Walking outside, I noticed a weathervane.
I didn’t have a reason to be out. I had just felt a stirring to leave the house for a bit, and I answered as best I could. Not knowing quite what to do, I waited in the air, I drifted up and down the block with my hands in my pockets, and I let everything slow down to as slow as I could get it to go. I leaned for a while, looking at whatever I happened to see. And at some point, I was moved to fully regard and appreciate a weathervane on a nearby roof.
I don’t necessarily have the words for what it means.
Jesus often retreated into silent places to pray (Luke 5:16). I wonder what he said in those prayers. Indeed, I wonder if he “said” much of anything at all.
We are to pray continually, or pray without ceasing—or so says I Thessalonians 5:17. If prayer consists only of speaking to God in word or thought, then we have a problem. We can’t do that continually.
One obvious answer is that prayer is not just speaking. It’s also listening. The communication is two-way. You know the old saw: We have two ears to hear versus one mouth with which to speak, so respect the ratio. Does that ratio look anything like the way we pray—listening twice as much as we speak? “Listening,” that is, to all that he might be saying into our hearts, our moments, and our lives?
But there is more. When we speak with an omniscient creator who already knows us better than we know ourselves, there is the question of language. Jesus might not always have “said” formal words and sentences when praying because human speech is limited. He was God the Son speaking to God the Father, so they could be expected to wordlessly understand one another. Yet we are the people of God. We who believe have God’s spirit, meaning that we can expect some portion of this same understanding. Indeed, the Bible says that he hears our prayers even when we don’t know precisely what to pray to him (Romans 8:26).
We do pray using the words of our own human language, and we must pray this way. We are created in God’s image, and like God, our word has power. But prayer—communicating with the infinite—must also consist of more than finite language.
There is something musical about this. When we surrender lovingly to an instrumental piece of music, we recognize the order and meaning of the movements and melodies, even though the nature of that meaning is emotional instead of intellectual. We let go of our insistence on our own mood in order to resonate with the mood of the music.
In the same way, our praying involves not just bowing our heads and folding our hands on our own terms, but also submitting ourselves to resonate with the “music” whose meaning is spiritual.
What kind of music is this? Well: one might rightly say ... wind instruments. In both of two very different books of the Bible (John 3:8, Acts 2:2), the Holy Spirit is associated with the wind. Our prayer seeks any and all ways of understanding God, including this one. We do pray to lay specific thanks and specific appeals before him, and we do pray to listen for instruction that we might be able to translate into thought or deed. But then there is this other realm of prayer, perhaps the greatest realm of all. Over and above everything else, our prayer also includes the quiet seeking—in our hearts, in patience and stillness—for a renewed and wordless awareness of which way the wind is blowing.
I didn’t have a reason to be out. I had just felt a stirring to leave the house for a bit, and I answered as best I could. Not knowing quite what to do, I waited in the air, I drifted up and down the block with my hands in my pockets, and I let everything slow down to as slow as I could get it to go. I leaned for a while, looking at whatever I happened to see. And at some point, I was moved to fully regard and appreciate a weathervane on a nearby roof.
I don’t necessarily have the words for what it means.
Jesus often retreated into silent places to pray (Luke 5:16). I wonder what he said in those prayers. Indeed, I wonder if he “said” much of anything at all.
We are to pray continually, or pray without ceasing—or so says I Thessalonians 5:17. If prayer consists only of speaking to God in word or thought, then we have a problem. We can’t do that continually.
One obvious answer is that prayer is not just speaking. It’s also listening. The communication is two-way. You know the old saw: We have two ears to hear versus one mouth with which to speak, so respect the ratio. Does that ratio look anything like the way we pray—listening twice as much as we speak? “Listening,” that is, to all that he might be saying into our hearts, our moments, and our lives?
But there is more. When we speak with an omniscient creator who already knows us better than we know ourselves, there is the question of language. Jesus might not always have “said” formal words and sentences when praying because human speech is limited. He was God the Son speaking to God the Father, so they could be expected to wordlessly understand one another. Yet we are the people of God. We who believe have God’s spirit, meaning that we can expect some portion of this same understanding. Indeed, the Bible says that he hears our prayers even when we don’t know precisely what to pray to him (Romans 8:26).
We do pray using the words of our own human language, and we must pray this way. We are created in God’s image, and like God, our word has power. But prayer—communicating with the infinite—must also consist of more than finite language.
There is something musical about this. When we surrender lovingly to an instrumental piece of music, we recognize the order and meaning of the movements and melodies, even though the nature of that meaning is emotional instead of intellectual. We let go of our insistence on our own mood in order to resonate with the mood of the music.
In the same way, our praying involves not just bowing our heads and folding our hands on our own terms, but also submitting ourselves to resonate with the “music” whose meaning is spiritual.
What kind of music is this? Well: one might rightly say ... wind instruments. In both of two very different books of the Bible (John 3:8, Acts 2:2), the Holy Spirit is associated with the wind. Our prayer seeks any and all ways of understanding God, including this one. We do pray to lay specific thanks and specific appeals before him, and we do pray to listen for instruction that we might be able to translate into thought or deed. But then there is this other realm of prayer, perhaps the greatest realm of all. Over and above everything else, our prayer also includes the quiet seeking—in our hearts, in patience and stillness—for a renewed and wordless awareness of which way the wind is blowing.
