The Rhythm of Prayer

Last week, I wrote about three 13-year-old students who were trying out for the basketball team at their school.  After an hour of lower-body workouts, their legs were giving out on them, and the students began to fall over.  All three boys were eventually hospitalized with a condition called rhabdomyolysis, or muscle breakdown.  Proteins released by muscle cells begin to clog the kidneys, and urine turns as brown as coffee.

The human personality is comprised of four essential components:  physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.  The fundamental pulse of life is rhythm, or balance, in all four dimensions between activity, or expenditure of energy, and rest, or recovery of energy.  When we fail to respect the natural rhythms of life, we fail to act with our full potential.  In our culture, we tend to assume that we can spend energy indefinitely in some dimensions--the mental and emotional-- and that we can be effective while spending little or no energy in the physical and spiritual dimensions of our person.  Like the 13-year-old students who collapsed physically, we often flatline spiritually.

Both athletes and business entrepreneurs who are successful report that while they are extremely focused, they also build in time for energy renewal.  These people build into their lives rituals that allow them to disengage from their own focused energy expenditure and to renew their energy.  Martin Moore-Ede, a physiologist who has made a study of our circadian rhythms, says this:

At the heart of the problem is a fundamental conflict between the demands of our man-made civilization and the very design of the human brain and body...Our bodies were designed to hunt by day, sleep at night and never travel more than a few dozen miles from sunrise to sunset.  Now we work and play at all hours, whisk off by jet to the far side of the globe, make life or death decisions or place orders on foreign stock exchanges in the wee hours of the morning.  The pace of technological innovation is outstripping the ability of the human race to understand the consequences.  We are machine-centered in our thinking ---focused on the optimization of technology and equipment ---rather than human-centered---focused on the optimization of human alertness and performance.--from The Twenty-Four Hour Society, p.6)

 

Reading The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz has given me some insight into why people often give up on prayer, or at least pray only when they are desperate.  I think maybe when we come to pray, we think we have to expend a lot of energy on prayer, and we fail to realize the part of the ritual of prayer that renews our energy.  So our prayer eventually peters out -- we spend energy; we get nothing back; our spirits slow down and soon stop working altogether.

 

We tend to think of prayer as what we do -- but actually, prayer is simply opening our spirits to God's energy at work in us -- renewing us, strengthening us, guiding us, teaching us.  The original meaning of the word enthusiasm is "God within:"  en-theos.  We fail to sense God's energy, His renewing, strengthening, guiding, teaching action in our lives because we leave out the second part of prayer -- reading Scripture.  So, since we seem to get nothing from our prayer-time, we give up, thinking our efforts quite useless.  In 1604, Dr. John Rainolds, President of Corpus Christi College at Oxford, petitioned King James I for an English translation of the Bible:

 

...the knowledge of God is the water of life...True divinity cannot be learned unless we frame our hearts and minds wholly to it.  The knowledge of God must be learned of God.  We have to use two means, prayer and the reading of the Holy Scriptures, prayer for ourselves to talk with God and reading to hear God talk with us...We must diligently give ourselves to reading and meditation of the Holy Scriptures.

 

If we fail to build into our prayer time the rhythm of reading Scripture, our prayer will soon become weak and stressful, just as our bodies become weak and stressed from over-training and not enough recovery time.  Reading the Scriptures allows God the space to enter our thoughts, our emotions, even our physical bodies.  It is our "recovery time" as whole persons; it is our source of Divine Energy, as well as of Truth. 

 

We do not need to read for information, the way we read other texts; we need to read for inspiration, for listening, for absorbing what it is the Spirit of God wants to teach us.  If we do not know where to begin, we should begin with prayer for direction -- and then trust that we will be shown what we need for each day's demand.