"How is your prayer?" A simple question with big impact (A Guest Post)
Photo by Amaury Gutierrez on Unsplash
I am delighted to welcome the Rev'd Mike Marsh, Episcopal priest and spiritual director, to the Backstory Preaching team. Mike has a particular interest in the desert and monastic traditions, Eastern Orthodoxy, contemplative and mystical spirituality, how they influence and support preachers and their sermons. Prior to graduating in 2003 from the University of the South, Sewanee, TN, with his M.Div., Mike was a trial lawyer for fifteen years. He has served as Rector of St. Philip's Episcopal Church, Uvalde, Texas, since 2005.
I no longer remember what had me so upset, but I was, and I was telling my spiritual director all about it. I was telling him what had been said, what had been done, and how it all affected me.
He interrupted me with a question. “How’s your prayer life?”
“I don’t want to talk about my prayer life,” I said, “I want to talk about my life and what happened.”
As soon as those words left my mouth, I knew that probably was not my best answer - and the look on his face confirmed it - but I continued on. He interrupted me again with the same question, and I still continued on.
“Just answer my question,” he said, “and I won’t interrupt again.”
I told him, “It’s not very good right now.”
“I already knew that,” he said.
Then we began the conversation about what was really going on.
“As my prayer goes, so goes everything else. ”
Prayer as Backstory
His question has remained with me. It’s one I continue to ask myself and others for whom I serve as a spiritual director. Over the years I have discovered again and again that prayer, the interior life, is the backstory to my life, marriage, parenting, ministry, teaching, preaching. As my prayer goes, so goes everything else.
Theophan the Recluse, a 19th century Russian saint, puts it like this:
“Let me recall a wise custom of the ancient Holy Fathers: when greeting each other, they did not ask about health or anything else, but rather about prayer, saying, ‘How is your prayer?’ The activity of prayer was considered by them to be a sign of the spiritual life, and they called it the breath of the spirit. If the body has breath, it lives; if breathing stops, life comes to an end. So it is with the spirit. If there is prayer, the soul lives; without prayer, there is no spiritual life.” (“Homily One,” Four Homilies on Prayer)
And for us as preachers, I would add that without a spiritual life there is no preaching.
Without a spiritual life there is no breath by which the Word can become flesh in either the preacher or the listener.
Instead of “speak[ing] as persons of sincerity, as persons sent from God and standing in his presence,” we become “peddlers of God’s word” (2 Corinthians 2:17).
Effective, transformative, and relevant preaching begins with one’s own inner work.
“You cannot cure the soul of others or help people without having changed yourself. You cannot put in order the spiritual economy of others, so long as there is chaos in your own soul. You cannot bring peace to others if you do not have it yourself.”[1]
We can offer only what we have.
We can take others only to the places we have been or are willing to go.
If we are not doing our own interior work we have no credibility or right to ask others to do their interior work.
We must, as Lisa often reminds us, “be good news to preach good news.”
Prayer as Invitation to More Life
“How is your prayer?”
For me that question is about more than the words I speak to God or the particular time I spend in prayer.
I hear it as an invitation to self-reflection and a call to the spiritual practices that form my life in the likeness of God. It resonates with my deeper longing for life and more life. And isn’t that what we are offering those God has entrusted to our care?
That deeper longing for life and more life is, I think, what took St. Antony, and the women and men after him, to the desert. The desert was a school in which they studied what it means to be human and discovered a deeper meaning of human existence. That’s why I think they have something to teach preachers.
They didn’t preach sermons and they didn’t teach homiletics, they practiced life.
I am more and more convinced that ordinary everyday life is our primary spiritual practice, the raw material God uses to heal and transform us, and the most authentic place from which we can preach.
In one of the desert sayings, Abba Agathon deals with “a small green pea on the road.”
What in the world does that have to do with life, preaching, or you and me?
[1] Alexander Elchaninov, The Diary of a Russian Priest (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001). 218.