Avoiding rote and empty words
1.27.2010 | All Blog Posts, Contemplation and Meditation, How to Pray, The Prayer of the Heart
About contemplative prayer, Joe asks: “How do those of us for whom the ancient practices are so foreign, connect with the sense of awe and intimacy you advocate? I can see that while the Jesus Prayer can focus us, I’m concerned that it might just as easily become nothing but more than a rote and empty old habit.”
Joe asks an important question and offers a helpful caution. We don’t want rote and empty old habits; Jesus does warn against vain repetition (Matthew 6.7). Here’s my take on this—
When Jesus taught us to pray, and warned us against “heaping up empty words,” he nevertheless taught us to pray by rote (Matthew 6.9ff): “Our Father, who art in heaven…”
And if we look at the Bible’s many prayers, so many of them are essentially a recitation of the tradition (cf. Mary’s response to the angel in Luke 1.38: “Here I am, servant of the Lord, let it be with me according to your word,” compare also the disciples’ response to persecution in Acts 4.23ff: they pray Psalm 2, verbatim, then improvise on it).
The Bible, and biblical prayer, celebrates rote repetition and is highly suspicious of the forms of free prayer we in the West consider “authentic.” They’d consider it vain. Any improvising the believer does in prayer is done based upon the memorized text from the tradition.
The problem is that those of us raised in modern, western, enlightened civilization think rote repetition is a bad thing. We’re hung up on so-called “free thought”. There’s no such thing as free thought. We all improvise on some “text”.
Listen to the prayers that spill from our lips; they do not cohere very closely to the Bible, but rather to Western values–mostly for security, safety, and abundance. There are a few precious exceptions of course, but these praying persons have drunk deep of sacred texts.
Next post, how repetitive praying can move us toward silence, the language of God…
1.27.2010
Brilliant thoughts, all. I appreciate the idea that we all improvise on some text. It’s probably one of the truest things one could say, yet people rarely realize it. We’re too caught up trying to sound creative and brilliant that we don’t realize our debt to those who have gone before.
1.27.2010
John, nicely put.
We have a debt to those who’ve gone before. And we’re shaped by forces and ideas and images we rarely examine. Too often the god we address in our prayers is a twisted a projection of such things.
Prayer, if it’s to bring us face to face with GOD, must help us face such indebtedness, and relinquish them.
1.28.2010
Hey Chris, one thing I’ve been taught is that when Jesus said “pray this way” he meant “pray in this manner” vs. “pray these words.” I agree with your concepts – liturgy and repeated prayer can help us move past ourselves – and I wonder if the Jesus Prayer text supports it. Other texts seem to, or at least advocate its practice as does tradition. I’m unclear about this text. Can you help?
1.28.2010
Rob, yes, “pray in this manner.” That’s right.
I’d just caution us who live in modern, Western culture that prizes a heightened individualism—or I should say, an untethered individualism—to turn more toward the tradition, that is to live more closely to it. That doesn’t mean a mere rote and empty repetition. Rather it means, as in jazz, that we learn our scales so well that we can then improvise properly and freely when given a chord chart or lead sheet.
The Jesus Prayer is that, as are the Psalms (such a wondrous collections of prayer’s that contain as John Calvin said, “the whole anatomy of the human soul.”). These words are a lead sheet, from which we playfully improvise.
Unfortunately we want to improvise like a Miles Davis (jazz musician) without the long, hard work of learning to play as he did.
And the saints and mystics (who know what it means to improvise…see Theresa of Avila, a great improviser), would also tell us that there is power in the words…the words-as-they-are. Of course, given the need for translation, etc, the words aren’t magic, hocus-pocus. Otherwise we’d have to learn Aramaic or Hebrew. But there is power in the Name of Jesus, which needs little translation.
Some would like to find words that feel good to them. I get that. I would too. But I think we also need to bend our lives toward those time-honored, proven words. “Jesus” is one of them. “Mercy” or “love” are others.
So, in continuity with the tradition, I’d say, “pray in this manner.” But learn the words. Then as they seed the heart and begin to grow there, trust the Holy Spirit to lead you into more freedom. But check the Westernized-ego within that always wants the novel, unique, and so-called “authentic”, and wearies easily of the same thing because it doesn’t want to know obedience. It doesn’t think it needs it. The ego is its own god (but doesn’t want us to know that).
The perennial wisdom tradition in all spiritual traditions knows that humble, dogged obedience in the same direction bears the fruit of a holy life.
Modernity is quite ignorant of all that, and my ego, at least, is pretty well infected with its disease.
Does this help? Come back at me, if it doesn’t.
1.29.2010
[...] Avoiding rote and empty words [...]
2.01.2010
I use a similar formula for one of my prayers – as my cell phone rings the Westminster CHimes on the hour I pray (what I think is a Benedictine rule) “Thank you God for being with me in the last hour; please be with me in the next.” I like, too, the image of a jazz musician, because I am one who didn’t invest the time on the scales. One of my professors said I had a good ear, but my fingers were holding me back. That may express how I feel about prayer. I want to pray something beyond my skill. We’ve been studying Foster’s Celebration of Discipline and my men’s prayer group is sharpening its skill through a book called Praying like Jesus. These plus your thoughts have been really helpful in molding me lately. Thanks for the images – they help speak more clearly to me than words do some times.
2.03.2010
How many of us “want to pray something beyond our skills”, as Rob puts it? Most. This is why I hold myself to a few good prayers and then allow them to inspire a few words of my own. I inch along in prayer, feeling my way into new words shaped by old words. The Psalms are a great school of prayer for this reason.
There is a great danger in wanting to pray well. Such a desire rouses the ego and then real pray scatters like forest critters before a clumsy teenager crashing along the path.