The Book of Not So Common Prayer - Linda McCullough Moore

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to the experience of adoration.

      I have found that hymns of praise foster my adoring best of all. The music primes my heart, allowing words to penetrate my consciousness, enlarge my loving. I hear, “Angels, help us to adore him, / Ye behold him face to face; / Sun and moon bow down before him; / Dwellers all in time and space,” and I glimpse heaven—angels, planets, and images beyond my knowing.

      Sometimes, art can be the way in. Every public library in the United States has books of Christian paintings. Steal an hour. Take one off the shelf and sit with holy images, allowing them to touch you. Let God surprise your heart in worship in the middle of the reading room.

      Adoration is my favorite part of prayer, the part that now resembles no other aspect of my life, the part that doesn’t leave me second-guessing or dissatisfied. Taking certain pleasure in something outside ourselves feels wonderful, and when that something is definitively perfect, there’s no downside. When we worship and adore anything or anybody who is not God, we are always shushing hushed but niggling, slight misgivings about the object of our worship. It sort of takes the edge off. But when we worship God, we adore perfection.

      The second part of the ACTS prayer is confession. Here, even more clearly, we experience ourselves to be entirely dependent upon the grace of God. We pray that the Holy Spirit will convict us of sin, in order that we can confess. I know no more frightening human condition than for a person to think he is just fine when that is not the case, to be unaware of danger, which, if recognized, could easily be avoided. A blindfolded man runs toward the cliff’s edge, laughing, saying he is fine. In our deepest beings, we must pray that God will show us the reality about ourselves, how fecklessly we run to peril.

      I have a very simple exercise I do. It is modeled on the Daily Examen of Ignatius Loyola, which is a practice of prayerful reflection on the day in order to see God’s presence and discover his direction. In the evening, I sit in a quiet place with my eyes closed, and I review the events of the day. It is almost like watching a movie as I bring all of the day’s activities and interactions to mind. I watch this movie twice—the first time, on the lookout for all the ways I see God’s hand in what has happened; the second time, praying to see the instances of things I’ve thought, and said, and done that have not been pleasing to the Lord. The Holy Spirit brings to mind those things for which I need to ask forgiveness.

      Confession seems to be a focus on the negative, for so sin surely is, but paradoxically, this is the path to peace. There is nothing lovelier in all the world than to feel regret and pain for something I have done and then have God obliterate all memory of that forgiven sin. Sins, fire-engine red, washed freshly-fallen-snow bright white. We misunderstand the Cross if we think Christ died to mute remembrance.

      The T in ACTS, thanksgiving, is perhaps a bit more straightforward. The primary glitch in this regard is trying to give thanks in the middle of the muddle of our lives. On a bright sunny day with no work and everybody healthy, our thanks is at the ready. But give us stormy weather, deep-sorrow sadness, or pain in mind or body, and praise is sometimes hard to come by. I have discovered, though, that it is an extraordinary experience in the middle of a migraine to sing out hymns of thankfulness. The blessing in those moments is the miracle that as I sing my heart fills up with what is good, and pure, and peaceful. I might still have the pain, but it is not the only thing contained in that one moment. I often wonder if I would know God as I do if I didn’t have a migraine brain. Chronic, quirky, unpredictable, and disorienting migraines help keep me tethered to the Lord. I thank God for the agency of anything in life that draws me close to him.

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      If we wait for everything around us to be OK before we open up our hearts to praise, we will wait forever. The secret in life is to make a place for joy and thanksgiving no matter what the circumstance. “But that’s impossible,” you say. Of course it is. God traffics in the impossible all day. And if we are his children, so will we. Imagine a world where only the possible was possible. I wouldn’t want to live there.

      Our ACTS prayer ends with supplication, an antique word that is our invitation to ask God’s blessing—for so very long, the first (and sometimes only) part in all my prayers. This aspect requires little explanation, except perhaps to say that there is nothing in the world we cannot ask God for. He is the One who says, “The very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matthew 10:30 KJV). It is his will and pleasure that we come to him with every longing that there is. There is no part of daily life that we are not meant to bring to God in prayer.

      I have a friend who has enlarged my thinking about prayers of supplication. This is a woman who has lived through a campaign of genocide, of ethnic cleansing, and she tells me she doesn’t want to ask God for anything that she can get from any other source—she’s thinking food, water, safety from being harmed—because she says if she gets that thing from some source other than God, then she will be inclined to worship that. She tells me she wants from God what one can get only from God. Me too. Basically. Only I don’t know what that is or how to ask for it. But I love the way her words have made me think about my prayers of petition. There’s the old saw: be careful what you ask for, you may get it. I thank God that he protects us from so many of our prayers, that he spares us by denying our requests. But it seems to me that my friend prays a holy prayer, one that will not be denied.

      Gazing on God

      ACTS is just one way of describing what prayer might be. Indeed, much of what we say about prayer, and certainly any comparisons we make between our conversations with God and our conversations with other people, will be no more than skimpy and segmented efforts to teach our hearts the truth. We know these little metaphors miss the supernatural mark, no doubt by several light years. And so, it is important that we square these comparisons with our theology, making sure they don’t mislead us, cause us to invent some different deity. Do I overstate here? I don’t think so. I know that personally I go through life inventing images of God and prayer that bear only slight resemblance to reality. I compare prayer to some ordinary chat, and so reduce it to a miniature approximation of the splendor that it is. And when I do this, I diminish prayer and chip God down to size as well. We must give thought to the comparisons we make. We must be careful what we say, for we are listening.

      For example, prayer can surely be companionship, but it is not always like two friends meeting for coffee. More often, it is like one friend giving the other a blood transfusion; one giving the other life, physically and spiritually. I’ve said it before, and we all need to say it again—many times—prayer is a relationship between two beings, where one of the two is God, and one is not. Embedding prayer in Scripture will keep this at the forefront of our minds.

      Prayer is so much more than our speaking words to God. It is God’s communicating with us, working on us, transforming us into the image of God, making us more and more like him. Prayer is a workshop where we are handcrafted,completed, caused to be what we were designed and—by God’s grace—created to be. For good or ill, whether we pray or not, we are always being changed; worked on by our surroundings; shaped and molded and defined. We get to choose the influences that will work upon us, but we do not get to choose their effect. In prayer we choose the influence of the Holy Spirit of the living God, never knowing what results might follow, but all the while trusting the One who says, “I know the plans I have in mind for you . . . ; they are plans for peace, . . . to give you a future filled with hope” (Jeremiah 29:11).

      The outcome will not be our doing, but we know the One who will cause us to be more than we can ask or imagine. Our thoughts run to new hairstyles; his thoughts run to new heads, new thoughts, new perspectives, and brand-new understanding. Our thoughts run to fit bodies; his thoughts run to fit souls. We envision happy days; he envisions everlasting glory.

      The focus of our prayers must be, with concentrated gaze, on God—because this focus is the only way to avoid making our prayers be for our glory. Even in our prayers for good things—for righteousness, for holiness—if we focus on ourselves and not on God, we’ll lose our way for sure. I say that what I want is God, to live for him and in his glory, but sometimes I think what I really want is my self—but my self made perfect, in fact made wonderful, so I can feel really good about me, and who I am,

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