Prayer continued

No direct answer to yesterday's prayer ... yet. Continuing the topic of prayer, I don't recall if I shared with you some notes I took from Henri Nouwen's "The Only Necessary Thing – Living a Prayerful Life."

Prayer is the act of dying to all that we consider to be our own and of being born to a new experience which is not of this world. Prayer is a death to the world so that we can live for God.

The great mystery of prayer is that even now it leads us into a new heaven and a new earth and thus is an anticipation of life in the divine kingdom.

Loneliness to solitude. All people are alone. No one in the world is like me. I’m alone. Out of the aloneness comes either loneliness or solitude. Alonenes can be seen as a wound. It hurts and is one of the greatest sources of suffering today. However aloneness can be a gift. In our aloneness we can discover solitude when God tells us how deeply He loves us. Aloneness reveals to us an inner emptiness that can be misunderstood and be destructive or filled with promises for those who can tolerate the pain. When alone with no distractions the chaos can be so disturbing we get busy again.

Plan 5-10 minutes per day to begin. It may feel like wasted time bombarded by a mirade of thoughts and feelings. The discipline of solitude allows us to gradually come in touch with the presence of God in our lives…leading to joy and peace.

In solitude I get rid of my scaffolding: no friend to talk with, no telephone calls to make, no meetings to attend, no music to enterain, no books to distract, just me – naked vulnerable, weak, sinful, deprived, broken – nothing. It is this nothingness that I have to face in my solitude, a nothingness so dreadul that everything in me wants to run to my friends, my work, and my distractions to that I can forget my nothingness and make myself believe that I am worth something.

But that is not all. As soon as I decide to stay in my solitude, confusing ideas, disturbing images, wild fantasies and wierd associations jump about in my mind like monkeys in a banana tree. Anger and greed begin to show their ugly faces… Thus I try again to run from the dark abyss of my nothingness and restore my false self in all its vainglory. The task is to persevere in my soliude to stay in my cell until all my seductive visitors get tired of pounding on my door and leave me alone… The wisdom of the desert is that the confrontation with our own frightening nothingness forces us to surrender ourselves totally and unnconditinnally to the Lord Jesus Christ.