Fewer Words, Richer Prayer
Fewer Words, Richer Prayer
Timothy Jones
To God we use the simplest, shortest words we can find, because eloquence is only air and noise to him. –F. W. Robertson, nineteenth century
During a time of professional failure and personal crisis, I began to realize something freeing.
My wife and I had moved to a large suburb of Houston to gather and plant a new church. Sent off with the good wishes of friends and family, and confident in our gifts, we felt ready to brave the challenges of organizing a congregation from scratch. I knocked on doors and we sent out mass mailings and did everything we knew to make our presence known.
And families responded to the invitations to join our fledgling venture. Tendrils looked like they would take root in our new suburb north of Houston.
Within six months, though, the city’s oil-industry economy dried up. People in our church moved out of state in search of jobs. We realized that our project was not going to meet expectations—not ours, not those of our supporters. I slogged through two more years, trying to salvage the common life of our little group. I went running many mornings in the humid Gulf Coast heat, the sweat and panting emblematic of our effort. Finally I resigned, recommending that the tiny church fold.
During that difficult time, when I tried to pray, often the best I could bring into the Presence was a groaning spirit, an emotional ache. My praying took on a stripped-down directness, a new frankness and urgency. No elegant, high-flying prose here, no eminently quotable lines. Not that I cared much. I turned in heartfelt need toward the best source for help I could think of.
And that became part of the discovery. Henri Nouwen and others I read with new earnestness already emphasized not getting chatty and saying too much when near the Holy. The stunningly articulate Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Your thoughts don’t have words every day.” Nor did my prayers. There was freedom in that recognition.
And indeed, some days I struggled to find the words for all kinds of reasons. Distractions loomed large. The mind raced. Anxieties crowded their way in.
I began to notice the ways others struggled with the words, or lack of them. In the presence of unfathomable majesty, some confided in me a question, What can I say? Or Will I be heard? Or Will my words measure up? Like the terror a writer feels when faced with a blank page waiting to be filled with words, the prospect of addressing God makes some freeze up. They get “pray-er’s block.”
But then another experience helped confirm me in my breakthrough, in my unlearning to place too much stress (in every sense of the word) on prayerful elegance and floweriness:
I attended a writing workshop.
Our leader was known for her artful, articulate books. But her counterintuitive assignment one afternoon set the stage for my feeling even more relaxed around sparse, heartfelt prayers.
*
“For the next three minutes,” she said, “write without stopping—using only one-syllable words.” I was not thrilled about this—not I, who when I’m writing, congratulate myself inwardly for my command of big, significant words. I silently groaned when we got the assignment.
But I tried. I looked out the the window at the wintry woods surrounding our conference center in Western North Carolina, finding some inspiration in the gray sky suspended over forested hills, some hint of help for what I was needing in that overcast time in my life beyond the wooded workshop setting. Pressures at the high-powered large church where I served were piling up. “The sun is not far from view,” I wrote, the words spare. “Who knows what clouds will move?” On and on I went—not a multi-syllabic word on the whole page (well, maybe one).
Yes, it can be done, I found (the previous seven words serve as a further case in point). I had less trouble than I thought. Based on the samples that some of my workshop colleagues read aloud, they too discovered a new delight for the tiny and trim. We all received a reminder that bigger words are not always more powerful. They may impress but they don’t necessarily carry the day or get us through a fearful night.
Lauren’s writing exercise made me think again how some of the most important things we say get encapsulated in the trim and lean: “Wow.” “I do.” “Stop.” “Look out!” “Back off.”
I’d been thinking, too, how already the trends of our wider culture were moving us more toward the tight and concise. Gone are the days when florid prose and long-winded speeches commanded respect by their sheer grandiloquence. Our attention spans wane. We prefer the spare and pithy.
Not that this is always a good thing. Not when complex political issues gave way to bumper stickers or yard signs. In our cultural moment we tend to get impatient with anything that requires much discussion. We’d rather depend on shorthand catch phrases or memes. Blogs or reasoned posts on Facebook go the way of even-shorter tweets, big on provocation but thin on nuance. Shorter is not always better.
And the appropriate words often matter immensely. They engage, invite, inspire. The difference between the right word and the almost right word, said Mark Twain, is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
But in some arenas of life our instincts to lean on less help us. Simpler can be profounder. I’ve been asking. Why not take that realization into my praying? Emily Dickinson made spare, startling lines and bulleted, precise images a poetic art form. Like the time she echoed worship language from her church-going younger days:
In the name of the Bee –
And of the Butterfly –
And of the Breeze – Amen!
(I just now notice what she could do with one-syllable words!)
