Listening toYahweh leads to the best kind of life.
Even at night, he speaks to my heart.
I orient myself straight toward Yahweh.
I don’t need to look anywhere else for support,
He’s right there.
(Everyday Psalms, Psalm 16, page 30)
I’m far too oriented toward myself. I can’t escape myself. My thoughts are in perpetual motion. My body keeps reminding me of its hungers and other basic needs. My sweet tooth haunts me. My desire to buy stuff lures me. My urge to protect myself from others and promote myself to others colors my interactions with them. My hopes and my dreams guide me. I am my favorite topic of conversation. I am my greatest preoccupation.
This isn’t surprising. For as the saying goes, “Wherever you go, there you are.” We are inescapable from ourselves. Our wants and needs and feelings require attention. They demand it. They call us to worship them, to devote ourselves to them. They want to be fed, to be coddled, to be treated as their own kind of holy trinity.
Yes, we are unavoidable to ourselves. But prayer reminds us that there is one other who is equally unavoidable, equally omnipresent.
I may be always present to myself. But God is likewise always present with me. The question is: Will I pay attention to God or just to myself? Will I pause my self-preoccupation and turn myself toward God? Prayer answers this question with a YES.
Now, it’s quite possible for me to pray and still have myself at the center of my thoughts. In this case, I pray to God, but I primarily pray about myself, returning to my wants and needs and feelings as my favorite topics. My narcissism may persist.
But prayer is a crack in my narcissistic tendencies. By turning toward God even for the briefest moment, my self-preoccupation falters. By turning toward God, I have turned away from myself, even if only slightly. This is progress!
The reality is this: God is the greatest reality of our lives. God is the one with whom we must always deal for God is always before us and behind us, to our left and to our right. God is the air we breathe and the ground beneath our feet. Jesus is the never-leaving, never-forsaking one. He is the A and the Z, the beginning and the end of all things, including all things pertaining to you and me.
Prayer takes this reality seriously. Well, maybe not seriously, but at least prayer orients us toward this holy reality.
Prayer starts the process of turning me into a God-person, a Jesus-person. Prayer opens me up to God. Prayer helps me see through God-lenses. And those are so much better than the myopia of my Me-lenses.
Prayer: Jesus, open me up to the Great Reality: You! Turn my attention away from my boring old preoccupation with myself. Help me orient myself toward you. And as I do so, help me see others as well. As I move away from this collapsed-in-on-myself life and outward toward you and others in a far more spacious life, teach me the way of love. In Jesus — in Jesus — amen.
For further reading: Simon Tugwell, Prayer: Living With God, Templegate Publishers, 1975.