I consider what I love, what passions run wild in my soul. That’s the essence of my root system, the base of my “tree.”

Then I consider what the world around me is hungry for. What do the people around me need? What is the cry of my life-world? Do I have any fruit on my tree to offer this hunger?

There are some hungers around me that I can acknowledge, but if I try to feed them I will only do more harm than good. The fruit I have may not satisfy every hunger. I have to know my limitations, what I actually have so that I’m not trying to give fruit I do not actually have to give. I cannot give someone else's fruit. I cannot do all things. I cannot give what I do not have. I cannot be all things to all people.

But there are some cries that I hear regularly, and they are cries for which I have some fruit, borne of my unique tree. It is this fruit Jesus invites me to offer . . . the fruit I have, not the fruit I don’t have.

For me this is the intersection at which I’m invited to live out the one-of-a-kind life that God has appointed to me.

Judgment Day 2011, part 2

It's 10:07 p.m.

Where is everybody?

Judgment Day 2011

There is never a period of history in which someone, somewhere is not fired up about a pending Judgment Day. I'm old enough to remember that in the late 1970's, some folks somewhere predicted the date of the Second Coming of Christ and went to live on their rooftops for a few days. Apparently, they wanted to be that much closer to heaven so they could meet Jesus a few feet before everyone else.

I've lived through enough of these predicted dates to see a pattern in them. For those who pronounce them and those who propagate them, there is most always a "turn or burn" element to the prophecy. The forecast becomes an opportunity for division, separation and exclusion. Some perish, some live. Some make it, some don't.

I'm interested today in a couple of things . . . and neither of them really concerns whether today really is the day or not.

I'm interested, for one, in the people who have quit their jobs and have spent days, weeks and months getting the word out about this Judgment Day. Some have left homes, family, work, and other responsibilities to go on the road and spread the word. They seem to be sincere people. And to hear them talk, there is a hint of obligation in their voices. There is also an undercurrent of fear . . . the fear that if they don't get out there and tell what they "know", then they will have to pay the consequences, too.

In short, there seems to be a need within persons to work themselves to the "good side of the ledger," so to speak. So they announce, proclaim, and bull-horn their way across the land in hopes that they are doing enough good to be rewarded in the afterlife.

If you pin your hopes on a system of good works and merit, then you don't want to have a ledger that lacks effort, works, and lots of courageous, in-your-face deeds when the final score is tallied.

I'm not belittling them, because in a sense these are courageous people who have completely given themselves to this pronouncement. There is something to admire in their willingness to walk out to the end of the limb for what they believe.

But that brings me to the second thing that stands out to me today. There is a notion of God underlying all this frantic activity that is unmistakable. The God of this Judgment Day is a God who separates and divides, a God of punitive judgment and ferocious vengeance who is going to get even with persons who are on the wrong side of the moral ledger. This thinking traffics on an image of God who is a cosmic Scorekeeper, primarily invested in keeping scores and settling accounts.

Such a God has little interest in healing wounds or mending lives, but in a strict moral justice that declares some in and some out. This God has to be appeased by our good works and tireless efforts. This God is more willing to "cast out" or "cast away" than to "draw in" and "bring together."

Yet, in most every expression of Christian spirituality through the centuries, God is imaged as one who brings together rather than dividing. After all, Christian spirituality has affirmed -- since Jesus -- that the ultimate goal of life is "union" or "Divine union." This union is not accomplished through moral good works or by our human efforts. It is received as we open ourselves . . . received as a gift that can be bestowed only by God. We don't earn it, achieve it, deserve it. Union with God is an act of generosity, entirely consistent with the character of God.

So all these pronouncements about May 21 and Judgment Day have merely invited me to consider afresh, "Who is God to me?"

"What do I believe fundamentally about God?"

"How have I experienced God, not theoretically, but practically in the real life that I live?"

Given those questions, May 21, 2011 looks much different for me than for many other folks. If life as we know it ends today, I'm okay. I'm not worried about my ledger. I can't accumulate enough to even the score.