When I visited Jordan some years ago, I had the opportunity to try to swim in the salty and heavy water of the Dead Sea. It was a wonderful experience - especially for someone like me who, for some reason, has to make an extra effort to stay afloat every time he swims in normal water! In that salty water, I did not have to do anything at all to stay afloat myself, because I was kept afloat by the surrounding water.
This experience taught me a lesson: it reminded me very concretely of what life in God is and what prayer is. When one is asked to define prayer, I think that a good starting point is to say that to pray is to rest. Prayer means resting in God, who surrounds us on every side (Ps. 139:5). In his speech in Athens, the apostle Paul said that we, human beings, "live and move and have our being" in God (Acts 17:28). Prayer is an intrinsic part of this living and being in God.
There is one weakness, however, in the metaphor which I have just used. Namely, there is no life at all in the Dead Sea. God, however, is no dead sea. He is a living sea, a sea of life. He is the sea which not only keeps us afloat, but also takes care of us, protects us, nourishes us, and is constantly giving birth to new life.
In the Bible, God's presence and caring which surrounds us like a sea of life is described beautifully in several passages. One of the most touching and eloquent of these passages is in Psalm 139:
O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my path and my lying down,
and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,
O Lord, you know it completely.
You hem me in, behind and before,
and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is so high that I cannot attain it.
Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,"
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
For it was you who formed my inward parts;
you knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
that I know very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.
In your book were written all the days
that were formed for me,
when none of them as yet existed.
How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
I try to count them - they are more than the sand;
I come to the end - I am still with you. (Ps. 139:1-18)
Jesus also spoke to his disciples about the same thing. He told them how the Heavenly Father takes care of us, and encouraged them to trust in this caring throughout their lives. Not a single sparrow falls to the ground apart from the Heavenly Father, Jesus said, and continued: "Even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid" (Matt. 10:30-31).
Jesus told his disciples to be free from worry and care. This carefree attitude has very much in common with the attitude of a swimmer who plunges trustingly into the waves of the Dead Sea:
Do not worry about your life,
what you will eat or what you will drink,
or about you body, what you will wear...
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow;
they neither toil nor spin...
If God so clothes the grass of the field,
which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven,
will he not much more clothe you - you of little faith?(Matt. 6:25a, 28b, 30)
The ability to believe required for us to be in God's care is no greater than the swimming ability required to stay afloat in the Dead Sea. Even those of little faith are invited to be surrounded by God's sea of love and caring, and to be kept afloat in this sea.
Prayer is constant communication with this divine reality which surrounds us. It means surrendering oneself to this reality, to the Heavenly Father, who loves us, sees us, listens to us, helps us and guides us. It means that we constantly plunge into the sea of God's love. God himself encourages us in this continuous act through his wonderful promises:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you;
and through the rivers,
they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.
For I am the Lord your God. (Isa. 43:1b-3a)
For the mountains may depart
and the hills be removed,
but my steadfast love shall not depart from you.(Isa. 54:10)
With weeping eyes they shall come,
and with consolations I will lead them back. (Jer. 31:9a)
Trusting in these unchanging promises of God, the apostle Paul encouraged the Christians of Philippi:
Do not worry about anything,
but in everything
by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving
let your requests be made known to God.
And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding,
will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.(Phil. 4:6-7
)
When we pray, the peace of God surrounds us, protecting our hearts and minds. And if we do not know how we should pray, God himself "intercedes with sighs too deep for words", as Paul wrote to Christians in Rome. Thus, prayer does not only mean being and resting in the living sea of God. God's presence and caring also means something that is even more than him carrying us, protecting us and and guiding us: it also means that God, in a sense, breaths with us. His Holy Spirit himself prays with us and for us. This, if anything, shows us that to pray is really to rest in God.
Being and resting in the living sea of God's love does not, however, mean passive idleness. Rather, if we rest and live in God, we are in the middle of a very dynamic and dramatic life.
Life, which God has created and which he sustains, is constantly under threat. The powers of evil can also swim in the sea of God's love and goodness! And they are good swimmers, which attack us like dangerous fish, leaving no one at peace.
In this battle, love and solidarity are threatened by selfishness and hatred; faith and hope by unbelief and apathy; truth by untruthfulness; the integrity of life by exploitation, discrimination and oppression; and the cosmos by chaos. Diabolos - the devil, the enemy of God - is, as his very name suggests, one who throws people apart from each other, causing division.
