Prayer Archives - Dreaming Beneath the Spires

On the Benefits of Writing Down Our Prayers

We are listening to A Praying Life by Paul Miller, a wonderful book on prayer in the car. (I was, incidentally disciplined by the author for almost five years, as he mentions in the book).

Anyway, Miller tells us that he often prays aloud. Jesus did so in his High Priestly Prayer in John 17, and his anguished prayers at Gethsemane. (However, Jesus also encourages us to pray in the privacy of our rooms so that our prayers don’t impress people (rather than God)…and thereby lose us the secret reward God gives those who pray.)

“Praying out loud can be helpful because it keeps you from getting lost in your head. It makes your thoughts concrete,” Miller writes. “When I confess a sin aloud, it feels more real. I’m surprised by how concrete the sin feels. I’ve even thought, ‘Oh I guess that was really wrong.’ On the way to a social event, I will pray aloud in the car that I won’t fall into lust or people pleasing. My prayers become more serious.”

* * *

However, when I find it hard to focus on prayer, what helps me is not praying out loud (I live with two daughters, one husband, one Golden Retriever, and one Labradoodle, and don’t want to startle any of them) but writing out my prayers.

When I pray my thoughts meander in the natural way of thoughts. Writing out my prayers helps me redirect my thoughts to the subject I was praying about so that I can saturate that worry in prayer, make sure I have heard God on it, and am acting in accordance with his directives. (This is particularly important for unanswered prayers so one senses the story God is writing in our lives).

I like to put my worries into the petri dish of prayer, so to say, bathing them in prayer, and continuing to “pray until something happens.” Written prayers help me “worry the bone of a prayer,” until light and clarity emerges as to what God might be doing in the things I am praying about, and what he wants me to do.

(Interestingly, though, Miller says prayer should be like human conversation between friends, meandering, free-flowing, playful. So if, in the middle of praying-worrying about how I am writing less than I want to, I start praying-worrying that I am exercising a bit less than I want to, and then that the room I am praying in is a tad messier than I want it to be…Miller would suggest praying about the latest worries that have popped up their groundhog heads instead of dragging prayer back to the first worry. Confess. Ask for help. Ask for strategy. And who knows? Perhaps the solution to the first worry—disappointing productivity–lies in the next two: not enough exercise, not enough tidying up!! Yes, indeed!)

* * *

The Circle Maker by Mark Batterson is another prayer-changing, hope-refilling book on prayer. Just as Jesus does, Batterson encourages us to pray about anything. Wild dreams, wild-goose dreams, dreams we are afraid to vocalize, dreams we can only keep alive because the Creator of the Universe can do and create anything… The dreams that we are embarrassed to say aloud, we can write down. And in the process of writing them down, they feel a little bit more real. “Dreaming is a form of prayer and prayer is a form of dreaming,” as Batterson says.

I have often found that wild-goose dreams I have prayed for have uncannily come to pass. In that way, our prayers can be prophetic, and, in the areas we have saturated in prayer, the transcript of our lives resembles the transcript of our prayers, to quote Batterson again.

* * *

We often don’t know our own hearts and minds and spirits. That is why people go to therapy!! Expressive writing is a form of therapy. So too is prayer journaling.

In the process of putting it down, in stark black and white, clarity comes about what I really want—which women socialized to be nice and obliging often don’t know!!

The actions and emotions of my own heart that I am less than proud about get unveiled and gradually repented of. The hurts and slights, the slings and arrows of interpersonal relationships which could metastasize into a cancer of unforgiveness if brooded over are released and forgiven…

Write out your confusion and lack of clarity. The areas of your life where you are not sure what God is doing, or the direction in which your life is veering. I often feel I know very little about my own life, the plot God is writing in and through it, the direction in which he is bending it, and what he wants me to do… Prayer helps me to understand the story that God is writing in my life a little better, and written prayer clarifies and focuses my heart-prayer.

I’m Recommending:

The Circle Maker: Praying Circles Around Your Biggest Dreams and Greatest Fears on Amazon.co.uk and on Amazon.com.

A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World by Paul Miller on Amazon.co.uk and on Amazon.com.

Analysing my Experience of Prayer over the Last 19 Years

By Anita Mathias

So I come to my time of prayer, and I am dry and distracted. My thoughts are whirling; I cannot hear God speak, and I have nothing to say. My spirit feels numb. Prayer?

