Copyright: This article is reprinted on the Lift Up Your Hearts web site http://www.worship.ca/ with the permission of Praying (July/August, 1995) where it first appeared.

Pneuma is a journal on spiritual direction and formation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada.

You talk about "street spirituality" in your latest book, "Seeds of Sensitivity." What is it?

Living a prayerful life and living everyday life are one and the same thing. Beyond the classic tension between our prayer and our action, there is that place where God becomes as real as the joys and sorrows we face every single day. All of a sudden we begin to see that prayer and action are truly one, when we are sensitive to God's presence in our lives. I call that "street spirituality."

Street spirituality is nothing more nor less than a deep sensitivity to God in our life. If our prayer life is centred on some romantic or otherworldly notion, then it ceases to be the kind of spirituality Jesus and his followers modelled for us. Their spirituality was street spirituality. It was not beyond this world. It involved solidarity with one another and solidarity with the joys and struggles of our life right here and right now.

On one side of this street, we have the problem of undisciplined activism, too much involvement in the daily grind and struggles, activity that does not have enough prayer at the source. This leads to burnout or perhaps to compassion fatigue. We fail to see what we need to take into our hands and what we need to leave in God's hands. So we then take on too much. Life becomes very difficult. Prayer nurtures us even in difficult situations; even in desolation there is consolation, as Saint Ignatius said. Prayer can be a real help in the specific situations that make our lives difficult, but, in addition, prayer can provide balance.

We need to recognize that the equation that balances prayer and action for each one of us depends on our life style, on our personality, and even on our particular time in life. Your prayer changes as you move through those changes life brings to us all. What the just-right blend is for us is always in flux. It is dynamic. People who have a rich sense of God in their life in one stage of development might lose it in another. If they haven' t moved along through greyness or darkness of transition, they often feel unfulfilled in their prayer lives.

On the other side of the street, there is another problem. It's been labelled "quietism." If our spirituality is not at all connected to real life, then the danger is prayer that is disembodied and irrelevant. Prayer is good. Prayer is something we are attracted to. A reality check, however, will show that we talk more about prayer than we really involve ourselves in it. One of the reasons we resist true prayer is that, once we have that good unitive experience that prayer brings us, then that experience impels us to act or serve, not to hang back. Our prayer leads us to engage in efforts that are difficult, controversial, or problematic.

We begin to realize the difference between peace and comfort. Sometimes I will not pray other than in a very formulaic way because I am really inappropriately frightened of what God might call me to do. I say inappropriately because with every true call comes the grace to follow through on that call.

Prayer can be dangerous! Is that what you mean?

Yes. The bottom line is we cannot control prayer. Prayer is a relationship. We shouldn' t control it, after all, because we are not God. Here's a way of defining prayer that we don' t often hear. The writer George Sand once said: "Wisdom teaches us to see something outside ourselves that is greater than what is within us, and then gradually, through contemplation and admiration, we come to resemble it." That's a good definition of what prayer and spirituality help us to do, I think, to come to resemble what we admire. Our young people especially need heroes these days, people who are human but who have grappled with what it means to seek out and discern ideals and then respond to those ideals in generosity. Prayer helps us become like our heroes.

We can even think of ourselves as heroes, especially in the context of prayer and God. One of the greatest ways we can honour God is by believing, really believing, that we are, after all, made in the image and likeness of God. When we honour this belief, then we can look at ourselves as a work of art. What is this work of art? How can I allow this work of art to come alive? I want to recreate the conditions in this work of art that exist or existed in my heroes. When we look in the mirror, we need to ask in what ways have we perhaps defaced this piece of art.

I am not talking here about shame, saying that I am worthless. But rather about guilt that accomplishes a good purpose. It is saying: I have done something wrong. We honour God by doing that, by not putting ourselves down, by believing in our God-given worth in spite of our failings. I call guilt of this kind prophetic guilt, and it can be a very vibrant, important part of our prayer, I think.

Love can help us continue doing things that are right. Loves takes the place of guilt, when that guilt is prophetic. Spirituality is all about generosity. We can get involved in generous actions even before we feel generous. "Fake it until you make it," as they say in 12-Step groups. This is another way of breaking through our image of ourselves which is too narrow, too ungenerous in its own right. God is much more generous to us than we are to ourselves. That's a fact!