Thus, there is a constant battle going on in the sea of the love and goodness of God. To live as a human being and as a Christian is to participate in this battle. Therefore, prayer also means fighting.
This battle, however, is not only external for those who pray; it is also fought in their very hearts. Sin - unbelief and selfishness - is not only outside them, but it is also a hard reality within themselves. Thus, prayer means fighting for both one's own life and the life of the world.
In this situation, prayer means asking difficult questions in the middle of confusion and darkness; crying in the middle of suffering and loneliness; crying to God out of the depths of guilt and pain; and knocking on what seems to be a closed door to the future.
We can do all this with trust and courage, however, because it is in accordance with the advice and commandment of Jesus: "Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you" (Luke 11:9). As encouraging examples, Jesus mentions the man who wakes up his friend in the middle of the night in order to borrow three loaves of bread from him (Luke 11:5-8), and the woman who keeps visiting the judge with unyielding perseverance in order to be granted justice (Luke 18:1-7).
A special paradigm for and symbol of the fighting prayer is the nocturnal wrestling of the patriarch Jacob with God in the Book of Genesis. The words of Jacob, "I will not let you go, unless you bless me," have been repeated by many distressed souls persistent in prayer throughout the centuries (Gen. 32:23-30).
As I said earlier, however, fighting prayer does not only mean praying for ourselves. It also means praying for others, for our neighbours, for our families, for the Church, for our nations, and for the whole of humankind. The praying Church acts as a priest of all creation, bringing before God the sighs, anxiety, sorrow, conflicts and sufferings of this world created by him, and saying: "Lord, have mercy on us. Christ, have mercy on us. Give us your peace."
But how can prayer mean fighting and resting at the same time? This seems logically impossible, but it is, nevertheless, a functional reality, as everyone who prays knows. At times, these two aspects of prayer may be temporally separated; at other times (and perhaps more often), they are within each other, intertwined, as was the case when a man said to Jesus: "I believe; help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24)
Paradoxically, it often happens that when we rest on God's promises, this rest makes us start something new, move on and take risks. As examples of this, the Bible mentions Noah, who built the Ark; Abraham, who started a journey, even though he did not know where he was going; Moses, who led his people from Egypt towards the promised land; and many other fathers and mothers of faith (Hebr. 11).
On the other hand, those who are preparing themselves for such a battle are given this word of God: "The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still" (Ex. 14:14). And many fights of prayer end in the same way as that of Jesus in Gethsemane: "Not my will but yours be done" (Luke 22:42). Moreover, the fighting prayer requires that we trust in God and turn to him in a childlike manner. Only children who feel secure have the courage to be persistent in their requests.
As I lay on my back in the waves of the Dead Sea, I was, of course, happy and grateful for that fantastic experience. When we experience the great goodness of God in the sea of his love, this goodness also naturally generates in us a spontaneous joy and gratitude. In such situations, praise and thanksgiving are closely intertwined. When we thank God - and not fate, fortune or ourselves - for the good things which have happened to us, we give glory to God, and our praise of him is intimately related to our thankfulness.
However, we often forget to thank God. Whenever we neglect this aspect, something extremely essential is missing in our prayer. Therefore, the Bible very often urges us to thank and praise God. One of such passages is Psalm 100:
Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.
Worship the Lord with gladness;
come into his presence with singing.
Know that the Lord is God.
It is he that made us, and we are his;
we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.
Enter his gates with thanksgiving,
and his courts with praise.
Give thanks to him, bless his name.
For the Lord is good;
his steadfast love endures forever,
and his faithfulness to all generations.
hus, one intrinsic part of prayer is our praise and thanks to God for what he has given to us, and is giving to us, and even for what he will give to us in the future. However, we should thank and praise God not only for what he gives, but also for what he is. In the last book of the Bible, the Revelation to John, there are lots of examples of this kind of praise of God. When the perspective of faith opens to the final arrival and victory of the kingdom of God, and to the time when God is "all in all" (1 Cor. 15:28), the voices of praise and worship can be heard with ever increasing clarity: "Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever!" (Rev. 7:12).
These are those who sing before the throne of God, those who "have come out of the great ordeal" and from whose eyes "God will wipe away every tear" (Rev. 7:14, 17). In that final kingdom of God, the fighting prayer will eventually change into a prayer of thanksgiving and praise.
We join this thanksgiving already here on earth when we praise the holy name of
God with "all the company of Heaven and all the saints" at the Holy Communion: "Holy,
holy, holy Lord, God of power and might: Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the
highest."