Dear Ray,
I want to try again to tell you what happens within me in some of our prayer meetings and table meetings. I have difficulty finding words that are honest without becoming unkind. I know how little I can see of another person’s inward life. Yet I also know that I often leave these meetings carrying an actual pain in my spirit.
Most of the time, I remain silent.
It is not usually because I have no desire to pray. I want to speak. Sometimes a few words are forming within me, something tender and almost too quiet to bring out. I would like to offer them with the saints. But as I listen, I feel an increasing distance between what is happening within me and the conversation taking place around me.
I do not know how to cross that distance without seeming to correct everyone.
So I say nothing.
One difficulty is the vocabulary. Sometimes the expressions seem to me like grandchildren of reality. Perhaps somewhere, in someone’s life, there was a genuine seeing of Christ. Words came from that seeing. Others received the words and repeated them. Then we inherited the repetition.
Now the expressions are familiar to us, though the living recognition that first gave them meaning may be much less familiar.
I say this cautiously because I have done it myself. I have learned how to speak about things I scarcely knew inwardly. I have borrowed another man’s certainty and mistaken my ability to repeat it for something formed within me.
Perhaps that is why the sound troubles me so much. I recognize it.
The words can be entirely correct. They may have a beautiful history. Yet as they pass from one prayer to another, I sometimes feel that we are handling the descendants of something living without having much room to acknowledge our actual condition before the Lord.
I do not need everyone to find new expressions. I would be relieved by a very old expression if it came with the simplicity of someone who was actually there within it. What pains me is the feeling that the language is continuing almost on its own, carrying the meeting forward while something quieter within me has nowhere to go.
Then there is the force of the speaking.
I hesitate here, Ray. I do not want to call a brother pushy when he may believe he is being faithful. But sometimes that is how the prayer reaches me. There are so many words, spoken with such insistence, that I feel pressed upon rather than included.
A concern is introduced and then held before us at length. It returns in another form, then another. I hear an opinion carried into prayer with a certainty I cannot share. Sometimes it seems there is little willingness to leave the matter open, to become quiet, or to allow that the Lord’s movement among us might take us somewhere we had not intended.
I may be misunderstanding the brother. What I experience, though, is a kind of stubbornness around the subject. The prayer seems determined to arrive at its own conclusion.
And I find myself wondering what I am being asked to join.
Am I joining a prayer, or agreeing with someone’s interpretation? Is there room for me to be uncertain? Can I remain inwardly honest if I cannot follow the direction being pressed upon us?
I do not wish to argue in a prayer meeting. I do not want my prayer to become a reply to someone else’s prayer. The thought of our addressing one another through words supposedly offered to the Lord makes me deeply uncomfortable.
So again, I am quiet.
But beneath the vocabulary and the forcefulness is something more difficult to describe.
Sometimes the whole movement of the prayer seems to place God outside us.
We are here, with our needs, our requests, our explanations. The Father and the Son are somewhere else, listening. We speak toward Them. We ask Them to come, to draw near, to give us something of life, as though the distance between us were still the basic condition of our relationship.
I know those prayers may contain sincere love. I have prayed them myself. I am not questioning whether the Father hears His children.
But I hardly know how to express the chasm I feel between that picture and the communion already given to us in Christ.
We have been brought into Him. His divine life is ours. We are not standing outside the life of God, trying to make ourselves heard within it.
When I become quiet enough to recognize what is already true, prayer sometimes seems to arise within that belonging. The Son’s love for the Father is not something I must manufacture. His communion with the Father is living within the life He has given us. There may be words, but I do not feel that I am sending them across a distance. I am within a relationship that existed before I spoke.
I remain myself. I still have needs. I can ask, give thanks, weep, or say, “Father.” Yet all of this belongs within the union already ours.
I do not mean that every inward feeling is the prayer of the Son, or that whatever occurs to me must be divine. I know how easily my own thoughts enter everything. But I am trying to describe the difference between composing a prayer toward God as someone elsewhere and allowing my words to arise within the communion of the Father and the Son.
To me, that difference is immense.
And when the meeting seems to proceed entirely from the first picture, I struggle to find a way to express the second.
Anything I might say feels as though it would require an explanation. But I have not come to explain prayer. I have come wanting to pray.
At the table meeting, this becomes especially painful. The bread and the cup are before us. We are remembering the Lord who gave Himself for us, whose life is now our life. I want to give thanks from within that nearness, within our being together in Him.
Sometimes I have only a few words.
Then a brother begins, and the words continue. Another follows with equal force. A familiar subject takes hold of the meeting. I wait, thinking there may be a small opening when the prayer has finished. But the next voice begins almost immediately.
After a while, I stop preparing to speak.
I remain seated with what is in me, and it begins to ache.
I do not think anyone intends to exclude me. Perhaps no one notices. Outwardly, I am simply a quiet brother in the meeting. But inwardly I have been listening, waiting, drawing back, trying again, and finally becoming still in a way that is no longer restful.
It is the stillness of having nowhere I can find to enter.
I wonder whether others feel this too. Whether there are prayers among us that never become audible because they cannot compete with the strength and length of what is already being said. I cannot know. I only know how often I want to speak and remain silent.
Who can find space for a small prayer when every opening seems already occupied?
I do not mean that prayer within the Father and the Son must always be quiet, brief, or without strong feeling. I would not want to turn my own temperament into a rule for the saints. But surely there can be room for tenderness that does not announce itself forcefully. Surely a few words do not need to push their way into our fellowship to belong there.
I find myself grieving for that room.
Then I become ashamed of the grief. I wonder whether I am too sensitive, too critical, too attached to my own understanding. Perhaps I am waiting for a perfect opening that no meeting could provide. Perhaps fear of being misunderstood has made me less available than I want to admit.
I need help with those possibilities. I do not want to make my pain proof that I am right.
Yet neither can I keep treating the pain as proof that I am wrong.
Christ has not ceased to be my life because a meeting troubles me. Our union has not failed because I cannot make myself comfortable with every expression. But I came hoping to share that life with the saints, and sometimes I leave feeling that I have kept almost everything within me unspoken.
That is the sorrow I am trying to tell you about.
I still love these brothers and sisters. I still want to hear them. I want to be surprised by the Lord in someone whose manner is very different from mine. I do not want to become so guarded that I can receive Him only in a voice that resembles my own.
But I also long to sit among the saints without feeling that prayer must press, explain, insist, and occupy every available moment.
I long for us to have room to recognize where we already are.
Within Him. Together in the life of the Son. Loved by the Father before we begin.
Perhaps then the words could come without so much effort. Perhaps there could also be a little silence that no one needed to fill.
And perhaps, in that room, I could finally offer the few words I have been holding.
Your brother,
Brent
Continue reading
A Prayer I Am Only Beginning to Learn — A letter on quietness and the communion we share in the Son.
When the Gesture Replaces the Presence — An essay on familiar expressions and the living reality they are meant to convey.
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