The absolute best description of
prayer I have ever heard or read comes from a colleague who quite often has a
very salty, irreverent way of saying very deep and true things.
Several weeks ago, Jason was
diagnosed with a rare, aggressive cancer—mantle cell non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He
is fighting it with a brutal regimen of chemotherapy. He has been sharing some
observations on his blog. A week ago, as he wrote frankly about the difficulty
of prayer for him, especially now; he went on to say what he thinks prayer
really is:
"When
we pray to God, we’re prayed in by God.
"Instead of a practice we perform for results we’ve
predetermined, prayer is a kind of parable of the Trinity. All prayer is but an
echo of the Son praying to the Father through the Spirit. Rather than hooking
God into our internal conversation, prayer catches us up into the eternal
conversation Christians call Father, Son and Holy Spirit."[1]
As soon as I read that first
line, I knew it for truth. Paul writes that the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs
too deep for words. Our deepest, truest prayer is not our prayer at all, but that of God bringing us into the ongoing
conversation, the ongoing communion within God’s own self. This is the love we
see in action in Communion.
On this Holy Thursday, my hope
is that we may be caught up by this prayer that is love flowing through the
Three-ness of God: Father, Son, and Spirit. Come tonight at 7 in the Chapel.
Romans 8:26
Likewise the
Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought,
but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.
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