For my birthday, amongst other things my brother sent me a pack of Harry Potter colouring postcards. Following the explosion of the trend for adult colouring books, these postcards are the perfect size to colour in roughly 20 minutes. Now I’ve not before really got stuck into adult colouring, despite having a lovely book to use. It seems a waste of time to do just on its own, and I rarely watch TV anymore, which would be an ideal time to multitask colouring and watching. But recently it has become the perfect way to help me pray.
Strange you may think, Harry Potter and prayer! For as long as I can remember I have prayed using words. I speak my prayers; I use words to say what I am thinking, feeling and asking. Even in times of silent prayer I form the words silently with my lips. But for this season of time I find myself no longer able to pray in words, or even think coherently about what to pray. I have plenty to say still, I just can’t think of how to say it!
During my first chapel service here at Duke Divinity School, the new Dean in her talk said that each of us would reach a point during the year when we were unable to pray using words anymore. And she was right! This term two of my classes have been ‘The Interpretation of the Old Testament;’ and ‘Christian Theology’. I read complicated books by Barth, Augustine, Aquinas, Tanner and other people whose names have been lost in the murkiness of my mind. I think through questions about faith, prayer, the sources of the Old Testament books, and so many other topics each week that the questions roll around, getting jumbled up, getting squashed in. They ask questions that tackle the very core of the Christian faith and the Bible, and re-open previous issues with God that I thought I had sorted, or at least buried. So by the time it comes to actually praying I have no thoughts left, no mental energy to think about what to pray, uncertainty about the language to use or the reason behind why I am praying.
My friend Brooke and I were chatting about this today, describing how it feels. It’s like the experiences we have each day and the way in which we used to pray begins to spread through our bodies, but as it moves upwards through our heart it slows and stops around our collarbones. It hits a wall…a wall of questions and thoughts. It feels tight and fragile, and in the uncertainty no words come out.
Another friend described it like this….every day whilst studying you take your precious vibrant pulsing heart (and in this analogy the heart is both the centre of thinking and feeling) and place it on the table, exposing it to new ideas and experiences. During the day it is smashed repeatedly with a hammer, and by the end of the day as you gather the pieces up and try to put them back together, they don’t quite fit. But you ease it back inside you anyway, and the next day you begin again.
Studying theology, I have discovered, is a difficult thing to do. It is not abstract or removed from my everyday living and relationship with God. It’s like jumping from lily pad to lily pad in a water park…. you stand there wobbling for a while, and then take the next leap. The lily pad is never still and safe, and always there is the possibility that you will fall off. It strikes me that whilst we often put professors in a category of clever people who think deep thoughts and write books and give answers, actually they are in just as vulnerable a position, tackling topics that no one else has, wrestling with questions that have stumped previous generations, and all the while holding a tension between their questions and their personal practice of faith. How they do it I have no idea!
So with no words left I have started praying just by being still and quiet for 20 minutes. Whilst colouring my mind is aimless, it does not think thoughts, it just sits. And although to my mind this doesn’t feel like proper prayer, it is simply a new way for me, and I trust that whilst I intentionally sit there in the LORD’s presence, my prayers are just as much known as when I could speak them aloud.
fromdurhamtodurham 