It’s as if you are having coffee with a friend you haven’t seen for a while, and you are so out of touch with her life, and she with yours, that you don’t know what to ask, don’t know what to tell, don’t know what to talk about. The conversation is leaden; you want to escape.

Keeping in touch is a sure way to better conversation, whether with God or a friend.

I pick up my pen. Since my mind cannot focus on ethereal prayer, I will write my prayers. Write my worries, my plans, and my fears. Check in with Jesus about each of them. That pathway into prayer–writing my prayers–never fails.

* * *

I write. I think. I pray. I sink, absorbed, into the quietness.

I had come to prayer so distracted, so out of touch with God, with nothing to say, my thoughts and emotions whirling restlessly.

But I had forced myself into the boat of prayer, and Christ and I together had pushed far away from shore.

It got quiet. It got peaceful. Long, still sheets of water everywhere. Slowly, a fish plopped up. A worry.

My writing?

I take that worry to God.

I don’t hear anything.

I ask the question again. So Lord, will I have a writing career, of sorts? And wait.

Slowly, clarity emerges.

I go back to my origin story. The clear call of God to write one day in 1983. A call which, for too long a time in my life, I have not been faithful to.

I will return to that. I will be faithful to my call. I will leave success and failure to him. I will keep writing. I will keep reading. I will study the craft as time permits. I will get better, that is certain. He will use my words to reach others, of that too I feel certain. I will run in my lane and leave the results of my race to him.

* * *

Other fish poke their heads out of the temporarily still sea. Our family business, and how to make it grow? My daughters’ future.

Ideas come, reassurance. Some questions remain question marks, of course. Not every answer is given in every session of prayer, but they are now question marks bathed in golden light.

I grow still and quiet. We have rowed so far from shore.

I had 36 minutes free, and so I set a timer.

When the timer goes, it is a wrench.

I have been in another country.

Without being too fanciful, I have felt the heavens part; I have felt grace rain down. I have felt the Spirit. Something has shifted in my soul. Its molecules have changed, its water become wine. I feel an expansive peace. Something of God’s life, of God’s love for me has entered into and enlarged my soul.

* * *

I have been mostly disciplined in prayer since a dark patch of disappointment in late 1996. I had been led on by an editor of a leading publishing company, who I had thought had given me a verbal assurance that he would publish my book. I had a leading agent, I thought–though we hadn’t signed.

The book I wrote was a disappointment to both of them, and, if I look at it now, will, almost certainly, be a disappointment to me. But it was written through pregnancy and early motherhood…in blood.

When, after revisions, it was still turned down, I flung myself facedown on the carpet and thought, “I want to die.”

* * *

“I am sick,” I then said to myself. I am spiritually sick. And Jesus said he was the Physician. I need him.

And having a wee bit of a practical streak, I thought: How much prayer and Bible study do I need to have the life of God course through my soul? And that is a question Scripture is silent on. It can only be answered by trial and error, and the answer can vary. On busy days, Martin Luther said he needed three hours of prayer (rather than his usual two). I needed to find my own answer.

So I set a stopwatch, prayed and read my Bible until I was bored, and then stopped. I was not at peace, but I was growing distracted. I was discovering my baseline for prayer, just as when I began the discipline of exercise, I walked until I was tired, wrote down my distance and speed, and then began to increase both (and am still increasing them, oh yes!)

When I was 17, I wanted to become a nun, and I did for a while, joining Mother Teresa. This was the discipline of prayer there: you didn’t prolong prayer, because you found it sweet, otherwise you would soon burn out. And you do not cut it short, because you were bored, otherwise, you would quit before you got quiet, got still, repented, heard God, tasted the sweetness of it all.

The next day I set a timer for the time I had spent, and just a minute more, and went on, adding a minute a day, dividing my quiet time between prayer and Bible study. I stopped at 90 minutes–45 minutes for prayer, 45 minutes for Bible study (though, in fact, now that the girls are older, I often end up spending even longer than that in spiritual disciplines! My soul needs it!)

Over the years, I found peace. I found serenity. I got to know Jesus a whole lot better. In prayer, God suggested ways to move from Williamsburg, Virginia, where I wasn’t particularly happy, to Oxford, where I am happy. In prayer, I “heard of” a business idea which changed our lives. In prayer, I “heard” God suggest blogging, which I so love. I prayed for my dream house with a very specific wishlist, and I stumbled on an ad, and God revealed ways to just about afford it.

