by Sharon L. Moe
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A member of the congregation I serve reminds me
to pray as if someone is listening. Our sense of prayer is shaped by our
understanding of God. Does the God to whom we pray hear and respond? Does God
answer all prayer?
God and prayer are mysteries to me. My understanding of the nature of God continues to change and grow as I change and grow. One image of God that shapes prayer for me comes from The Journey Home by Nelle Norton: God as the "Great Listening Ear at the Center of the Universe."
Listening and hearing prayer is part of the very essence of God. God exists to listen. God exists in listening. We are partners with God in the very act of praying.
The Hebrew Scriptures are formative in this understanding of God. Throughout the Old Testament, God is experienced as the one who heard the people’s cries and came to deliver them from captivity.
As a pastor, I know how powerful listening can be when someone is in crisis or despair. Often when a member of the congregation comes to me, their greatest need is for me to listen as their own answers -- their own deliverance -- emerge as they are able to talk and be heard.
Nelle Morton writes of the power of "hearing someone into speech." Being present to someone who is unable to articulate her or his inner thoughts and feelings, and offering gracious, respectful space until the words are shaped and spoken, is a redemptive gift we can give one another. It is an example of how the power of listening can redeem and re-form us.
Thus, the power in prayer is often in the very act of praying. As we speak, believing that we are being heard and allowing the words to emerge from deep inside, we are formed and re-formed. The listening God calls out of us the very best, truest, deepest of who we are, what we care about and what we know.
Prayer, as a lifelong, life-changing endeavor, nurtures our relationships with God. Prayer is a way of aligning ourselves with the ultimate will of God.
Wishes and prayers
Many times as a pastor, and in my personal life, I am drawn to pray for particular needs. Though I don't understand prayer as a means to getting what we want or need, there are times when another's need or my own desperation move me to pray to the wish-granting God of my childhood.
One particular instance came when I was awaiting a letter in response to one I had written. This was an important letter for me, and it didn't come as had been promised. I recall walking to a nearby beach and there, alone on the beach, raising my fist to God and railing at God to deliver. I cried and challenged God to make good on this thing I needed so badly. Emotionally spent, I returned home. There, on the table, was the letter for which I had been waiting.
Another time, however, when I was working as a chaplain on a hospital’s pediatric floors, I met a little girl, Gladys, who was hospitalized with AIDS. She was about 15 months old when I met her but looked much younger. In isolation for her protection, she would lie in her crib crying for hours at a time. Her mother, who also had AIDS, was increasingly unable to be with Gladys.
I grew to love Gladys. She never spoke a word during the six months I knew her, but we played a greeting game. I would come to her crib and say, "Hello, Gladys. Do you remember me?" She would reach out her little index finger and touch my nose. Then I would touch her nose. It was our way of saying hello and goodbye.
Gladys went into crisis at Christmastime and was in the pediatric intensive-care unit when I went home on Christmas vacation. I remember the anguish and anger with which I prayed that last night at the hospital before I flew home:
"God, I want you to heal Gladys! I want you to heal all these babies! Heal them! Be God for them! This isn't a plea, it's a demand. If you are God, heal these poor children."
Gladys was not healed, though she did pull through that Christmastime crisis. She died in the spring. My soul had tried to get God to suspend the natural laws of the universe. My prayers failed.
Demanding justice
But in a way, they didn't. I had to pray for physical healing for Gladys and the others. I needed to expect a response by God. The demands of justice required my demands of God. It had something to do with setting the standard.
Like the prophet Amos, with his plumb line in the midst of the people, the demands of justice in an unjust and oppressive society require a standard.
Amos' prophecies set such a standard: in the best of all possible worlds, he implied, this is the ultimate will of God, and we are capable of living into it. So it was with Gladys. The demands of justice required that someone call out for what she should have had: a life that was healthy, with adequate and nurturing love, and a supportive social system in which the accidents of birth and location did not rob her of hope and a future.
Prayer at its most powerful is a calling out for what should be, the setting of the standard to which we and life itself should strive. Such prayer reminds God and us of what we care about, what we work for, and what should and can be. Such prayer has power, personally and corporately. It reminds us of what God wills and promises, always calling us, with God, toward that will and that promise.
The Rev. Sharon L. Moe is pastor of Temple United Methodist Church in Seattle, Wash. She has been a school of Christian mission study leader.