Prayer and Failure

How should I pray? What does it mean to pray? And who is this God who I pray to? In taking up a practice of meditation, I’ve come to a certain understanding of prayer. It does not have to do with holding anything intensely in thought or trying to say the right words in a prayer. Instead, it can only be described as a movement towards trust, while at the same time a reminder of how difficult it is to trust a God who we follow into an unknown and difficult future over which we have such little control.

The practice of meditation which I have adopted is largely influenced by John Main, a Catholic priest who founded a Christian community in Quebec. This meditation is very simple. It involves sitting upright, ensuring a relatively straight spine. The whole of the meditation then consists of repeating a mantra, attempting to do so over and over again through the whole period of meditation. Common mantras are “maranatha” or “shalom”. Father John suggests between 20 minutes and half an hour set aside for meditation.

The goal of the mantra is to empty our minds for the awareness and presence of God to emerge from within. But this is not a forceful or violent forcing of our regular thoughts out of our overly-active minds. It is rather gentle, trusting, and patient. And this is how it becomes prayer: when thoughts arise, as they inevitably do, in the midst of our meditation, we simply imagine our repeated mantra as “touching” or gentling “pushing” those thoughts. So often when we sit in silence those things about which we are anxious or afraid come swimming to the surface. We begin thinking about our own flaws, about people who frustrate us, about those things in our lives which deserve attention like world disasters, human conflict, and all sorts of things. But by “touching” those thoughts with the mantra, we then create the space for God, for love, for peace to overcome such thoughts. Whatever our thoughts, be they joyful, shameful, angry, or even peaceful, we set them in the context of the love of God. But we let them all go, even those positive feels of peace and love, because so quickly anything can become an idol, especially God’s good gifts. By letting it all go in the repetition of our mantra we move further and further towards trust in God, a God who we don’t know, but a God in whom we trust. Just as the psalmist says in psalm 73: ^“25 Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. ²⁶ My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”

In fact, we even let go of our own ideas of God as love and our hope for peace and love to emerge in meditation. It all must be relinquished in the name of trust, trust which is the only way into the fullness of life which we witness in the life of Jesus. Of course, the goal is not to eliminate one’s self, but to really let one’s true self emerge, to let God emerge, and which both emerge, in fact, simultaneously. And the beauty of this is found in that we are supposed to let it all go in meditation; even our frustration at ourselves when we can’t let our thoughts, anxieties and worries go! It is all a movement of gentleness and love, even in the inevitable failure that even the most practiced and holy meditators undergo.

Jesus himself, in the garden of Gethsemane, failed to fully keep every anxious thought from him; he was just as terrified and scared of death as anyone. But that failure to empty himself did not become cause for anger and frustration at himself, but instead became just another opportunity for trust. And so Jesus, through failure to fully trust God, used that very failure as the ideal place to trust God, the very place in which he was able to truly empty himself and allow the union of God and human to make its full manifestation.

So we need not let our failures or discouragements in meditation, or even in life, be cause for absolute despair and anger with ourselves. By following Jesus we can see failure as the very place in which we have the opportunity for the union of God and self to take place. This, I think, is the beauty of prayer and the beauty of failure.