Prayer of the Heart

St. Theophan the Recluse (1815-1894), Russian asectic, bishop, and prolific author

I don't know about you, but prayer intimidates me a bit. I'm not by nature a contemplative, and the thought of being alone in a room with just my thoughts (just as likely to be about baseball or some banal subject) is a bit scary. I've discovered that I need coaches or guides in prayer.

One I've discovered is a guy named Theophan the Recluse. I know, I know--any guy with "Recluse" in his name, who's not a spider, has got to be a little creepy. Don't let that intimidate you; he was just a Russian monk of the 19th century. Monks are the ones through history who've made a point of retreating from society in order to think more deeply about God, and cultivate a life of contemplation and prayer.  Theophan's main contribution to Christian spirituality was his translation of a group of writings on prayer called the "Philokalia" into Russian.

He says something that helps me, and addresses some of my prayer insecurities.


Recall how you prayed and always strive to pray this way, so that prayer comes from the heart and is not just thought by the mind and chattered by the tongue.

When he says, "prayer...chattered by the tongue" I know just what he means. In my tradition, prayer is considered "good" if it is long, eloquent, and (usually) loud. My tradition values free-form prayer laced with spiritual-sounding phrases like "washed in the blood of the Lamb" and "sanctified and set-apart by the sinless substitutionary atonement of Jesus..." I know all about prayers "chattered by the tongue" and they do much to intimidate me in my own prayer life.

My new friend the recluse, perhaps because he has spent more time praying alone than to try to impress others, speaks of a different kind of prayer-- the prayer that comes from the heart. The thought in this more Eastern method of prayer was to memorize a simple prayer, sometimes called a "breath prayer" and repeat it often enough that the words weren't central. It was a "known-by-heart" prayer.

This kind of heart prayer takes me out of the competition mode. It puts me into more of a contemplative moment, allowing me to reflect on what God might have to say to me. This I think, is what Theophan must have intended. Perhaps that is why the saint once known as "George" took the name Theophan which means "God appears." When we pray from the heart, God often appears.

How do you feel about prayer?

Unspoken Request?

This is a blog entry I have been reluctant to make. The whole facebooking, blogging, and Twittering process involves sharing information about yourself with others. Everything from the mundane "had Fruity Hoops this AM, Yum!" to the amusing "son shoved rox (sic) in the furnace vent--only cost us $1000" (true story) to the annoying, "Jimmy bought a new cow bell and overalls in Farm-Land." I'm comfortable in the land of self-disclosure, and often (as you probably know) fill the digital landscape with verbiage both pedestrian and profound.

But recently, I ran into a roadblock. Something going on in my life so big, so perplexing, that I fell back on that old chestnut of youth group prayer meetings. "I have an unspoken request." For those of you unfamiliar with the expression, it could be hauled out if one was so verklempt as to be rendered speechless by life's troubles, or simply when you didn't feel like praying for Uncle Bob's travel mercies any longer. It was like saying, "I take a pass." Which was exactly what I felt like saying, when I found out that my dad had a tumor in his spine.

To be fair, my Facebook friends responded with grace and charity. "I'll pray!" said one. "From your heart to God's ears," chirped another. But it didn't feel like that to me. When an MRI revealed that my pops had a tumor in his cervical spine, I experienced it almost as a digital event, a strange post about a made-up world of fantasy; this couldn't be happening to me and to my family. Writing the status update , "my dad has a spinal column tumor" was something neither my fingers nor my brain were ready nor able to do.

Not that I am a stranger to tragedy. As a pastor, I have walked through devastating days with parishioners, and our family like yours has endured our share of pain. Yet in this pleasant season where we share a neighborhood with my folks, seeing them nearly every day, such unwanted news shocked me. Writing down that diagnosis seemed too stark, contemplating the possibilities too grim for me to attempt. So I retreated to the unspoken...

But now I speak. First, because I need help. I need friends and acquaintances to pray and encourage me because I simply can't handle life alone. I wish I could. Second, in speaking the unspoken I name our enemy, focus our prayers, target our petitions. Because as dire as that news is, I do believe in power greater than all our troubles. Speaking my need focuses my attention on God's power to save and heal, even in the worst situations.

I'll be frank; my mind often floods with the torrent of possible complications from a surgery that could scar, paralyze or kill. I choose nevertheless to give a "confession of hope" because "He who promises is faithful." That is to say, I dare speak these bare words of need because I do believe that Jesus the healer can and will deal with that need as only one who has died and rose again can... through the doctors, yes, and even beyond a doctor's skill.

So tomorrow morning you may see my status "At the hospital for my dad's surgery." I hope you'll join me in saying a prayer, because this is bigger than me. And the next time you have an "unspoken request" know that I'll understand. But more importantly, the Bible says, "Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD." The unspoken is already spoken to Him. And that's what gives me hope...