Just... Um.. Prayer

About two years ago I went to a religious "humor" website and it featured an article called "The Church Mystery Shopper. The shopper's job was to randomly enter a church and critique things such as the flavor of the church coffee and how many people with nametags were standing at the door to greet people. I recall the rest of the shopper's report as continuing along the same superficial lines. However, one of shopper's confessions that I distinctly remember was that the church mystery shopper secretly admitted to counting the number of times the word "just" was said in each evangelical prayer. I'll provide some examples for those of you who don't attend evangelical churches. Someone might pray, "Father when we come before you today we just want to glorify your name," or, "Heavenly Dad, we just want to thank you," or, "Lord Jesus, we just want to focus on you." Ironically, immediately offering up such exaltations to the almighty they would then pray a long list of more self centered prayer requests: We just want to pray to do well on the test, we just want to pray for our sick grandma, we just want to pray for our own personal safety.

Last month I shared the observations with a fellow camp staff member and he whole heartedly agreed that "just" was over used. He noted that he had already spent some time thinking about it and that he felt the worst offerenders were people who say "just umm" in an attempt to sound pious. For example, "Father, we just... um would like you to bring peace to the Middle East."

Combing the experiences of reading that article and having a conversation and ruminating on them in my mind, I have developed a tendency during long, and dare I say boring, prayer times to count the number of times someone says just when praying (sometimes up to 12!) and on occasion I have had to hold in a chuckle when I get a really on fire "just... ummer."

I recognize these idiosyncrasies as judgemental spiritual deficits and, fortunately, a book by Thomas Keating titled Open Heart, Open Mind has helped redirect my thinking on prayer. The book focuses a form of prayer called contemplative prayer. Keating claims that this is an inward centering prayer, written about by mystics and bearing some resemblance to Eastern meditation, that was once commonly used in the church, but questioned heavily during the inquisition and discredited by schools that taught theology when human knowledge came to be seen as more concrete during the sixteen and seventeen hundreds.

The basic premiss behind centering prayer is that you learn to quiet all of your inward voices and focus you attention on the still, small voice that dwells within you in the form of God. Keating lays out a step by step process that involved clearing your mind and increasing your focus. Iit does involve quite a bit of time, two half hour periods a day for the rest of your life, and you aren't praying for tangible things but hoping that God will change you and make the fruit of the spirit more evident in your life.

If you are like me and not familiar with Catholic writing or doctrine, you might be a little cautious when you begin reading the book. A couple of times he diverts into discussions of odd things like the story of a medieval Catholic monk who possessed the spiritual gift of "levitation." However, I think there are lessons in the book that anyone, regardless of denominational background, can learn from reading Merton's writing. Primarily, that prayer is not about us, but about God and to be successful at prayer we need to get over our own selfish hang-ups and just umm.. spend some time focusing on what God wants for our lives and what he has to say.