Jesus' practice of withdrawing for prayer is in seamless continuity with his prophetic mission to unmask the hypocrisy of those who were in leadership in society, the blind guides who were leading the people towards the precipice of destruction. Prayer deals with those politics and the politics of our own souls. It is not just 'them' - that's the biggest lie of them all, and the commonest. It is ourselves; we are adept at self deception. Our motives are not obvious and they are seldom pure. To pray is to embark on the arduous task of learning with Christ to tell the difference between the truth of our own hearts indwelt by the Spirit, and the lies we tell ourselves to avoid facing who we are and what we are called to be and to do. The scriptures speak of Satan disguising himself as an angel of light, a mythic way of referring to the political dynamic of camouflage and deception that permeates all human societies and our own individual hearts which are miniature versions of society.
It is simplistic to 'pray for guidance,' as if God will simply put a message into our heads about who to be and what to do, saving us from the trouble of doing the work of discernment. Praying is the work of 'discernment of spirits,' the work of paying attention to our impulses and dreams and fears, listening to them long enough and unfolding them painstakingly enough for us to recognize what is genuine and what is phony.
Take discontentment: we have these feelings of dissatisfaction, voices that murmur "Surely, this can't be all there is? There must be more to this relationship, this job, this life than this?" We can smother these feelings or we can listen to them. We can risk sitting with them with God, and take the risk of asking what they mean. We don't know what they mean, and we can't look it up in a book. Prayer is taking the risk of finding a meaning that we hadn't bargained for and might not necessarily welcome at first.
We might be surprised to discover through sitting in prayer that our inarticulate dissatisfaction is nothing less than the Spirit praying within us, subverting the status quo, prodding us to hunger and thirst for fullness of life, getting us to extricate ourselves from compromise and shallowness. Our discontent is divine discontent, passion breaking through.
Or we might find out that our feelings of discontentment are the whining of the ego. When the sense of entitlement has been unmasked, we can go on to ask God about what it means to discover contentment with what we are given, the start of a journey of repentance that involves not only the practice of gratitude and acceptance but also the readiness of discover the depths that are hidden beneath the surface of ordinary things.
Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is on the staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
