Honest Prayer

"Commedia? Carnivale? Plague?" by Crazy Uncle Joe (Creative Commons)

Prayer is essentially the expression of our heart longing for love. It is not so much the listing of our requests but the breathing of our own deepest request, to be united with God as fully as possible. – Jeffrey D. Imbach, The Recovery of Love

Who am I when I pray?

As a devotee of Brennan Manning, I am aware of what he calls “the Imposter,” the false self that seemingly all of us constantly battle in our lives. The Imposter is our substitute, shield, and safety net. It promises to protect the hurt, vulnerable, and ashamed parts of us, the part that we fear others might one day discover and subsequently abandon and leave in isolation.

The ironic thing about the Imposter is that it delivers to us exactly what it promises to deliver us from. The false self we constantly roll out to others to protect who we really are ironically leaves our true selves in isolation. When concealed by the imposter, our true self neither knows others or is known by them. We desperately want to be accepted and loved by those around us, and we believe this defense mechanism will do the trick. But it does just the opposite! Worse, even if we are able to somehow manipulate others into loving our Imposter, it leaves our true selves feeling even less accepted and loved than before.

It is bad enough to experience this in our relationships with those around us. How much more so when we experience it in our relationship with God! Prayer, one of the most vital channels by which we deepen our love affair with God, can drive us farther away from him when we choose to wheel our Imposter out into the presence of God. We go to prayer in desperate need to experience God’s acceptance and love . . .

. . . but God can’t accept and love what isn’t there.

Gerald May put it this way:

I am seduced and enticed by a certain image of myself as a whole, holy, loving man who is well on his way to becoming free from attachments. When this image comes up in my prayer, it causes me to pose and posture; I find myself trying to make my prayer fit my image of how a holy man would pray. I no longer really invite God into my prayer. It becomes an act, a scene I play out on my own stage for my own edification. God is there in spite of this silliness, but, for the time being, I am unaware of that saving fact (Addiction and Grace, p. 100).

Thomas Merton echoes the fruitlessness of the false self:

This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy (from James Finlay’s Merton’s Palace of Nowhere, p.34).

And Brennan Manning drives the point home:

Obviously, the impostor is antsy in prayer. He hungers for excitement, craves some mood-altering experience. He is depressed when deprived of the spotlight. The false self is frustrated because he never hears God’s voice. He cannot, since God sees no one there. Prayer is death to every identity that does not come from God. The false self flees silence and solitude because they remind him of death (Abba’s Child, p. 43).

Melancholy sets in when we consider that this might be as good as it gets with God. I think this is why so many of Jesus’ followers strive in, fail at, and give up on intimate prayer life. We’ve never been brave enough to come to God in complete spiritual nakedness. We fear to bring our true selves into the light of God’s presence, for then we will be known for who we truly are. And how could anyone love us for who we really are?

There is, of course, an alternative to a shallow and distant prayer life. And it is simply this: There is one who dares to love us for who really are. Jesus the Nazarene, and his Father who sent him to rescue us.

Oh I know, that’s old hat. We learned that in Sunday School. And I think if we took a lie detector test and were asked if we believed Jesus loves us, we’d pass with flying colors.

But most people will miss intimacy with God by about eighteen inches. That’s the average distance between a person’s brain and her heart. We’ve got the head knowledge pf God’s love, but we really haven’t let it trickle down into our heart where it can begin to transform us.

It is only we have truly incorporated into our fabric the reality that God loves us unconditionally—no matter our hurts, habits, and hangups—that  we can start to bring out our true selves, bit by bit, into the presence of God without fear of judgment or abandonment. And that’s when the real miracle of transformation begins: God begins to reshape us into a closer resemblance of how we should be.

It is the scandalous love of God that empowers us to take a fearless moral inventory of ourselves, shed every disguise, and enter into his presence with every wart and blemish exposed, hungry for his grace to cover our failures and his power to help us make us better imitators of him.

One of Brennan Manning’s favorite sayings was that God loves us as we are and not as we should be.

It’s only when that becomes heart knowledge that we can engage in honest prayer.

Honest prayer is engaging in conversation with God as we are, and not as we should be.

Grace and peace.