Why do we pray? Is it for personal reasons? Is it because we feel we are commanded to pray? Or do we want to get to know God a little better?
There are many reasons to pray, just as there are many ways. But one thing is certain, sincerity in prayer will lead one away from the ordinary and into presence. Anthony Esolen says that our prayer should call us out of ourselves.To be called out requires stepping into the unknown. It means taking prayer not simple as a connection to God, but as our imagination learning to recognize the image of God.
As in all things Divine, we are constantly revising our concepts. Bernard Bro says that all too often our prayer is addressed to an abstract, deformed image, to a God as the representative of an idea and a law, much more than to the ineffable Person who, through his love, has allied his destiny with ours...
Prayer should be about getting our image of God right. How do we know when it is right? I think it comes when we understand God in the manner of Isaiah 43:20-21 who writes: I put water in the desert and rivers in the wasteland for my chosen people to drink, the people I formed for myself, that they might announce my praise. Isaiah's image of God is one who cares for us in the situation that we are in, not as one who takes us out of it. God doesn't take us out of the desert of our lives; he gives us our necessities. In essence, God doesn't change our situation. He is there to provide as we journey thought the desert, the wasteland.
Getting the image right means knowing the God who allows us the struggle, but steadies our feet; who leads us through the Valley of Darkness but doesn't leave us alone; who broods over our chaotic souls without taking the chaos away. Because God is bigger than all of that.
It is hard not to make God a graven image, to fashion Him according to our own experience or lack of it. He established this early on in the 10 commandments because He knows our bent to invent His character out of the novel of our own life. This is why we must have a picture outside ourself to begin with, what He has revealed about Himself in the Bible. When we see that love fully shown in His Son, we can begin to abandon our low image of Him and walk with hope and joy. We will from time to time get out the engravers tools when we forget Him in our journey. Yet as we find Him with us and faithful in our experience those tools get packed away in their bag and our imaginative idol is cast down. As you suggest joy is not the absence of trouble but the apprehension of God with us, strength now and hope in the life to come. Let Him engrave that fully on our hearts.
ReplyDeleteI like your thought. To follow that, what you say suggests that we should not make our image of God, but find the image he has engraved on our hearts. What a wonderful thought!
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