Thumbprints...

I've been thinking about the nature of prayer, how it differs from one individual to another. Joanna Depue says, "Prayer has a thumbprint. The type, style, frequency, method of prayer each person uses is as unique as the individual using it."

I wonder if we remember this often enough. It's all too easy to come to believe that one's own way of prayer is somehow normative; or else it is more Biblical, or deeper, or something, than someone else's. We forget so easily that prayer is what God does in us, and we can take no credit for it, any more than we can blame ourselves if it "doesn't work" in the way we'd imagined it should.

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Romans 8.26.27)

And yet the heart of each of us is entirely unique, perhaps more unique than a thumbprint or a retinal scan. We are, at our deepest, God's, and it is his signature that lies hidden at the bottom of each of our hearts, whether we will acknowledge it or not.

It is this uniqueness that makes it so necessary that we should pray, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." And it is this utter connectedness, this brotherhood and sisterhood with all Creation, that makes that prayer, and any prayer, universal, intercessory on the most profound level, and somehow a gift...

We like to make a distinction between our private and public lives and say, "Whatever I do in my private life is nobody else's business." But anyone trying to live a spiritual life will soon discover that the most personal is the most universal, the most hidden is the most public, and the most solitary is the most communal. What we live in the most intimate places of our beings is not just for us but for all people. That is why our inner lives are lives for others. That is why our solitude is a gift to our community, and that is why our most secret thoughts affect our common life.

(Henri Nouwen - with thanks to the Henri Nouwen Society)