From Our Archives

For earlier essays on this week's RCL texts, see Dan Clendenin, What is God Like? (2022); Debie Thomas, When You Pray (2019); Joan Bigwood, Lord, Teach Us to Pray (2013); Nora Gallagher, The Scandal of the Particular (2007).

This Week's Essay

By Amy Frykholm, who writes the lectionary essay every week for JWJ. 

Luke 11:9: “Keep dancing your prayers, and the way will open before you.”
(First Nations Version)

I was nineteen years old when I first stepped into an Orthodox cathedral in Krasnodar, Russia. My guide was a woman named Olga Nikolaevna who was also my history professor at Kuban State University. She was a recent convert to Orthodoxy, and someone whose humility and gentleness had caught my eye in an otherwise harsh public environment. She showed our small group of Americans some of the traditions of Orthodoxy. “Sometimes,” she said, “when I don’t know how to pray, I come here, and I light a candle.”

With the smell of incense in the air and the flickering candles of unspoken prayers, my nineteen year-old self divided into two points of view. One was disdainful of her statement. How could someone not know how to pray? Praying was just talking to God: words formed inside yourself and directed heavenward. That was prayer. Anybody could do it. No incense or candle could substitute for this. If you couldn’t do it, you probably needed to get right with God. This was a phrase that made a lot of sense to me in those days and was something that other people needed to do. I had already done it. Box checked. 

Another part, perhaps a wiser and deeper part, heard Olga Nikolaevna and squirreled away this different perspective on prayer. Little did I know that the time was coming very soon when I would not know how to pray, when Olga Nikolaevna’s words would come back to me and the simple gesture of lighting a candle would stand in — gracefully, eloquently — for an absence of words. 

Orthodox Icon of Jesus Praying.

Maybe this is why Jesus’ disciples ask him to teach them to pray — because prayer occupies the space between the said and the unsaid, between the known and the unknown. It’s an ever ongoing question, not a set of mastered techniques. As they acknowledge their unknowing, the way for prayer generously opens. I used to interpret the request made by the disciples in Luke 11 as asking Jesus to teach them how to do something. I’ve gradually come to understand that they are asking about how to be something. Or perhaps how to become something: a gradual process of transformation. 

What no one told me when I was growing up and being taught to pray is that prayer is not a check mark on a daily to-do list. Prayer is a way, a path. Prayer makes a whole world, transforms a small self, and it takes a lifetime of learning. 

In the First Nations Version of Luke 11, the translators illuminate this reality when they translate the Greek, usually rendered as “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” as “Bring your good road to us, where the beauty of your ways in the spirit-world above is reflected in the earth below.” When kingdom becomes “good road,” the imagery transforms from something indefinite and static to something tangible and dynamic. We imagine the process of walking, instead of the manifestation of an intangible, far-away place. 

In his book on contemplative prayer Into the Silent Land, Martin Laird notes that the path into prayer does not come with a map. Notice, he says, that a gardener does not actually grow plants. A gardener merely hones the skills and engages in the practices that allow plants to grow. Much of gardening is not-doing. Similarly, we find our way into prayer as if we were the first people ever to approach this strange territory. Even though others have gone this way, they have left scarcely a trace. It’s an intimate, personal road. The poet Antonio Machado writes,

Pilgrim, there is no road
The road is made by walking
By walking the road is made.

In 1941, toward the end of her short life, French philosopher and theologian Simone Weil was working on Gustave Thibon’s farm about 150 miles north of Marseille. This was in the Free Zone. The northern part of France was already under Nazi occupation, as the south would also be only a year later. Weil died in 1943, the result of a hunger strike aimed at suffering alongside those who were dying of hunger in German-occupied France. 

Catacomb Fresco of a Family Praying.

During evenings on the farm, Weil taught Thibon to read Greek, using the Lord’s Prayer as their text. As she worked in the fields during the day, she began to repeat the text over and over again to herself, feeling as if she had never prayed before. She found that the “very first words tear my thoughts from my body and transport it to a place outside space,” and that she was filled with a divine silence that was “infinity of infinity.” 

Even though the prayer seemed to transport her to a place beyond words, Weil found herself meditating on the words as well. What did it mean that God was “father” or that we were compelled to forgive “debts”? What actually was “daily bread”? Eventually, she wrote a meditation on the prayer, “Concerning the Our Father,” in which she attempted to capture the meaning and sensation of the prayer as it came to her. 

The prayer, she says, traverses the path between heaven and earth. The need for daily bread corresponds to the need for the elusive holy name. The need to forgive corresponds with the need to follow the divine will. The need to be guided from temptation is akin to the need to be drawn into the kingdom of God. Acceptance leads to desire leads back again to acceptance and again to desire. This prayer contains within it all that can be asked on the road between heaven and earth. It is impossible, Weil says, to say it through even one time, “giving the fullest possible attention to each word,” and not begin a process of transformation, however small, in the soul. 

Early Fresco of a Woman at Prayer.

But of course, that’s the rub: giving the fullest possible attention. Therein lies the lifetime of learning, the lifetime of walking the good road. Weil’s extreme expressions of spirituality can lead a reader away from this quotidian practice. When she says that she was filled with a divine silence that was infinity of infinity, I look at my own little prayer practices and I think, “What do I know about divine silence?” I know a lot about mental chatter; I know a few solitary moments of exquisite stillness. Her expression of extremity seems to invite comparison. But one of the things I’ve learned on this prayer road is that, regardless of my self-judgmental thoughts, I need to keep going. Over time, I’ve found that talking to God has lost some of its attraction and listening for God has proven more alive. I’ve found that prayer has infiltrated its way into every aspect of my life, and that even when I don’t think I’m praying, I’m praying. 

Luke 11 emphasizes persistence. The way of prayer is a long road. Keep walking on it. You have to knock on many doors. You have to ask for a lot of understanding. Doubts will come. Fears will come. You’ll have to change your mind and your heart many times. But, as the First Nations Version puts it, “Keep dancing your prayers, and the way will open before you. Search for the ancient pathways, and you will find them. Keep sending up your prayers, and they will be heard” (Luke 11:9). 

*Weil’s essay can be found in The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (Moyer Bell, 1977), pp. 492–500.

Weekly Prayer

A.R. Ammons (1926–2001)

Hymn

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth
and go on out
     over the sea marshes and the brant in bays
and over the hills of tall hickory
and over the crater lakes and canyons
and on up through the spheres of diminishing air
past the blackset noctilucent clouds
           where one wants to stop and look
way past all the light diffusions and bombardments
up farther than the loss of sight
    into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark

And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth
inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes
trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest
     coelenterates
and praying for a nerve cell
with all the soul of my chemical reactions
and going right on down where the eye sees only traces

You are everywhere partial and entire
You are on the inside of everything and on the outside

I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum
has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut
and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark
chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down

and if I find you I must go out deep into your
    far resolutions
and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

A.R. Ammons (1926–2001) was an American poet who often combined spiritual and scientific lexicons to express his view of the world. He’s seen in the tradition of Walt Whitman: gritty, witty, and transcendental.

Amy Frykholm: amy@journeywithjesus.net

Image credits: (1) Byzantine Orthodox Art; (2) Wikimedia.org; and (3) CorbisImages.com.