Once upon a time there was a Jewish man named Moses. He lived in Israel and had since the 1960s, not long after the country was formally recognized as a state on the world stage. He was a devout man, orthodox, the sort who wore the black hat and had the sides of his hair hanging down in curls. Every day, for over fifty years, he had gone and prayed at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Rain or shine, hot or cold, he was there, saying his prayers, three times every day. He ran a little restaurant a few blocks away, a business he had started specifically so that he’d have the ability to visit the wall and pray like he wanted. In all his years he’d only missed his prayers a handful of times. A few days in the 90s he had been too sick and in 2012 his wife died and he was too grief stricken to get out of bed for a week. Other than that he was there. He was a beautiful soul, full of devotion, and he kept the commandments as best he could.
Moses prayed for all sorts of things. The normal, banal things that everybody prays for, like health and enough money to live on. But he also prayed for more grand and exotic things, like world peace and an end to hunger around the globe and for cancer to be cured. Sometimes he would write his prayers out in long prose or poetry and place them in the nooks and cracks of the wall like so many other people did. Sure, the janitor the city had hired came by everyday and unceremoniously scraped all those prayers out and dumped them in a garbage bag, and that was a little disheartening sometimes. But ultimately what did it matter? God knew what he had written.
In 2017, some Palestinians launched some rockets from over the border and killed one of Moses’s friends. This made Moses sad. He didn’t hate the Palestinians. He didn’t hate anyone. It was just a thing that happened, and he didn’t know why it should’ve.
Later that year, an evangelical tourist from America came to visit Jerusalem and go on a tour of the holy lands. The tourist’s name was Kevin and he was forty-six, balding, and had a slight pot-belly. Kevin loved Jesus. Kevin also loved the Jews because, to his mind, they were a living link to the religion practiced by all the people in the first two-thirds of his Bible. Kevin came to the Wailing Wall with his camera one day in September and saw Moses there and Kevin was moved by the compassion he saw in the old man’s eyes. In a fit of curiosity Kevin introduced himself after Moses had finished his prayers.
“How long have you been coming to the wall to pray?” Kevin asked
“Fifty-four years.” Moses answered.
“Wow!” Kevin said awestruck. “You must feel very close to God after all that time.”
Moses thought about the mangled body of his friend after the rockets, and all the prayers he’d written and put into the cracks for world peace.
“No.” Moses answered. “Truth be told, I just feel like I’ve been talking to a wall.”
That’s not my story. I heard it long ago and far away in a Baptist church somewhere during a sermon. Baptist ministers are full of such parables. It’s a requirement. There’s is something in the DNA of a Southern Baptist that gives them a predilection for allegory.
The story as the Preacher told it was not meant as a dig a Jews or their beliefs but rather as a commentary on prayer and how one ought to approach it. I use the story likewise. See, lots of people feel like Moses. The world is full of dutiful Catholics who pray their rosary beads every day, rain or shine, in sickness or in health. Catholics who also feel, sometimes, like they’ve been talking to a wall. Prayers go unanswered. Little Suzy doesn’t get better. World peace doesn’t come. Buddhists chant their mantras. Muslims get out their mats and say the Salahs. And, yet, so often these prayers seem not to count for much. And for we Christians this is particularly problematic because Christ has said, “If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.” Matthew 21:22.
What do?
There’s a kind of prayer without faith in it and more often than not it’s the sort of prayer that people approach as a duty. I’ve never liked prescribed prayer, specifically for this reason. I don’t pray the Rosary precisely because so many other Catholics tell me that I should, every day, to make sure I get to heaven. No thank you. I do not want to turn prayer into a chore. When prayer becomes something you feel like ***you*** have to do in order to “get results” you’re not living in faith anymore. ***YOU*** are trying to do it. You’re like a witch or a warlock trying to conjure the reality you desire through your efforts of will. YOU are trying to get yourself into heaven by reciting a set of prayers everyday. YOU are trying to manifest world peace by doing 100 rounds of your mantras along your beads or fifty prostrations upon your mat. You aren’t actually believing God will do it. You’re trying to make it happen by force of will.
“When you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the pagans do, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.”
If you want to pray for world peace, why make it any more complicated than “Hey God, please bring about world peace.” If you want to pray for the healing of little Suzy, why not simply say, “Father, please make Suzy well.” Why do you feel the need to make your prayers ornate and complicated and long? Because you don’t really believe God hears. Because you think that you can force your will to happen by incantation. There’s no belief in such praying. There’s no faith.
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it’s good to sit and chant a prayer, or to say a phrase or a psalm over and over again. I like to sit and chant the Jesus prayer from time to time. But I do so because I enjoy it. Because sitting with God and meditating can be fun. If you enjoy praying the rosary or stopping by the Western Wall three times a day, by all means, have at it! But if you approach it as a duty. As a job. Then, I think, you’ve missed the point. I think you probably don’t believe. I think maybe you’re making your religion more about you and your force of will or your own perceived piety than you are about God. I know because I’ve been guilty of same in the past. It’s an easy trap to fall into. To stand on the street corner and make a big show of your prayers, as Christ said the hypocrites do. Or to make your prayer in Church ornate and showy. Or to even sit alone in your room and to believe that if you just pray hard enough, it will happen. But prayer doesn’t work because you put effort into it. It works because you believe. And, if you’re trying to force it to happen, how much do you believe it?
St. Benedict said that prayer should be brief. I think for this reason. Our Lord likewise, when asked, “teach us to pray” gave us a prayer that can be said in about fifteen seconds. This is because prayer should ideally just be like talking to a friend. You don’t have to work or try to talk to a friend, you just do it. When you approach it like that you find that prayer becomes enjoyable. And then, paradoxically, by keeping it brief you end up doing it all the time.
Good reminder to myself.