Prayer Can Be ... Receiving Love

Do you know what it’s like to receive love? 

Like, really receive it? 

I have a close friend who teaches me a lot about this.

There have been a number of special times when we’ve been visiting each other where, before our time together ends, we sit together on the couch, our heads on each other’s shoulders, just being together in silence. 

In those moments, I can literally feel her receiving my love. Her eyes are closed, and she’s just sitting there, letting me be with her in a vulnerable moment. 

Her receiving my love in those moments?

That’s prayer. 

How do I know this? Because my own heart toward her is full to bursting with the same heart God has toward her: love, acceptance, enjoyment, welcome, delight. When she allows herself to receive those things from me, she’s also receiving them from God.

What is it like for you to receive love? Can you consider that experience the equivalent of receiving God’s love for you?

Prayer Can Be ... Liturgy, Part 2

I’ve been sharing with the Cup of Sunday Quiet subscribers about some of the difficult changes at work in my spirit and my life with God. Over the last few weeks, as these changes have accelerated, I’ve seen myself grow more and more weary. More and more weak. 

Last weekend, I had hardly any physical or emotional or spiritual strength to stand. 

When it came time on Sunday evening to drive to the contemplative eucharist service at our church that we love so much, I had a hard time just being willing to go. It felt like I was pushing myself to get ready, pushing myself out the door, pushing myself to be faithful and just show up. 

And as we were driving to our little church, just around the corner from our home, I thought to myself: 

“I’m not going to have the strength to say the prayers. I just can’t physically do it. I’m going to have to let the prayers of the people carry me.”

This is another reason I love liturgy. It prays for us when we cannot pray ourselves. 

I knew that I could be in that church with that gathering of people that night and simply be there, not even a single word escaping my mouth the entire time, and the people would still pray. 

Their prayers would hold me up.

I could rely on their prayers when I had no ability of my own.

Prayer can be liturgy because in the gathering of the people, it prays faithfully. It allows the voices of the strong many to hold up the weary few.

Prayer can be liturgy … if we need it, and if we let it.

Have you ever experienced liturgy holding you up in this way?

Prayer Can Be ... Liturgy, Part 1

Kirk and I made an episcopal church our home a little over a year ago.

After attending non-denominational Christian churches for most of my life, getting used to liturgy in church definitely took some time. We were the ones flipping through the Book of Common Prayer, never quite sure which pages were happening next. We were the ones taking the cues of those around us when the time came to kneel or stand or sit. We were the ones who never made the sign of the cross on our foreheads, lips, and heart at the announcement of the day’s Gospel reading because we just didn’t know what that gesture was or what it meant. 

Despite the learning curve, it took me no time at all to appreciate two key aspects of liturgy: 

1. Liturgy helps you pray what’s true.
2. Liturgy holds you up when you’ve fallen down.

Today we’re going to talk about the first, and tomorrow we’ll talk about the second.

So, when it comes to helping you pray what’s true, I love that every week, I get to tell God this:

I confess that I have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what I have done and what I have left undone. I have not loved you with my whole heart. I have not loved my neighbor as myself.

This prayer brings me back to myself. I’m reminded of what’s happened since I last prayed these words, as though the events of the previous week — or even the previous hour! — are playing on the movie screen of my mind. These words help me acknowledge my need for grace to myself and to God. 

I love that just before taking eucharist, I get to say the words of the Lord’s Prayer slowly. I get to remember that God’s name is hallowed. That I long for his kingdom to come. That I get to be a part of his will being done on earth right now. I get to keep asking for just the right amount of daily bread. To be forgiven while being reminded of my own need to forgive. For God’s grace to help me evade the darker side of life. I get to tell God each and every week that his is the kingdom and the power and glory, forever and ever, amen. 

And I love when it comes time to pray this: 

Grant us strength and courage to love and serve you with gladness and singleness of heart.

It reminds me of my heart’s deepest prayer: that I want to love God with single-hearted focus all my days.

Liturgy helps us pray what’s true. 

Have you ever experienced this with liturgy?

Prayer Can Be ... An Offering

Kirk and I traveled to the Pacific Northwest for a wedding a little over three years ago, and before we flew back home, we had one full day to explore the area. So we trekked over to Whidbey Island, off the coast of northern Washington State, and spent the day there.