But all these are side effects. My character began to change, molecule by molecule, and that is one of the gratifying side effects of a life of prayer. I became a kinder person, more empathetic.

My life of prayer is not a story of remarkable worldly success. And so I cannot recommend prayer as a way to become rich, become famous, become a great writer. To take up a discipline of prayer for the worldly advantages it might confer is like marrying only for money, or only for sex, and we know all how that works out, don’t we?

T. S. Eliot looking back on the first twenty years of his life as a writer says,

Twenty years largely wasted

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s how I feel as a writer and as a pray-er.

But then, what Stephen King says about writing is equally true about prayer.

Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, or getting laid, or making friends. It’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. Writing is magic, the water of life. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

Prayer is everything Stephen King says writing is, and more.

It is not a sure way to worldly reward, though it has brought wealth and success to some, according to the plan of God for their lives

However, though material rewards are not guaranteed, as Jesus said, rewards are guaranteed. We pray for the fun of hanging out with Jesus, to get his take on things, to see life with his eyes, to absorb his wisdom. We pray because with the discipline of prayer comes lightness and joy. With the discipline of prayer and obedience comes peace and calm, wisdom and guidance. Water for a parched soul. Sanity. We pray so we can be enlarged by loving something larger than ourselves, and that is the Lord Jesus himself.

We pray because it is our daily bread. Jesus may choose to give some of us nutella too, and I still pray for metaphorical “nutella”, and grilled cheese and homemade blackberry jam, and according to the lane he has marked for me, the work he has given me to do in the world, and the people he has given me to influence, he may well give me some of these things. Or he may not. But tasting Jesus is fun, and joy and wisdom, and for these gifts from the discipline of prayer, I am grateful.

When Shackles become Wings: On Domesticity, Creativity, and Me

By Anita Mathias

I was married 25 years ago, while in a Ph.D programme in Creative Writing at the State University of New York Binghamton. I had just earned a BA and an MA in English from Somerville College, Oxford, then an MA in Creative Writing from Ohio State University.

My husband probably hoped for a traditional marriage, though he never actually said so. You know–I would do the dishes, and laundry and shopping and cleaning and cooking, and he would have a career. In the early years, I urged him to try a role reversal; to let me have a try at a career and at supporting us (and to accept the consequent drop in our standard of living), but he would have none of it.

For the first decade or so of our marriage, I bitterly resented domesticity. My mother had a full-time cook, a full-time maid, an “ayah,” and a gardener (whereas my husband’s mother had done everything herself.) Had I gone through all this higher education to become a cook/maid, I’d sign? My husband insisted that a cleaner was a waste of money, saying that he could easily whisk through the house and clean it. Well, I’ll credit him with good intentions!

We feminist writers in graduate school used to tell each other, “The dishes can wait; the poem cannot wait.” And too often the dishes waited, for days and days, and the resultant domestic and marital stress affected the poetry too.

I found it impossible to keep up with housekeeping. The further behind we got, the harder it was to catch up. Which caused stress and chaos and unhappiness which affected my creativity far more than if I took the bit between my teeth, and simply did what had to be done.

* * *

Finally, about 18 years into our marriage, Roy did what I had been urging him to from two years into our marriage—took early retirement, and tried to be a house-husband.

Well, well, well, turns out he was only a wee bit better as a house-husband than I was as a housewife!! He promptly got the cleaner and gardener I had so long desired!

But he does do enough housework so that we do not live in mess and chaos.

* * *

And since, it now takes just an hour or two to get to the reasonably orderly tidy household we both crave, rather than an apparently infinite task, I, ironically, often spend an hour or two in housework and gardening.

And I have discovered a strange thing. The days I do not spend an hour or two around my house and garden, weeding, sorting laundry, tidying up, my spirit feels slightly out of sorts. My mind is active, as I read and write; my spirit, not so much. I feel a bit out of touch with God. A bit unaligned with him. A bit overwound. It’s as if I need the downtime of traditional “women’s work” to really pray.

It as if I needed the things I despised—folding laundry, putting things back in the right place, pulling weeds—to be able to think, to pray, to right myself with God, to position myself in God, to surrender my life to God again, to seek his wisdom.

Breathing place, sanity-savers, time for thinking, time ironically for creativity, time for repentance, time for surrender—gifts offered by the mundane tasks of folding clothes, tidying rooms, prettying a garden.

I wish I had embraced it from the start. I would, ironically, have been a more productive writer.

