Praying for the prayer-challenged

  • Back in mid-April, the quote for the day in “Daily Lives” made me do a double-take. But by the end, I had decided it was a keeper, because it helps with that thorni­est of sit­u­a­tions: How do you pray for the dif­fi­cult peo­ple in your life who aren’t in the faith?

    The quote is from Elder Por­phyrios of Evia, and on April 19, I read …

    Pray, and when you have to, speak to your chil­dren with love.

    Huh? “When you have to …?” What’s with that? Decided that it must be a monk/spiritual elder thing, and that ‘chil­dren’ referred to spir­i­tual chil­dren. So maybe the whole thing was going to turn out to be irrel­e­vant. But it continued …

    Lots of prayer and few words. Lots of prayer and few words for every­one. We mustn’t become an annoy­ance, but rather pray secretly and then speak, and God will let us know in our hearts whether the oth­ers have accepted what we have said. If not, we won’t speak. We will sim­ply pray mystically.

    Because if we speak, we become an annoy­ance and make oth­ers react or even infu­ri­ate them. That is why it is bet­ter to speak mys­ti­cally to the heart of oth­ers through secret prayer rather than to their ears.

    I had some spe­cific peo­ple in mind when I read the quote that day. They had been press­ing in on my thoughts because I knew I was going to spend time with them. And I won­dered again, “How do I get through to them? How do I tell them about what is the most impor­tant thing in the world?” Peo­ple have been so inun­dated and ham­mered with the “good news” pitches of well-intentioned evan­gel­i­cals that they’re sick and tired of any­thing remotely Christian-sounding. It’s not that I’m think­ing stealth evan­ge­list thoughts; I’d be con­tent just to be able to be myself around them, to use the vocab­u­lary and express the con­text that comes from a litur­gi­cal life.
    You don’t tend to get that sat­is­fac­tion, and after a while, you find that you’re not even try­ing any­more. I’ve got­ten so used to guard­ing my speech, cov­er­ing my icons (fig­u­ra­tively speak­ing), that I don’t even notice. And, worse, I don’t even try.

    So Elder Por­phyrios’ thoughts went to my heart. “Lots of prayer and few words.” If you can’t speak to them with­out infu­ri­at­ing them, then speak to their heart mys­ti­cally in prayer. It may be a spec­tral ver­sion of the good work of evan­ge­lism, but for some that I know, it may be the best hope I’ve got.


    Related posts:

    1. St. John of Kro­n­stadt, on prayer
    2. Bright Fri­day and my wooden heart
    3. The scary Mary prayer
    4. One last Christ­mas prayer
    5. Prayer: won­der and despair

    May 8th, 2010 | Grace | 6 Comments |

6 Responses and Counting...

  • s-p 05.08.2010

    I REALLY like this! I feel an Ortho­graph com­ing on…
    Seri­ously, the longer I’m Ortho­dox, the less apt I am to open my yap about Ortho­doxy to peo­ple unless they ini­ti­ate some kind of con­ver­sa­tion. I’m rather enjoy­ing “being myself” instead of some “icon” of myself I’ve made up or other peo­ple have tried to make me out to be. St. Peter says we need to be able to “give an answer for the faith within us”, not tell peo­ple what the right ques­tions are.

  • Gretchen­Joanna

    Thank you for shar­ing this. It is so impor­tant, and I for­get it, and get all anx­ious, as I did just this week, when I have to be around some­one to whom I don’t know what to say. I was so wor­ried on my way to her house that I could see things were not going to go well, with me in that state, so I just started pray­ing Lord, have mercy! (about 40 times?) and it brought me to my senses. And we had a lovely time, me not try­ing to accom­plish anything.

  • Grace

    Both of your expe­ri­ences mir­ror mine. As a younger Chris­t­ian, I was out there try­ing to “dia­logue” more often. But I always found out that it really ended up being a mono­logue — mine — with them being silent and polite … and entirely unconvinced.

    I’ve noticed that the more sec­u­lar and impi­ous our cul­ture becomes, the more a per­son stands out for just being decent. So I try to aim for that — park my ego, tem­per my evan­ge­lis­tic ambi­tions with char­ity, and be a good enough per­son to intrigue my friends. :-)

  • Grace

    Gretchen­Joanna:
    Nice blog, BTW! I had missed it some­how, but I’ll add you onto my blogroll, which is badly in need of an update.

  • Ali

    I needed to hear this today. I recently spent some time with sev­eral peo­ple who are inter­ested in my faith–to a point–but com­pletely baf­fled by it, and they cer­tainly don’t want to hear about deep reli­gious truths, such as Christ was born of a Vir­gin, He is the Son of God, etc. These peo­ple like me to describe my faith to them on intel­lec­tual terms and are inter­ested in hear­ing what I read, but once they actu­ally see me read a Bible or any other reli­gious book, they get ner­vous and can’t under­stand why I would spend so much time think­ing about and act­ing on my faith. I had good inten­tions when I opened my mouth about some­one I know well who is intends to go on a seri­ous spir­i­tual retreat and spend some time at monas­ter­ies in deep prayer. Once these peo­ple heard the words monastery and deep prayer, they got ner­vous and tuned me out. I thought their behav­ior was rude, and I was upset with them because I was not try­ing to con­vert them in any way. But I am reminded that often the mys­ter­ies are bet­ter kept close to my heart or only shared with those who are mature enough and ready enough to hear about them.

  • Mimi

    I love that quote too. How sim­ple and how achingly beau­ti­ful when you start to unpack it.

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