While we were exploring the island, we stopped the car overlooking the coast in one particular area, and Kirk got out of the car. When he got back in the car, he had a large, smooth, gray stone in his hand, which he handed to me.

This trip was happening just before I was going to begin a 3-month summer of solitude dedicated to the study of nonviolence. And this stone, we both knew, had something to do with that.

It was a prayer rock in some way.

When we got home from the trip, I placed the stone on top of a Trinity fixture, which you see pictured above, which sits in a corner of my desk. I placed the stone there and just sat there looking at it, letting it be a kind of offering to God.

It was the offering of the summer of solitude about to begin and whatever words might emerge from it. 

It was the offering of my trust in God for those three months and their result. 

It was an offering of acknowledging that my doing what I was about to do in those three months — and anything I did as a result of them — was simply a response to God’s invitation in my life in the first place. 

Objects can be offered up as prayer. 

Have you ever experienced something like this?

Prayer Can Be ... Symbolic

I have this wall next to my desk that I call my prayer wall. Affixed to it are 5 or 6 symbolic items I’ve purchased or received as gifts over the years. 

Each one of these symbols reflects something deep and meaningful to my heart. 

One of the symbols is a cast-iron symbol of a tree. It has small sprouting buds on each branch, and the topmost branches make the form of a cross. It reminds me of resurrection — that life springs out of death. It speaks of my life’s work, which is centered around growth. It reminds me of the tree of life.

Another of the symbols is a tiny golden-bronze cross that has 12 individual stick-figures joining hands in a circle at the center of it. Their joined hands create the image of a heart between each one of them. This symbol reminds me of my heart for cooperation and my prayer for a peaceful world. 

Yet another of the symbols has a large Holy Spirit dove on it, swooning over the word “Pax,” for “peace.” It reminds me of my ongoing journey to understand and embody nonviolence.

It’s my prayer wall. 

Sometimes, when sitting at my desk, I stare at each image, letting my gaze linger on each one.

It’s a time of remembering who I am in my deepest core. It’s a time of asking God to keep cultivating in me the heart he gave me before I was born. 

Do you have any symbols that are prayer to you?

Prayer Can Be ... Photography

I see a mossy mop head. Do you? 

Also, a heart.

About a year ago, a friend emailed to say she was considering an iPhone purchase and wondered how I’d liked my experience of owning one. I had owned mine for about six months at the time, and I wrote her back to say, “It’s changed my life.” 

It seems an audacious claim, I know.

But I made it in all seriousness. There were about 5 reasons I could list — quite readily — to detail why I’d found it to be true. 

And one of those 5 reasons — the most meaningful to me of them all — was the discovery of photography it brought into my life, specifically through the use of the Instagram app.

Whether you use Instagram or some other app, a “real” camera or just your handheld phone, photography can become a form of prayer in several different ways.

• First, it makes us aware. When we have a camera in hand, we notice the details. We have an eye out for beauty. We’re present to our surroundings, looking for what speaks to us to be captured. 

• Second, it makes us still. In the moment of taking a photograph, I find that everything slows down to zero. My breath even holds in my throat. I’m completely in tune with the moment and the object in front of my lens. Time evaporates. 

• Third, it enlivens. On the Instagram app, the creative proess extends beyond the click of the camera. There’s an instant editing process that invites further interaction with the image and experience. Different filters lend perspective and mood. The blurring tools help accentuate intention. The photograph becomes an organism enlivened by our touch — and it’s enlivening to experience, too. 

• Fourth, it gives us a chance for remark. When something catches my notice to be captured as a photograph, usually a short word, phrase, or line runs through my mind immediately. This becomes the photo’s caption — the way I share my heart in taking it, the way I make that image an offering.

I’ve found that photography — even my “poor man’s” version of it — heightens my love affair with beauty, stillness, perspective, and creativity. It’s a way to see and to express my heart. In a way, it’s how I tell God, “I see you here.”

Have you ever experienced photography as prayer?

Prayer Can Be ... Art Collage

My first art collage, June 2012.

