The Book of Not So Common Prayer - Linda McCullough Moore

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even bother to state anything so patently obvious? I don’t say to the thumbtack on the table: “I am far above you. I’m wiser and stronger, more dexterous and agile, in short, a better human being.” So why would God compare himself to gods made out of brass and terra cotta, or even mortal flesh?

      I don’t take on the thumbtack; there’s no contest. Why would God take on a president or Queen Elizabeth?

      But he does take on other “gods.” He goes out of his way to say he outdoes “kings” and “rulers,” and his Holy Word repeats it like it means something. But what might that meaning be?

      I don’t think God is comparing himself to actual flesh-and-blood prime ministers and presidents. Rather, it seems to me that he is taking on the real gods we worship, the gods we give our very selves to, the gods we live and die for. He’s saying, “I matter more than even these.”

      Let me name the gods we worship, all the things in life we deify. Silly gods: hockey, buffalo wings, and YouTube; serious, staid gods: education, status, and security; secret gods: fraud and pornography; subtle deities: self-image, personal best, and winner; churchy gods: morality, self-righteousness, and pride; old-fashioned gods: sloth, lust, and greed.

      These are not our incidentals, harmless pastimes; rather,they are the objects of our worship and self-sacrifice and dedication. If that seems extremely stated, we can do the math; run the numbers; calculate the time we give to all these things and then compare that with the time we spend with God. We can evaluate their relative importance in our lives quite simply, just by going without them for a month.

      Or, another telling exercise: we might write down 8:00, 8:30, 9:00, 9:30, 10:00, and each half-hour through the day until bedtime, and for each time write down what we have done, and in the margin, write who was god of that half-hour. God is not God of our lives if he is not God of our half-hours.

      Time is the thermometer, the indicator of priorities of the things we value. So too, time used differently can alter who and what will rule our days. There’s a well-kept secret of time management that doesn’t get much press. It’s this: If every morning you take five minutes and jot down what you will do with each half-hour of your day, that one small practice will actually change the things you do with time.

      Time. It’s the one thing every blessed one of us is given in exactly the same amount. Donald Trump has no more minutes in his hours than you’ve got in yours. Oprah Winfrey has just seven days in every week she lives. Barack Obama gets 365 days every year, and once every four years when he gets an extra day, you get one too.

      Jesus tells us: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). Where you put your minutes is very likely where you put your heart.

      I believe that the first step in acknowledging God as our truest treasure is showing up to pray. Every day. Even if it’s raining. Even if it’s not. Even if you have a hundred other things to do. And here’s the astonishing surprise: You start to like this daily prayer. You start to need it. You start to miss it when it isn’t there. You start to love it. You begin to treasure your time alone with God. It becomes the best-tasting, most melodious, harmonious, exciting, satisfying part of your whole day. You crave it, you can’t get enough.

      And guess what else? You don’t end up living in a cave somewhere. You don’t get voted the Hermit Saint. People appear from the most unlikely places; your life gets richer with experiences and happenings, relationship and blessing. You seek first the kingdom of heaven and God’s righteousness. You put your treasure where your heart is; you say, out loud, in a big, bold, outdoor voice: “I will have no other God before you. You are my God.”

      You come to God in prayer—and you would be very well advised to hold onto your hat.

      How Can I Do It If I Don’t Know What It Is?

      And yet, what is prayer? That one short word is asked to cover a multitude of mysteries. Prayer is worship. Prayer is sitting down with God, abiding in his love, filling our minds with images of him. Prayer is being in the presence of the living God and being acutely aware of how unlikely and astonishing that is. Prayer is resting. Prayer is wrestling. Prayer is the most outrageous and transforming thing that we will ever do, but often we reduce it to a wave, a knee bend, and a please and thank you. Prayer is, most simply put, being consciously in the presence of God. In a very true sense, prayer is being, not doing. It is less an activity than a location. (It goes without saying that we are in God’s presence all the time, but being aware of this reality is another story.)

      And yet prayer is not all peaceful and serene. I have been considering starting a campaign to abolish the term “quiet time.” True, we prepare our hearts to receive God by quieting ourselves—stillness really is the place where it all begins—but what pervades our prayer times is often anything but quiet. There will be moments that are holy, soft and gentle, but so many others that we will experience as monumental and imposing, riveting our full attention. And, it must be said, we are guaranteed there will be times when prayer is dull and vacant, parched and dry as dry can be. These times will be interspersed with encounters with God we find to be enlightening, shocking, and in the end life-changing.

      Prayer involves every aspect of our being: thought and reason, emotion and desire. This conversation with our Heavenly Father will encompass all of life. And it will surely touch our deepest beings, joining in rich paradox happiness and sorrow, satisfaction and disappointment. Prayer knows how to hold the contradictions of our lives in one brilliant understanding.

      “Come now, and let us reason together” are the words we read in Isaiah 1:18 (KJV). Prayer can be exactly this: reasoning together. We do it all day long, with ourselves and with the people in our lives. We may not give it this name, but we are always thinking and deciding, discussing and arguing about ideas. Reasoning is part of prayer. Prayer can be the questions we ask God, and when we allow ourselves to listen, it can be the questions God asks us. “Have you ever stopped to think about it this way?” asks the Holy Spirit. Faith is not a blind venture; it is based on serious thought and understanding. On reasoning. On reason.

      For anyone—such as me, to take one random example—whose first experience of prayer was limited to asking God for things, there is much to learn. And that’s the good news. The challenge of learning to pray can get me out of bed some mornings. Imagine how boring and lifeless would be any practice that was not dynamic, multifaceted, and richly textured.

      Perhaps a useful starting place might be to think about what it is we do in prayer, to help us move toward an understanding of living in a state of being with our Heavenly Father. Many Christians know the acronym ACTS, which offers one good description of prayer: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. The order of the letters recommends the sequence we might pray.

      First, we adore. Think of the bride and groom standing at the altar on their wedding day. It’s not hard to imagine a bit of adoring as the first order of business, the natural impulse, automatic and exactly right. So it is that we are made to love and adore our Savior. But, the argument arises, marriage is a human relationship, not the connection of God and his child. True, it’s not; but human love can help us know the nature of adoring, caring, and blessing, so long as we do not confuse comparison with definition. We cannot think of relationship with God without referencing our experiences in human love. And so we do compare, always with the understanding that it is the same and it is different, that the two are alike and unalike, one a shadow image and the other the real thing.

      In this sequence of prayer, we start out by adoring, knowing adoration as a feeling we have for those we love the most. And is this automatic? It is not. Or, not in my experience. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that it took me approximately forever to reach the place where I even knew what adoration of God could be. It has truly been a long time coming. And how did I get there? I prayed. I asked God to give me love for him. I prayed the truth; I prayed the very words, “I do not love you. Would you give me love for you?” And he did. There is nothing

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