There is a great difference between successfulness and fruitfulness. Success comes from strength, control, and respectability. A successful person has the energy to create something, to keep control over its development, and to make it available in large quantities. Success brings many rewards and often fame. Fruits, however, come from weakness and vulnerability. And fruits are unique. A child is the fruit conceived in vulnerability, community is the fruit born through shared brokenness, and intimacy is the fruit that grows through touching one another's wounds. Let's remind one another that what brings us true joy is not successfulness but fruitfulness.
(With thanks to the Henri Nouwen Society)
I think there is a degree sometimes of confusion in our minds about prayer and success. I have noticed this particularly clearly in some evangelical/charismatic churches and prayer groups ("taking the land for Jesus," "claiming the victory of Christ over..." etc.) but we are all vulnerable to this kind of thinking if we are not sufficiently self-aware.
The pattern is that we identify a need for prayer, formulate (liturgically or on-the-fly) a prayer for that need to be met - implicitly or explicitly, we also formulate the terms in which we will recognise that it has been met - and we then evaluate the "success" or otherwise of the prayer in terms of whether these terms have been fulfilled. Whether we have been praying for healing for a minor ailment, or for the evangelisation of a sub-continent, the pattern is broadly similar.
Prayer though, it seems to me, is above all about fruits rather than success, to use Nouwen's definition. Prayer is vulnerability to God, not the aggressive claiming of our rights. To use Nouwen's example, a child is to be conceived in the act of making love, not in an act of marital rape.
Prayer is sharing our brokenness with God and, if praying with another or in a group, with each other. Prayer is an act of appalling intimacy, not a demonstration of expertise or of bravado.
The joy of prayer is in growing closer to God through sharing his love, his desires, his longings for holiness, justice, mercy. It is not to be found in any imagined bending of God's will to our own.
As Paul said, we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us "with sighs too deep for words." (Romans 8.26) We truly must not imagine we know how to pray, or what to pray for, specifically. It seems to me that this is a dangerous second-guessing of God's will, a superimposition of our own agenda, or at least our own interpretation of God's agenda, upon what he actually wills, or desires, for us or for any situation.
When Jesus said, "Ask, and it will be given to you" (Matthew 7.7) I have found I have to read this in the context of Matthew 22.37-39, where Jesus affirms the two greatest commandments as love for God and love for our neighbour, and in the context of the prayers of Bartimaeus (Mark 10.46ff) and the Canaanite woman (Matthew 15.22) and all those similar prayers to Jesus in the Gospels. The cry for love, and for mercy, will never go unanswered; and if God does want us to clarify to ourselves what it is we are really longing for, he can always say then, as Jesus did to Bartimaeus, "What do you want me to do for you?"
This is a hard lesson, only learnt in pain and failure. But it holds the potential for such joy, and the real bearing of fruit.
Before I was afflicted I went astray,
but now I obey your word...It was good for me to be afflicted
so that I might learn your decrees.(Psalm 119.67, 71 NIV)
No comments:
Post a Comment