In the course of a visit one time, a friend said she had something she wanted to share with me. We sat down on her comfy two-person rocker chair, and she pulled out an art collage piece she’d created.

All over the piece were images and words she’d pulled from various magazines and collected into one concentrated place. 

It was the words that arrested me the most. They spoke of realities near and dear to her heart. Realities we’d spoke often about in the years of our friendship. Realities she’d incorporated into her lifestyle and that had guided some of her biggest life decisions.

I was staring at a piece of her heart on that posterboard.

And it was holy. 

No words but three could escape my lips in that moment. “This is prayer,” I breathed.

“It is?”

My friend was surprised. She hadn’t created the collage with prayer in mind. She’d just set out to express what she cared about. 

But it was indeed a form of prayer.

When we get in touch with the most interior truths of ourselves — when we touch them, when we see them, when we say, “Yes, this is true of me” — we touch what God also sees. We touch God’s response: “Yes.”

Have you ever experienced art collage as prayer?

Prayer Can Be ... Painting

I am, quite admittedly, not much of an artist. I never have been. 

But last year, I began to experiment with paints and markers in my Moleskine, and I discovered how much the process can be prayer. 

Often, I’ll pull out my art supplies, put a blank sheet in front of me, and have no idea what I’m going to create. It often starts with nothing more than a feeling or intuition.

That feeling or intuition may be heavy — out come the dark colors, painted all over the page. It may be hopeful — out come the yellows and greens. It may include a word or a line of words. It may carry symbols or patterns.

It may feel like fiery, passionate, hope-filled growth — and so out comes the painting you see above. 

The paints teach me what my heart has to say. I discover what’s going on in there through color and brushstrokes.

And what comes out is a prayerful offering.

My heart. On the page. Offered up.

Has painting ever been prayer for you?

Prayer Can Be ... Silent

At the end of the weekly lectio that I record each week for the Cup of Sunday Quiet, I usually include a few moments to sit in silent acknowledgment of what that time has held. 

God is present. We are present.

And we just hold the acknowledgment of that for a few silent seconds.

This is prayer, too. 

In fact, these “prayers of the silences” are an often companion in the journey of my life with God right now. God is here, but we aren’t communicating in conscious, cognitive ways like I’ve been used to doing. 

It’s a strange and difficult change, but it is also okay. I sit in the silence, staring off into space, and I know God is here, just as much as I am. No effort to put things into words is needed. Just being aware of our presence in the same space is enough. It is prayer, too.

Do you ever experience these prayers of the silences?

Prayer Can Be ... Verbal

I can still remember my first prayer journal — the one I started in seventh grade. Its cover looked like denim jeans, complete with an image of a denim pocket with brass rivets on the front.

And it was filled with melancholy.

I spoke often of the boy I liked and how much it hurt that he liked someone else. I begged God for so many things in those written prayers: for the boy to like me, for forgiveness, for a stronger faith.

I think back on that journal and know that, in a way, I was praying. It was prayer in the best way I knew how to do it at the time. It was as honest as I could allow myself to get.

But more than anything, I was really just talking to myself. 

There was always a push and pull between what I wanted to say and what I felt I should say in that prayer journal. I was learning how to express my inner thoughts, perhaps for the first time, but I was also quite inhibited about expressing those thoughts.

Push and pull, push and pull, push and pull.

There wasn’t much room for God there. 

Instead of connecting directly with God, I scoured the Bible for answers to my prayers. I tried to understand God’s perspective on my junior high (and, eventually, high school) cries. I did the best I could to figure out God’s mind. 

But God wasn’t much there.

I felt like I was talking out loud on the page to myself and to a very stoic idea I carried in my mind of God. It pictured God with long white hair and a long white beard, a closed expression on his face as he looked at me, with him seated way up high on a massive throne.

It wasn’t encounter. It was more like fleeing for my life.

Those prayers written in that journal had more to do with me figuring out what I thought and felt about my life experiences and then judging what I thought and felt about those life experiences by what I surmised the Bible had to say about them. 

It had nothing to do with real relationship with God at all.

Verbal prayer is meant to be so much different than that. 

Verbal prayer — whether spoken or written or thought — is meant to be an experience of encounter.