A house, living in a house, doing some of the work living in a house demands—this is the life God has given me, mountaintops and valleys, and as I embrace it, I find that, like saxifrage, tiny alpine plant that splits rocks, creativity blooms in the apparently unpromising nooks and crannies of duty!

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Like saxifrage, tiny alpine that splits rocks, creativity blooms in the rocks of duty! NEW from @anitamathias1

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The Only Form of Multitasking that makes you Cleverer

By Anita Mathias

My daughter Irene returned from a talk by neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield informing us that multitasking decreases fluid IQ more than smoking marijuana, or losing a night’s sleep does.

My daughter, as intense as I am, walks around the house with her iPad, watching documentaries or TED talks or AsapScience (when she isn’t reading or studying.) Or sometimes—okay, mum, get real–lighter, less relentlessly educational stuff; she is a teenager, after all.

I keep telling her to do one thing at a time. Whatever your hands find to do, do it with all your might.

Delighted to have Baroness Susan Greenfield’s backing, I advised Irene to use the mundane things of life, waiting for food to reheat in the microwave, waiting for the kettle or the eggs to boil, as pathways into prayer. To ask for God’s wisdom and blessing on the next task, on how to do it best. To do a mid-day course correction if necessary. Repent. Ask God’s blessing, wisdom and guidance on the dreams and visions for which she is striving. Ask him for the big picture blue sky visions for her life, for guidance on her life’s work and for the path she is to tread which will be the precise intersection between her deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger. Thank God for his goodness. Breathe.

She said, “Mum, but praying through the day is multitasking too.”

I guess so. And it’s the only form of multitasking that’s scripturally advised: “Pray continually.”

You tap into the vast resources of a brain greater than yours. And somehow, that great kind brain comes to help you with ideas, wisdom and sometimes concrete external interventions, changing your circumstances from the outside, changing you from within.

And I guess prayer is the only multitasking that makes you cleverer.

Wriggling towards Shalom

By Anita Mathias

When I find I am stressed, or distressed, I like to pause there and then instead of going through the day with undefined, subterranean unease.

I take the question to which I do not know the answer–how to be more productive perhaps. How to read more. How to help someone. How to get our business to flourish further–and ask Jesus for the answer. And keep asking the question, sort of saturating the question in prayer. If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you (James 1:15). And I keep asking, and keep asking for God’s answer–his surprising out-of-the-box answers, and eventually, as James promises, guidance, answers and wisdom do come.

* * *

Sometimes, I sense a vague fear and unease. Do you? I like to slow down and ask: What is it? What’s bugging me? What is this nebulous dark cloud? Sometimes, the fear, anxiety or annoyance is quite rational, and sometimes not so.

But whether it is a rational fear, or just a vague sense of unease, it does have the same solution.

I mentally put the fear or worry or annoyance into the petri dish of prayer, and invite God’s power to surround, saturate and irradiate it.

I surrender the possible dark outcome I dread to God. Put it in his hands. If it does happen, He will still be there. He will still love me. He will still give me the ability to be happy through it all.

And then I ask him to avert the outcome I dread. Ask him for wisdom for what I am to do today. Ask him for a game plan for the months ahead.

It’s in his hands now, whether things work out just as I prayed for, or just as I dreaded. It’s his worry.

I then just rest in his presence, rest in his love.

It’s not magic, nothing about the spiritual life is …or perhaps everything is!!

But I do get up from the place of prayer so much lighter in my spirit!

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“Useless Prayer” by Henri Nouwen

By Anita Mathias

“WHY should I spend an hour in prayer when I do nothing during that time but think about people I am angry with, people who are angry with me, books I should read and books I should write, and thousands of other silly things that happen to grab my mind for a moment?

The answer is: because God is greater than my mind and my heart, and what is really happening in the house of prayer is not measurable in terms of human success and failure.

What I must do first of all is be faithful. If I believe that the first commandment is to love God with my whole heart, mind, and soul, then I should at least be able to spend one hour a day with nobody else but God. the question as to whether it is helpful, useful, practical, or fruitful is completely irrelevant, since the only reason to love is love itself. Everything else is secondary.

The remarkable thing, however, is that sitting in the presence of God for one hour each morning — day after day, week after week, month after month — in total confusion and with myriad distractions radically changes my life. God, who loves me so much that He sent His only son not to condemn me but to save me, does not leave me waiting in the dark too long.

