The listening kind of prayer

I think we may be talking to God too much. It's not the quantity that concerns me, or even the quality necessarily, but the ratio of talking to listening. My sons are part of a church club that is harmless enough, and possibly even helpful, encouraging them as it does to memorize Scripture. We were riding in my truck the other day when my 6-year-old popped in a CD from the club. On it a man explained that the Bible is God's way of talking to us, while prayer is our way of talking to God.

I can't bear the presence of those pedantic types who like to seize on the shape of a single leaf and use it to justify razing the entire forest. This is probably because I am prone to precisely such behavior. So I am proud to say I didn't throw the CD out the window. It keeps us on our toes as parents, I suppose, to be constantly vigilant about correcting doctrinal errors that pour forth from church and para-church sources. I kept this in mind as I stopped the instructional CD for a quick corrective lesson: me trying not to sound like the pedantic parent, and my sons probably wondering why Dad has an editorial about everything.

This is all by way of saying that I couldn't help but think, listening to this suggestion that the Bible is God's primary instrument for communicating with us, while prayer is primarily an instrument for us to speak to him, how disastrously wrongheaded it is, how it misconstrues Scripture and early Church teaching, how it encourages the American Christian culture of yapping, yapping, yapping at God, of keeping him safely contained in the Bible box, of making him the perfectly quiet mate in our narcissistic me-and-Jesus relationship.

Maybe it's because we have become conditioned to hate the quiet, surrounded as we are by radio and television chatter. Or perhaps it's that we can't imagine there are times when God doesn't care to hear our requests and complaints, or our marble-tongued efforts to praise him. On this last, I was chuckling with a friend recently about how spontaneous prayers might sound if the word "just" were suddenly excluded from our vocabulary. Lord, we just thank you for this day, and, uh, we just thank you for this fellowship, and we, um, just praise you Lord. ... A little quiet praise from the heart might be a welcome change in heaven.

Maybe the reason prayer is so often filled with our words is because it's difficult to accept that sometimes God simply wants us to be still, to be quiet, to know He is God. "My soul," wrote David, "waits in silence for God only. ..." Be still, God says, and know.

This knowing, this resting in an abundant knowledge that is greater than we can articulate, does not come to completion from our talking it out, or even from reading our Bibles. In prayer we can commune-if we would just shut up for a time-with the living God. This is a knowing beyond intellectualism, and it is in its own way rightfully frightening, which is perhaps why we talk too much and listen too little.