In my book, among other things I wanted to examine the real, concrete reasons why people do not pray. Thomas Merton said that we are always in over our heads in prayer. If you are looking for a path to God, he said, it is often like looking for a path in untrodden snow. Walk across the snow, and there's your path. No one can give us a map. Our terrain is unique. We don' t like that. We want someone to show us what to do. But the simple fact is that you need to pray and then see what happens.

Here's the dynamic. You decide to pray. At first, you feel lost, foolish. You feel cold, indifferent, nothing is happening. Well, that's all part of prayer. But then things start to happen. We notice that something that has previously been very difficult for us has now become somewhat easier or has become a means for achieving growth and wisdom in our life. Of course, new problems come along that we have to deal with. They are never really solved through prayer. Usually what happens is that we outgrow them.

What are some other impediments to good praying that you hear from people?

People tell me sometimes that prayer is boring. That's only because we leave what is real, what is immediate, what is important, what is urgent in our lives completely out of it. We leave behind our anger, our sexuality, our annoyances. We are not concrete and specific enough. That's where our life is, in these gripes, in these annoying situations, in these problems that confront us every day. If you want your prayer to be more passionate, bring that prayer right to where your life is, no matter how unromantic, prosaic, trivial, or painful these things seem.

That's one part of the boredom issue. The other is that what often looks likes boredom really is not. It is just the reality that we often have to meet God in the void, when things are quiet, at an impasse. We are stuck. We can' t go forward or backward. At that very moment, God can touch us in ways that we can' t be touched when we are vibrant, absorbed, energetic, flying off in a dozen different directions.

Another reason we don' t pray is that in prayer we don' t see results in usual ways. We have an expectation of immediate return. Alcohol and drugs are addictive because they produce a desired result right away. They also, of course, produce an undesirable result. There's a real trade-off. With prayer, what happens may not match your expectations. What happens in prayer you may not fully understand, or want, or even see right away. Someone once said, "When I pray, I don' t often see obvious results. But, when I stop praying, then a lot of good things stop happening. That I know." I think we feel that prayer is worthless in our lives because our concrete actions don' t produce quick results. Prayer is a source of conversion and transformation. It is a way to really experience in your guts what it's like to be a child of God. But it is not magic. It won' t remove obstacles in the blink of an eye.

Prayer changes our attitude, which then changes the world -- at least our world. "Face reality, and change will take place," according to an ancient Zen saying. When we face the reality of God in ourselves, change takes place almost without our efforts coming into play at all. But we need to be awake. We need a sense of patience. We need to recognize that we are often stubborn and greedy.

Here's another thing that happens in prayer. Often we make excuses for God because we don' t want to face our real doubt that God exists, that prayer to God is finally a waste of time because no one is there on the other end. But that's exactly one of the things we should face in prayer. Thomas Merton said that, along with deep faith, comes deep doubt, as sure as rain. So give up the business of suppressing that doubt. There is nothing that needs to be left out of prayer.

Now you are talking about impediments to good prayer, aren' t you?

Yes, sometimes even though we stick with it, in our hearts we don' t feel our prayer is very deep or rich. I have identified some impediments to deepening our prayer in my book. For example, in prayer we often feel very lost because our notion of God is very vague. We don' t have a good sense of the history of relationships between God and the human person found in our scripture. Our prayer life is going to be a limp affair if there is an absence of grappling with sacred scriptures. Without the scriptures, our prayer life becomes unanchored. Even with the scriptures, if we are too intellectual about them, we are unattached to that history of humans talking with God. We need to wrestle with those scriptures. Scripture can really challenge us when we do that. When we encounter scripture with sensitivity and energy, the persons in the stories become friends whom we can almost talk with, and themes from the Bible become places for us to reflect on our way of living. This results in a change in our prayer and in our life.

The great theologian Karl Barth said, "When we ask what scripture is saying to us, often the scripture asks back: Who is it that is asking?" There is a real sense of encounter there. You can understand when people have reached a certain level in their prayer, when they have a deep desire to sit down with scripture, the gospels, or psalms and really be there with them. That urge is not only a grace from God but a grace whose time has come. A sad thing occurs when we don' t take up that challenge. Prayer does not replace scripture. Our prayer is really a new page of scripture. Scripture is dynamic. As long as I am in the dynamic with it, bringing real problems, dilemmas from my life to it, then I am actually contributing to this history of relationships between God and human.