I might think that each hour is useless, but after thirty or sixty or ninety such useless hours, I gradually realize that I was not as alone as I thought; a very small gentle voice has been speaking to me far beyond my noisy place.

So: Be confident and trust in the Lord.”

From The Road to Daybreak, by Henri Nouwen (New York: Image Books, 1989).

In real life, amusingly, Nouwen was a fidgety pray-er. Michael Andrew Ford writes, “Nouwen could rarely sit still for long. When he was in prayer, he fidgeted, coughed and moved but seemed to have no awareness he was doing it. His apparently restless and distracted prayer nurtured him. While his body was twitching, his spirit could be deeply present to God.”

The writer Parker Palmer describes Nouwen at a Quaker retreat centre where the traditional gathering in silence was practised for 45 minutes every morning:

“I was conscious of being in the company of a world-class contemplative and I was expecting to have an extraordinary experience sitting next to him during worship. But as we sat in this plain, unadorned room and settled into the silence, I realised that the bench was jiggling. I opened my eyes, glanced to my left and saw Henri’s leg working furiously. He was anxiously trying to settle but without much success. As time went on, the fidgeting got worse. I opened my eyes again only to find him checking his watch to see what time it was.”

Ford continues, “Nouwen’s primary need for prayer meant he was completely oblivious to more mundane things. He would dash to the bathroom wherever he was staying and shower without closing the curtain, soaking the place in water. Then, without looking in the mirror, he would shave as quickly as possible, so he could get downstairs and be with God. As a result, he often ended up with a one inch patch of old whiskers on his neck and fresh soap in his ear.

“Contemplation was at the heart of Henri Nouwen’s life. It was a discipline of dwelling in the presence of God. Nouwen was convinced that Christian leaders need to reclaim the mystical so that every word they speak, each suggestion they make and every strategy they develop, will emerge from a heart which knows God intimately.”

Housework as a Pathway to Prayer—with Vermeer’s Women

By Anita Mathias

You can almost hear the silence. The milkmaid is quiet, so quiet, and time is suspended as she pours milk.

The hands work while the mind thinks.

Is it a life of drudgery, or is it a gift–her trivial chore a window into eternity, time to think, to pray, to look out of the window into God?

Vermeer’s women lose themselves in: housework. It glows! Is this domesticity? Can it be? That’s the way I want to live my life, slowly, tranquilly, not fighting the irrelevant relevant, the distracting, trivial and necessary tasks of my days, but embracing them as an oasis of contemplation in which desert flowers may bloom.I gaze at Vermeer’s women. I trust things that help me lose track of time–reading, writing, gardening, hiking, the sea, art galleries, prayer, good movies, good conversation.

Vermeer’s paintings, poems one might say, on the radiance of domesticity are more moving when we learn of the hurly-burly of his household–a wife, eleven children, and a feisty mother-in-law.

Those paintings that could have been called “Shanti, shanti, shanti” or “Tranquility” are probably sighs of yearning, images of an elusive Eden. They hint how manual work–if used as time for contemplation–might be redeemed.

I now view the trivial necessary tasks of life which I used to bitterly resent—as (in small doses) gifts: time to pray, time to seek direction, time to worship, time to sense God’s love.

I am reading Pete Greig’s Red Moon Rising about the birth of 24/7 prayer movement in Britain. “Pray constantly,” the exhortation of the apostle Paul has challenged and puzzled us through the centuries.

As my life grows busier, I relish these accidental windows into prayer: rooms to be tidied, gardens to be weeded, laundry to be sorted, little windy passages into contemplation, to situating myself again in the love of God, and finding peace.

Does God have Favourites?

By Anita Mathias

When Jesus rose from the dead, whom did he reveal himself to first?

Mary Magdalene.

Why her?

Because she was there.Because she loved him enough to go in search of him, in sheer love, with nothing to gain from the encounter.

* * *

And why was Isaiah granted his precious vision of the Lord, seated on a throne, high and exalted, with the train of his robe, filling the temple, surrounded by winged seraphs flying and calling to one another, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord Almighty, The whole earth is full of his glory.” Because he chose to be quiet and still long enough to see the vision. To overhear the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send?” And so he volunteers, “Here I am. Send me.”

* * *

Those who hang out with God are more likely to hear and overhear what He is saying. To somehow see God’s perfect plan for their lives. To catch his vision and hear his directions. To get in on the secrets of the universe!