We allow ourselves to see what is true in our hearts, and we allow God to see it too. We experience God seeing it with us. We engage with God about it. This is verbal prayer.

I quote this passage from Henri Nouwen’s Way of the Heart often, and I will quote it again. This is the best description I’ve ever discovered of verbal prayer: 

“To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all-seeing, within you.”

Here, we have conscious conversation and a knowing, real encounter with God Himself.

What is verbal prayer like for you?

Prayer Can Be ...

In our new series exploration, we’re going to examine prayer — all the different forms it can take. 

It’s so easy to think prayer is one certain thing: sitting and talking to God. 

But prayer is and can be so much more than that. 

I’d love for this series to set you free to experience prayer as so many different things, so many different layers, so many unexpected ways of connecting to God in the midst of your everyday life, your interests, your passions, your lifestyle, your deep heart. 

Come on a journey with me these next few weeks to discover all that prayer can be. 

What are the ways you have experienced prayer?

Evidence of Life

I hope this day finds you well and connected to yourself and to God. 

I look forward to starting a new exploration with you on Monday. Until then, much love. 

xoxo,

Christianne 

Visio Divina

Since we ended the dark night series yesterday, I’m taking the rest of this week to prepare for our next series exploration, which will begin next week. 

In the meantime, I’d like to provide you with a chance for visio divina.

This is known as “sacred seeing.” It is an invitation to prayerfully ponder an image and allow it to be an opening to conversation between yourself and God. 

Contemplate the image above. 

• What do you see? 
• If you gaze at the image a little longer, what else do you notice?
• What does it evoke in you? 
• Why do you suppose that is your response? 

Bring what you notice and how you respond into conversation with God.

Into This Dark Night: My Wish for You

It’s been a long journey for us here, learning about the dark night of the soul together. My sense is that enough has been said, at least for now, about this concept in this space. There’s plenty to ponder, for sure. And the archives are here, should you want to revisit the entries. 

But as we close out this series, I want to share my heart toward you through this. 

If you are walking in a dark night — either of the senses or the spirit — I want you to know this is real. You aren’t imagining things. You haven’t done something to upset God. God hasn’t left you. 

God is here, but in imperceptible ways. 

And what is happening here, even though you can’t see, hear, feel, or understand it, is profound and powerful.

It only requires that you wait.

The other aspect of my heart toward you here is that you would have companionship in this journey.

Companionship in the spiritual journey — having a place to talk about and discover God in the details of our lives — is always helpful. I have been meeting with a spiritual director once a month for four years, and it is one of the most beloved aspects of my life.

But in this place of the dark night, where the journey is so mysterious and dark and lonely, I would especially encourage you to seek out mature, wise, and discerning companionship.

How can you locate such a companion? 

There are a number of ways.

Call your church to learn if they provide this ministry. Call retreat centers in your area, as they often have spiritual directors available to meet with retreatants and local residents. 

Two websites — Spiritual Directors International and the Evangelical Spiritual Directors Association — provide online directories for finding a spiritual director in your area. 

And lastly, if you would like my companionship with you — whether you’re in the midst of a dark night or not — I provide spiritual companionship to individuals all over the globe. It would be an honor and privilege to provide such space and conversation for you. You are welcome to get in touch with me here. 

Thank you for being here in this series with me. The dark night of the soul is not an oft-talked-about subject in churches, and I so wish it was more broadly known.

Much love,

Christianne 

Into This Dark Night: Why This?

Near the beginning of our study of the painful night of the spirit, a friend emailed me and said: 

“I just can’t comprehend why God would allow someone to experience that.”

We had, at that point in the series, talked about Mother Teresa and her 40 years spent suffering in the dark. We had also discussed that the night of the spirit is darker than the night of sense.

Why? she wondered. Why would God do all this?

In the place of such a challenging concept as the dark night of the soul, and especially the night of the spirit, I find two thoughts very helpful. 

The first is that our souls were meant for union with God.

Such intimacy was the intent of creation, and the fall of humanity has made the human journey one that continually seeks re-union. Some mystics throughout history have used the image of a spiral to picture this journey of the soul back toward God througout a lifetime. The labyrinth is another representation of this journey, with the soul advancing ever nearer the center, even as there are turns in the journey that seem to take us away from that point of center. 