In some ways, I should not be surprised by the muscular impact of the small. A word carries great power. Even little words.
Still, there was room for me to apply that freedom even more profoundly to my devotional practice. My conversing with God.
*
I was talking with a friend, my spiritual mutual mentor, Kevin. Something he said helped me see even more sharply how the force of the little works in our favor when it comes to prayer. In one of our bi-monthly long-distance spiritual check-ins, Kevin said, in an off-hand way, something about his practice of ordering prayer with three little words.
One-word prayers? I asked him to tell me more.
“I pray, first,” he said, “Thanks!” He comes grateful, ready to call to mind and recite the abundance of blessings strewn about.
He talked about proceeding to “Sorry.” Then “Help!”
Part of what intrigued me about this idea had to do with what I already know about our Jewish and Christian forebears. “Before a word is on my tongue,” said the psalmist, “you know it completely, O Lord” (139:4). Jewish tradition has it that God hears the faintest whisper. That is a wonderful picture. The emphasis is not on our mouthy eloquence.
That prospect helps because words—even the big, seemingly impressive ones—sometimes fail us. Or are beside the point. Even get in the way. Our spiritual yearnings often don’t require much of the elaborate. Years after the workshop exercise that required the smallest words, I notice more and more possibilities for the climate of my asking.
“When you are praying,” Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount, “Do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do.” Did his hearers really think that they would, as He said, “Be heard because of their many [and fancy] words?” Thank heavens God is not waiting for secret passwords, counting on in-house jargon, expecting from our lips a dictionary of syllable-packed prose.
Jesus attracted the marginalized and those not used to crowds hanging on their words. And it was the tax collector’s prayer in Luke 18 that Jesus commended; all the man could say was “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”
*
Such glimpses remind me that when it comes to the utterances we use to commune, the most apt prayers may best come out as a sigh. Or a burst of anguish. Or a yelp of joy. Some days it will be a cry to be reconciled (“God, be merciful!”). We may do well, as Catherine Ricketts recalls of her childhood wails, to “mouth vowel sounds, creaking like a hinge and catching my breath.” This is part of what it means to inhabit a world beset with suffering and incomprehensible injustices or horrors that seem, well, horrible. This is what it means some days to pray through stretches of circumstances that seem just plain unfair. Or moments we feel filled with regret and guilt. Such realities belong in our beseeching because what lies deepest within us does not need glittery utterance. In the presence of an immense, vast, radiance-streaming God whose very word created worlds, why would I think my words need to impress, or capture every nuance, or sound like fine prosody?
And the heartfelt, less wordy way may be the only viable course if you are laid out in a hospital bed in pain, worried about tomorrow’s procedure. A moan communicates just fine for those grieving the loss of a spouse or child. When our prayers are as much groans as elegance—such as during my own professional disappointed hopes—a syllable may be about all you manage.
That means we need not be flummoxed if what wells up in the heart doesn’t resemble polished grammar. If it doesn’t sound like what the nineteenth-century saint Thérèse of Lisieux called “splendid turns of phrase.” No. Often just a word will do. Thérèse spoke of the folly of feeling as though she needed some “formula of words” to pray: “I just do what children have to do before they learn to read. I tell God what I want quite simply… and somehow He always manages to understand me.”
This was not all in my conversation with Kevin. But the three simple words got me thinking and became a catalyst for yet more discovery.
*
The next time Kevin and I talked, I wanted to hear more. “Tell me again the three words you use!”
And I told him how I’d been experimenting with the simplest prayers: One-word prayers. It’s not that I don’t love flowing, finely wrought prayers—I have books full of them. I can think of the books I’ve written about praying. And I love the elegant beauty of well-worn printed prayers, the attention to language found in, say, The Book of Common Prayer. I like the effortless eloquence of a wizened pray-er moved by the Holy Spirit in a living room Bible study prayer time.
But then I recall the other side to my life with God. Out running one morning not long ago, my head finally shaking off sleepy doldrums and my thoughts clarified, I saw again how often my distracted, harried mind needs settling when I respond to God—or life. My words and attentions skitter across the floor like raw coffee beans bursting from a packed-too-full burlap bag. I need more than a resolve to keep trying to gather the flying thoughts and finally concentrate.
*
Lying in bed not long ago, awakened too early to feel rested and not late enough to get up, I found my mind again tumbling with thoughts and remembered incidents from the day. My sleeplessness was an urgent, jumbled affair. Wordy thoughts pounded a marathon down the running trails of my mind.
But then I thought of ways I’d been experimenting with Kevin’s one-word prayers. And now, fully sleepless, I found that I was able, like Kevin did, to turn some of the agitation into prayer with the simple word “Thanks!” The word helped me feel gratitude to God for some good things that had happened. I noticed how a single word can snag a racing thought and tie it onto our efforts to pray and adore God. My prayers became less restive.