We often forget that the basis of prayer is an attitude of love. God's love for us is a key part. Contemplation is a gift first and foremost, a gift of love. We feel that prayer is just a technique, everything will fall into place, and that God will have to respond to me if I have set up the techniques right. But the reality is that love is what drives prayer. We bring our love to God. God responds in love. Love opens up possibilities. Gertrud Mueller Nelson says in her book, Here All Dwell Free, that romantic love is not an aberration, "it is heady stuff that launches ships and makes the world go around. It is a powerful taste of the divine as we experience it in one another; it is also the necessary vision that allows one to be crazy and daring enough to make a commitment."

That sense of fire in the belly, of passion, is really what this love is about. In many cases, our prayer is largely just formulas. It is a copy of life rather than a real relationship. Love is the basic prescription for a prayer life that is limping or ill. Prayer comes alive when we are dancing to the same music God is moving to. Where is your excitement? Where is your passion? In our overwhelmed and discouraged world, the answers to these questions involve hope. Passion and commitment can produce great things. We are in the midst of a culture filled with depression. Recognize there is hope based on relationship with God, not taking you away from the world, but getting you deeper into it.

Another reason folks don' t pray well is tied to the excessive need in our society to be in control. Opening ourselves to the Spirit in prayer involves the risk of surrendering control. In fact, a sensitive prayer life is like a relationship with a good psychotherapist. In psychotherapy patients risk interacting with someone who doesn' t fit the pattern of other people in their lives. That person is rigorously honest, yet not hurtful. That person is generous, but does not fawn over you, firm but does not reject you. What happens in psychotherapy is that the therapist is actually a loose cannon in our psyche. We can' t control or easily define that person. As a result,we have to look at our own projections. It's the same with God. If we can deal with the resistance to God we have because we are frightened of what we cannot control, then all of a sudden wonders can take place. God can reveal to us possibilities we never saw before. Our prayer life can be a gentle place where we can deal with very difficult things.

Is prayer just one more thing we have to work at in our achievement-oriented world?

Life is not always easy, but then it's not just comprised of the difficult either. There are some who have great difficulty letting go and enjoying. In the Jewish Talmud, it says God will hold us responsible for all the things we didn' t enjoy. In prayer we begin to appreciate the ebb and flow of life by looking at everything with a sense of wonder and awe. Prayer is a wonderful way of maturing and growing. It is also surprising. Surprises can be stressful. In prayer we are supported but thrown off balance at the same time. We are thrown off balance often because we try to stop God, when in fact there is no need to stop. In trying to stop inappropriately we throw ourselves off balance. If we kept moving forward, we wouldn' t feel off balance.

Another reason we resist prayer in silence and solitude is that we do not want to challenge our own shame. We don' t want to see some things about ourselves. Prayer is frightening. Paul Tillich said, "If you' ve never run away from God, I wonder about your God." Metropolitan Anthony Bloom described the meeting with God as like entering the cave of a tiger. Psychologically, when we sit in silence and solitude, we clear out our consciousness and create a vacuum. Often when we do that, we then confront, right off the bat, our shame, our lies, our betrayals, our failures. We don' t see ourselves in the best light. When we think about it, though, seeing yourself in the best light is only seeing part of the picture. But if we stay with the prayer, keep at it, then we begin to see the whole picture. A greater freedom and possibility for real passion are then increased. Truth sets us free.

Praying often means we have to give up our attachments, our "friends." The attachments we have are subtle. We may be angry in certain situations and not want to see our role in it. We may be somewhat overweight and not notice our attachment to food. Recognize these friends for what they are. Walk in honesty. In your prayer try to confess as many of these things as you can, even if at that moment you don' t want to get rid of them.

We say, "Oh God, I want to be naked before you, but I certainly don' t want to give up my toot on the bottle every night." "I hate this person I have to work with. I don' t want to give it up, but here it is anyway." These attachments hold us back because for every attachment that has a hold on us, to that extent we remain hidden from God. We use up energy on these attachments that could be used being open, available, and growing in God's sight.

The last obstacle to good prayer is the lack of connection with daily activities and challenges. Making prayer an actual part of daily life is most important. If folks really saw that prayer is like breathing, eating, or talking, that it is not something extra, that it is part and parcel of a human life, then it would be easier to make prayer a daily encounter. To forget our time alone with God every day is to court the misfortune of a life out of balance.

The dedication to balancing quiet reflection, involvement, and action that we call prayer will help us accept the contradictions and mystery of living out a street spirituality today. Such a commitment to prayer and action in the midst of so much confusion and darkness as we have today can be a heroic act. It can also lead us to experience the promise Jesus made to us long ago, "I shall not leave you orphans; I shall come to you." What more can we ask?