John of the Cross uses the image of a ladder — similar to Jacob’s — in which we are continually ascending and descending the rungs but ultimately climbing ever higher toward the perfection of union. 

Even though the journey is complex and the experience sometimes one of consolation and sometimes one of desolation, all of it is meant for the intent of union. 

Such union is our soul’s intended home. 

The second thought I find helpful in the face of such a difficult concept is that the soul increasingly desires such union and is willing to endure whatever pain may be required to land upon it. 

John of the Cross says that at this point in the soul’s journey, when the night of the spirit comes, the soul is “so in love with God that she would give a thousand lives for him.” She would willingly die a thousand deaths. 

She is, plainly, heartsick for God. 

“When this love shows up in the soul,” he says, “it finds her ready to be wounded and united with love itself.”

The night of the spirit is one of the most agonizing experiences a soul can endure on earth. But it’s a road the soul, prepared for this journey, is willing to take when it comes. 

Into This Dark Night: Seeing All the Dust Particles

The spiritual blindness that happens in the night of the spirit happens because the divine light of God is brighter than the eyes of our soul can handle. This is one reason the night of the spirit hurts — because our souls, being human, are much weaker than the brightness of the divine light of God. 

John of the Cross says this: 

“The light and wisdom of this contemplation are so pure and bright and the soul it invades is so dark and impure that their meeting is going to be painful. When the eyes are bad — impure and sickly — clear light feels like an ambush and it hurts.”

There’s another reason the night of the spirit is so painful, though, and it’s because what the soul is able to see when the divine light shines upon it are all its imperfections. 

The saint describes it this way: 

“Consider common, natural light: a sunbeam shines through a window. The freer the air is from little specks of dust, the less clearly we see the ray of light. The more motes that are floating in the air, the more clearly the sunbeam appears to our eyes. This is because light itself is invisible. Light is the means by which the things it strikes are perceived.”

The light of God is a sunbeam on the soul, and our native imperfections are dust motes and particles floating through the air, now clearly visible because of that ray of light. The sudden, acute awareness of all these imperfections makes the soul in this place feel quite wretched. 

Remember, the soul that has entered the night of the spirit has already endured the night of the senses. Her love for God has been purified a great deal, and she has come to a place of being wildly in love with God. 

Seeing her impurities through the searing light of God undoes her.

She feels these impurities will separate her from the lover of her soul, God, forever. 

Into This Dark Night: A Different Sort of Darkness

In the night of the senses, we learned that darkness comes because God slams the door shut on the senses. There’s a drying up of what we feel and experience of God, and it’s because he’s turned the light off.

The night of the spirit is a different sort of darkness. 

Here, the work of God in the soul is directed toward divine union — the most intimate “one-ing” the soul can ever experience. And so, to accomplish this union, God turns up the light that’s poured into the soul. 

The result is utter blindness. 

I love the way John of the Cross makes sense of this blindness in response to God’s light: 

“The brighter the light, the more blinding it is to the owl. The more directly we gaze at the sun, the more it darkens our visual faculty, depriving it and overwhelming it, because of its inherent weakness.”

God’s light is so bright that it pains and blinds our “eyes,” or soul. We can’t see. We’re putting our hands out in front of us, feeling our way forward without the help of sight to see our way.

As paradoxical as it sounds, the darkness happening here in the night of the spirit is actually light. And it is immensely painful to the soul.

Tomorrow, we’ll learn why.

Into This Dark Night: The Night of the Spirit Is Darker

I mentioned yesterday that the night of the spirit is a difficult reality to write about. Whereas we spent about four weeks exploring the night of the senses (you can find the archive of those posts here), I suspect we’ll spend just a few days on the night of the spirit.

It’s just that profound.

Additionally, John of the Cross tells us that the night of the spirit is much less common than the night of the senses. Most individuals in the life of faith, he says, experience the night of the senses to some degree or another, and often several different times.

The night of the spirit is rare.

And it is incredibly potent and pain-filled for the one enduring it. 

St. John of the Cross uses the word “misery” quite a lot to describe this experience. 

For instance, here’s one way he describes what it’s like:

“In the face of her own misery, the soul feels herself coming undone and melting away in a cruel spiritual death.

