By Martin L. Smith
Recently, I had a visit from an old friend who had been at seminary with me in the late 60s, and as always our reminiscences caused us rueful laughter, especially about how far off target our training had sometimes been. We recalled how a visiting lecturer in religious sociology, full of the latest academic ‘futurology,’ earnestly warned us that we would be responsible for guiding people through a tremendous cultural revolution—the onset of an era of leisure! Cybernetics, the replacement of human labor with robots, and a host of new technological developments were bound to bring about within a few decades, we were told, the halving of the work week and widespread earlier retirement. Our challenge would be to guide people spiritually to deal with all this newfound time, as technology released us for creativity and play and community building, or for ennui and frustration.
No such development occurred. What an irony that the much vaunted technology of American society is dictating a harried pace of life where work has made deeper inroads into people’s lives, reducing vacations, fostering 24/7 work availability. Priests are hardly in demand as resources for interpreting the meaning of leisure! They feel just as pressured as the rest of us to keep up the pace, cram the schedule, put in the hours. Who has time to pray these days? Most of us have really good excuses for not praying. To find time for it seems so unrealistic that we can safely leave it unexplored. We complain, but our sincerity is questionable. Addictions and patterns of conformity are effective means of fending off challenges that intimidate us, challenges that would demand time if were to meet them.
To have a prayer life at all now is usually a symptom of considerable courage, the chutzpah to swim against the tide. And perhaps that is how it should be, since Jesus’ teaching, is about learning to swim against the tide of conformity. And prayer itself is a paradoxical activity. It requires leisure to be opened up by unplugging from the pressures of everyday demands. But it isn’t itself leisurely; it isn’t a pious version of stress management that temporarily recharges the batteries for a return to the fray. It is itself a kind of inner work.
Jesus’ teaching about prayer often appears to be simple, but in fact he gave people the outlines of a practice that is very searching. Take the seemingly simplistic injunction, “Ask, seek, knock.”
Think what we would be doing if we actually took that seriously. These three verbs goad us to explore three areas of vulnerability to which most of us can get access only by what we properly call soul-searching. To do what Jesus commends means to explore three areas of desire. What do I lack that I really want? What am I searching for that I haven’t yet found? What do I feel shut out from that I want to be let into? If most of us don’t in fact pray much, it might be because we are in some way appalled at the prospect of opening up these cans of worms. If we did we would be face to face with the reality that deep down there is a lot that is missing from our lives, that there is some experience we haven’t yet attained, and that we feel excluded from some kind of belonging we can hardly name.
Now our busyness provides us with daily alibis for not praying. But if we ceased to be busy, we would probably try to bring other avoidance mechanisms into play to let ourselves off the hook so that we wouldn’t have to open up these very sensitive areas. Jesus’ words, though, are literally en-couraging. Apparently, the secret of God’s reign lies in the paradox that it is precisely by leaning into our feelings of lack, lost-ness, and exclusion that we can begin to connect with God’s overflowing fullness. By learning (laboriously at first) to spell out what we desire, what we want to find, how we want to be welcomed, we open ourselves up to first-hand experience of God, (as opposed to religious chatter about God or second-hand ideas about God).
Overwork and stress inhibit desire. Period. (Picking up hints, one gets the impression that the sex-lives of conformist over-workers are being as damped down as our prayer-lives.) We might even start to pray again if we realized that God in fact wants to kindle our heart’s desiring, not repress it. The church should be a school of de-repression, which trains us to be men and women who reclaim these currents of desire for themselves, with freedom to use passionate words like longing, yearning, desiring, thirsting, hungering, seeking, knocking…
Martin Smith is well-known in the Episcopal Church and beyond as a priest, writer, preacher and leader of retreats. Through such popular works as A Season for the Spirit and The Word is Very Near You and in numerous workshops, lectures and retreats, he continues to explore a contemporary spirituality that encourages a lively conversation between new knowledge and the riches of tradition.