And then I thought not only of God’s gifts from the day, but how in some ways I’d fallen short. A simple, “Sorry” let me mention my need for mercy, to let go of some of my guilt and self-recrimination. Prompted me to express penitence rather than try to defend and rationalize or self-berate.
And the third little word: HELP. Boy, did I need some assistance. But to whom better to go? I unburdened my fast-moving mind of its worries, turning fears into pleas.
Before long I was hard asleep.
*
The ears of my heart pricked as Kevin talked about his practice for another reason than my wanting to go beyond wordy excess. I was discovering that sometimes an approach strong on the blunt and unaffected can actually create more room for a heartfelt encounter within our praying. Especially if I am free from the worry that I will trip up over finding the right phrase. Fewer words may lead to richer conversation.
And lately I’ve been letting the words I use leave room for such encounter. They guide me and, simple thought they are, become the prayers themselves:
Like Thanks! I see how simple gratitude enlisted during my early-morning wrestling without sleep can set a whole day on a different footing. Sometimes the gratitude has means thankfulness for what God has done but also praise for who God is.
“Sorry” is a natural prayer word, given how I slip up. Big-time. It flows naturally when it shows what my puny righteousness looks next to the God I thank and praise.
How often do I need to cry “Help!—something with more the feel of pleading, given our dependence on God—my crying out for help for me or others. A word like help can follow hard after a runaway fear and at least slow it down, maybe reconnect it to a promise from God or reinspire a determination to depend on God. Sometimes my “Help” takes on even more urgency as a “Please!”
*
I’ve been going further as I keep experimenting: Beyond thanks, sorry, and help, I’ve been adding two more little words: “Send,” asking God to send workers into our cultural moment, to drive agents of reconciliation into the hard-fractured places—asking God to send me, like Isaiah when called by God did in his unaffected, heartfelt way: “Here am I.” I try to be willing to be sent. And I tick off names of those I know and think about who have been. Here prayer lifts my eyes beyond my little world, becomes missional.
And “Come”—which turns out to be the Bible’s very last recorded prayer, in the very last chapter: “Come, Lord Jesus! Come, and make your damaged, heartsick, lost world whole again.” I find when I read an upsetting news headline, I will cry out with renewed longing that Christ will move. A word is all I need! Maybe all I have stomach for. When I am tempted to discouragement about a world that yet awaits full restoration, praying Come! quietly changes something in me. I invite Christ into what seems desperate or broken or beyond hope, but isn’t.
It's not that one-word prayers are all I say. But they prompt me to include situations and faces and hurts and desires that otherwise, in my distracted mental running laps, I might not.
And sometimes prayer moves us beyond the words altogether, transcending chatter. We get swept up into a communion where vocabulary falls away and we are met.
*
Not long ago, with all these thoughts rolling around, I was asked to give a talk at a community event commemorating the philanthropy of the founders of a senior living home, an annual affair for residents, staff, and others from the wider community.
I knew the defenses with which some outside (and inside) Christian belief regard such affairs. I decided to talk about prayer in ways that majored on inviting rather than judging, that held out the possibilities rather than chiding about neglected duties.
Prayer, I said, can use the most elementary speech.
And I told a story about the fourth-century monk Abba Macarius that has long struck me. Someone came and asked the desert father, “How should one pray?” (I suspect the inquirer really meant, “How might I pray?”)
The elderly man said, “There is no need at all to make long discourses; it is enough to stretch out one’s hand and say, ‘Lord, as you will, and as you know, have mercy.’ And if the conflict grows fiercer, say: ‘Lord, help.’”
What could be simpler? “‘Help!’ is prayer in fine form,” I said to the several dozen gathered there. “And now I want you to do something: Say ‘help.’ Help. Just say the word.”
They did, with no hesitation.
“You’ve just prayed,” I said, “a wonderfully eloquent prayer.”
There were chuckles from the group. The murmured laughter grew out of our realization that prayer does seem hard some days. But I had benignly coaxed them not only into praying, but to praying out loud, and turning to God for what only God could offer.
The result was simple, but no less significant for the brevity. Simple—and full of promise for other prayers that might follow.
Timothy Jones
Rector & Writer
Timothy is the author of a dozen books on the spiritual life and enjoys finding creative approaches to daunting spiritual truths, helping them seem more inviting and accessible. He is the former Dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Columbia, South Carolina, and is Rector (Pastor) of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Halifax, Virginia. He blogs at revtimothyjones.com.
Photography by Josh Hild