   It is as if the soul were being swallowed by a beast and disintegrating in the darkness of its belly, like Jonah when he was trapped inside the whale. She must abide in this tomb of dark death until the spiritual resurrection she is hoping for.”

An interior death is taking place in the night of the spirit. 

In the night of the senses, a kind of death happened, too, but it was more a death of externals. The soulwas learning to depend less on action and feeling. Its interior life was strengthening and growing in love for God. 

Here, rather than dying to externals and what the soul can perceive, the soul is dying to what is left to be purified inside of her. It is, as John of the Cross puts it, “descending into the underworld alive.” 

Yow. 

Tomorrow we’ll look at the why and the how of this happening.

Into This Dark Night: The Night of the Spirit

The night of the spirit. 

This is a really difficult reality to write about.

Whenever I think of this most difficult journey in the spiritual life, I think of Mother Teresa. Most likely, you have heard that after her death, the world learned she had carried a spiritual darkness in her life for 40 long years. 

Forty years. 

How can we begin to wrap our minds around that? 

I remember when the news of this broke.

The news agencies didn’t know what to make of it. They were, in short, flabbergasted. That small, humble woman everyone in the world knew as the face of love, as one who had wholly given herself to God in every single moment she lived, had walked blindly in spiritual darkness for 40 years. 

She didn’t know where God was. She felt wholly abandoned. 

And yet she continued to love God and people broken in both body and spirit.

The media outlets questioned her faith. They questioned her life. They questioned everything she stood for and everything we thought we knew of her. 

But those of us acquainted with the deeper realities of the spiritual journey knew, immediately, this: 

She had endured the most difficult season of all. She had endured the dark night of the spirit. 

This is a difficult one to write about. And truthfully, I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to say about it here. We’ll discover the answer to that question together over the course of the next few days.  

Into This Dark Night: When the Night of the Senses Ends

We’ve spent several weeks venturing into the terrain of the night of the senses, which is the first portion of the dark night of the soul.

What happens when it ends? 

John of the Cross teaches us that a time of consolation and strength sets in. We learned on Friday that, eventually, love is enkindled within us and we become more and more consumed by that love, without really knowing how it got there or how it continues to grow.

God has done it, and we begin living into it.

Once we emerge from this portion of the dark night, John of the Cross also says this: 

“In this phase, the soul is like someone who has escaped from prison. She goes about the things of God with freedom and satisfaction. Now that the faculties are no longer attached to the discursive mind or troubled by the spiritual anxiety that used to bind the soul, her interior delight flows more abundantly than it ever did before she entered that first dark night. Without the labor of the intellect, she now finds within her the most serene and loving contemplation and spiritual sweetness.” 

Freedom. Interior delight. Serenity. Spiritual sweetness. 

I just love that. Don’t you?

The saint also tells us that the soul, upon emerging from this night of sense, begins to cultivate mastery of the spiritual life:

“What joy! The soul has emerged victorious from the tribulations of the night of sensory purification. She has risen above the state of the beginner and entered the state of the adept. God may not immediately move her into the night of the spirit, now. Instead, the soul may spend years cultivating mastery before she is ready to face the impenetrable darkness that leads to union.”

I can just see the soul going along with increasing strength and ease on this other side, firmly and continuously practicing the disciplines of the spiritual life from a new place than she did before — not based on what she does or how she feels, but from a rootedness in her belonging to God and the love and connection to God she received in new doses while enduring the night of sense.

Before we discuss the second phase of the dark night of the soul — the night of the spirit — I want to say a few things to wrap up our learnings about the night of the senses: 

• The night of the senses can last a long or a short time. 
• It can also repeat itself.
• God may choose to apply a light or heavy hand of the darkened senses to a soul enduring such a season. 
• The strength or lightness of the experience is based upon what God deems most fitting and endurable for each individual soul.

In other words, there is no formula. 

But as we have seen through our exploration these past few weeks, it is a worthy trial. God has deemed the soul ready for such a journey. And while it is confusing and painful and sometimes disillusioning, it is meant to be so. 

God is doing good work in the soul, and it is work we cannot do for ourselves. 

It is wholly grace.