Prayer and Surrender

Moses was persistent in prayer. With help.

In our first reading, the key to Israel’s victory is Moses’s persistence in prayer, with assistance when he grew weary. In our second reading, Paul tells Timothy to be persistent. In our Gospel, Jesus says to pray always. If a corrupt judge would eventually concede to the plea of a persistent widow, how much more can we trust our loving Father.
 
What does it mean to pray persistently? What’s the right way to understand Jesus’s analogy? Are we nagging God, like a toddler who can’t take no for an answer? Are we a pebble in God’s shoe, annoying him until he stops to deal with us?

That doesn’t feel quite right, does it?
 
There’s a corny old joke that suggests a better answer. A man dies and finds himself at the pearly gates. Saint Peter congratulates him on having led a good life but says “before I can let you in, do you know the password?” The man says “Jesus Christ is Lord!” Peter replies, “that’s true and it’s important, but that’s not the password.” The man says “Ok, how about John 3:16: for God so loved the word, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” St Peter says “yeah, that’s the good stuff, but it’s not the password.” The man is getting a little frustrated. He throws up his hands and says “I give up! I surrender!” Peter relaxes and says “that’s it! you’re in!”
 
Surrendering to the Lord unlocks prayer and spiritual growth. God loves us, with mercy and grace, and we don’t need to fear surrendering to him. And yet for strange tragic reasons, we find surrendering difficult.
 
The priest who I heard tell that joke, Father Douglas McKay, worked for twenty years with addicts at Our House Ministries, an addiction and recovery program in South Philly. It’s interesting that a priest who works in a place like that tells jokes. It’s interesting that the addicted are sometimes so close to the kingdom of God, that the broken-hearted find it easier to surrender. Perhaps the poor in spirit are blessed because when you’ve had the pretenses kicked out of you, it’s easier to drop the façade of self-sufficiency.
 
Maybe that’s why the widow in today’s Gospel is so persistent – she represents all of us. Every human being is actually humble and dependent, but it’s easier to admit it when we’re at the bottom of the totem pole.
 
Meanwhile, with all the demands of middle class life, churning through our to-do lists, it’s easy to forget this hard-won lesson. We often have just enough competence to pretend. Until suffering rips the mask off, we’re too anxious or too proud to surrender, perhaps frightened that God’s love can’t be trusted. We’d much rather haggle with God and each other, as if we could emerge the winners. The poet Malcom Guite points out that while we pray “thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,” we tend to demand a juicy portion of power and glory for ourselves.

We know the temptation to justify and embellish, to place ourselves in the right light, to make ourselves the main character. We know the temptation to righteous fantasy, to spin a situation in a way that blames everyone else, never our own crooked heart. It’s that kind of self-service which needs to be renounced daily, because it’s a substitute for relying on God.

Marc Foley is a Carmelite who laughs at himself for those times he catches himself “spending $100 of emotional energy on a ten-cent issue,” those times he’s fought and won an argument, but lost the peace in his soul; of having been right on the surface, but wrong on the deeper things.
 
Surrendering doesn’t mean being a doormat, open to abuse. It doesn’t mean that we deny our suffering, our feelings, our frustrations. It doesn't mean we yield our hunger for justice.
 
But surrendering does mean to stop letting pride take the lead, to stop feeding the beast. Surrendering means taking a breath, digging deep, and conceding ‘thy will, not mine, be done.’ Surrendering means fighting to stay in that place of self-abandonment, of being ready to trust God's way, not ours, even when it hurts, even when we’re feeling dry.
 
Clement XI was an eighteenth century pope who wrote a beautiful prayer, inspiring us to exchange our vices for God’s virtues: we give him pride, he gives us humility. We give him sensuality, he gives us simplicity. We give him vanity, he gives us modesty. We give him greed, he gives us generosity. We give him anger, he gives us gentleness. We give him our sluggishness, he gives us burning hearts. We give him stony hearts, he gives us soft and open hearts. We give him our longing, he gives us his Presence. This is conversion. This is surrender.

To pray persistently - to seek God day by day, to mature in Christ - means moment by moment asking for this exchange of his will for ours. This is hard for proud, busy, wounded people. But God loves us! He wants to live in us. How many relationships could be healed, how many conversions could occur, how much happiness could be unlocked, if, in the quietness and loneliness of our hearts, we asked for the grace to surrender and do it his way, to be reconfigured until we're able to live his way. He is always there, never absent, and each day, the graces flow when we surrender. We are fully alive when we embrace our dependence.
 
Elizabeth Ward has been called the poet laureate of domestic life. She was a mom and a wife, and she once wrote:

A good book. Short. Recommended.

See, I am cumbered, Lord, 
With serving, and with small vexatious things. 
Upstairs, and down, my feet 
Must hasten, sure and fleet. 
So weary that I cannot heed Thy word; 
So tired, I cannot now mount up with wings. 
I wrestle -- how I wrestle! -- through the hours. 
Nay, not with principalities, nor powers -- 
Dark spiritual foes of God's and man's -- 
But with antagonistic pots and pans: 
With footmarks in the hall, 
With smears upon the wall, 
With doubtful ears, and small unwashen hands, 
And with a babe's innumerable demands. 

I toil with feverish haste, while tear-drops glisten, 

(O, child of mine, be still. And listen -- listen!) 

At last, I laid aside 
Important work, no other hands could do 
So well (I thought), no skill contrive so true. 
And with my heart's door open -- open wide -- 
With leisured feet, and idle hands, I sat. 
I, foolish, fussy, blind as any bat, 
Sat down to listen, and to learn. And lo, 
My thousand tasks were done the better so.