I'm co-leading an adult group through “Unbinding Your Heart,” a book/process that focusses on evangelism and prayer. This morning, I encountered an arresting line in the book, “What's at the heart of life with God? A powerful relationship between each one of us and the Trinity.” The heart of our life with God is our relationship with an abstract theological construct? That's not the way people work. It struck me as an awkward, peculiarly mainline Protestant way of talking. And then, perhaps exceeding the author's attempt at elegant variation, a fruitful one.
To whom do we pray? Evangelicals pray directly to Jesus, who is to them the person of God. Catholics (at least, according my Lutheran catechetical instruction) pray to a favorite saint, as an intercessor between them and an God. Jews and Muslims pray directly to the one God, who Christians equate to the Father/Creator person of the Trinity. But for mainline Protestants, it's not so clear that there's such a consensus. My intuition is that they're lead in prayer to Jesus when they're very young, but that they don't often build a sense of a personal relationship. As they enter the teen years, when relationships with authority figures of all sorts are often strained, and reinforced by catechetical experiences that tend to be academic and theological, they drift into addressing such prayers as they offer to a de-personalized God, which mostly equates to the Father. Then, in late middle age, as what their life will be becomes more and more a function of the choices they've made than the choices they'll make, they rediscover Jesus in prayer.
Contemporary mainline Protestants often struggle with prayer. We sometimes seem to face a chasm between the prayer life we know, which may be infrequent and unsatisfying, and the vibrant life of prayer that we feel we should have, and which we sometimes witness (with both discomfort and envy) in our evangelical friends. How can we get from here to there? If we try to jump the chasm, will we fail the trial of faith?
One strategy is to enter into prayer through a conscious discipline. Pray a Psalm. Structure prayers as if they were Psalms, following a formula such as “adoration, supplication, thanksgiving, intercession, confession.” I think that this a productive strategy, and I'd like to build upon it by suggesting a supplementary discipline, inspired by that awkward notion of our relationship with the Trinity as the heart of our life with God. Let me suggest praying in turn to each of the persons of the Trinity. I think if we took this seriously, these prayers would be different. Our prayers to the Father might emphasize adoration, supplication, and thanksgiving. Our prayers to Jesus might emphasize confession and intercession. And our prayers to the Spirit? They would emphasize our desire to follow God's will, and for us and others to be inspired in love to do the work he's set out for us.
The advantage of being smaller in scope is that this kind of prayer would encourage us to go deeper. The advantage of rotation is that it gives our entire prayer life (if not each prayer individually) the breadth of the formulas. And it makes the point, the heart of our life with God isn't our relationship with the Trinity as an abstract theological construct, it is our relationship with the persons of the Trinity: with the Father, with the Son, and with the Holy Spirit. Now and forever, Amen.
Peace
