Deacon Jim Knipper discusses different types of prayer and invites listeners to try a more meditative form of prayer during Lent. Transactional prayers that involve telling God what we want are common, but may not facilitate inner transformation. Jesus taught praying in secret and being still. The Desert Fathers and Mothers practiced quiet, meditative prayer to commune with God. When we listen instead of speak in prayer, God listens and our inner being can reconcile. This type of prayer can foster peace within and reflection in others.

1. 06 March 2019 Ash Wednesday Princeton, NJ
Today we begin our journey of the 40 days of Lent taking us to Easter. So while it is not a Holy Day of
Obligation our liturgies, all day long and into this evening, are filled with those looking to receive ashes. And as
each Lenten season comes upon us we often spend our time choosing some form of offering that we will
commit to...some amount of almsgiving or fasting or determining what favorite food or activity we will give
up.
But how could this Lent be a bit different for you and me than those in years past? One way may be to
examine the form and depth of our prayer life and how that could change, transform, and enlighten us. In
general, most of us here today participate in communal prayer like what we are doing here right now - and
private prayer like reciting the rosary or words of your own making. These types of prayer are called
transactional prayer - where we control the words and make pronouncements to God, telling God as to what
we need, and what we want God to do. Nothing wrong at all with this type of prayer, albeit it can get rather
ego centered as we spend most of the time telling and asking God what we need or what we want (as if God
didn’t already know). It is the type of prayer that all of us are so used to - giving it all to God and trusting that
if we pray hard enough and long enough and sacrifice enough things - that perhaps God will listen to us. But
does this prepare fertile ground for the conversion of the heart and soul?
In today’s Gospel passage we hear Jesus teaching his disciples on how to pray - when he says to: stop babbling
like the pagans - because your Father already knows what you need; go to your inner room, close the door
and to pray, in secret to your Father who will repay you. Notice, he says nothing about gathering in a great
church, with candles and incense, and music and chanting and lots of spoken prayers.
Perhaps Jesus already knew what would happen once we were given words - that we would be so focused on
which words should be said, by whom and at what time and how often that we would forget the reason and
method on how to pray.
In the 3rd and 4th centuries, the Desert Mothers and Fathers recognized the same thing and taking a page
from this Gospel, moved away from the chanted and overly spoken prayer to the type of prayer where one is
quiet, centered, and meditative - allowing for time and space whereby you can move away from distractions,
away from it being all about me, away from the babbling Jesus talks about and to go to that place where God
is just waiting to be in communion with you by loving you...just as you are. It is deep prayer. It is prayer
where you look in the mirror and the face you see is not distorted, it is the real you - filled with joys and
sorrows, of hurts and wounds and concerns, and failures and sin and yet it is the face that is always loved by
God.
And what does that prayer sound like? When Dan Rather interviewed Mother Teresa he asked her what she
said during her prayers. She answered, “I listen.” So Dan turned the question around and asked, “Well then,
what does God say?” Mother Teresa smiled with confidence and answered, “He listens...and if you don’t
understand that, I can’t explain it to you.”
1 Deacon Jim Knipper

2. While I never got to meet Mother Teresa, I think what she may have been referring to is when you participate
in that type of prayer you are allowing communion with God to take place - allowing the inner presence of
God to speak to you...to be reminded that you are loved and you are called to love.
For when we practice this type of prayer, inner conversation has a chance of taking place - where a sense of
being genuine in who we are and how we love comes to the surface and God’s love is made manifest in what
we do and with those we come in contact with each day - especially those who live on the margins.
And then what happens is best described by the great African-American theologian Howard Thurman when he
wrote: [Then] “if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and if you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is
possible for me to go down in me and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes having
made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me and the wall that separates and divides will disappear
and we will become one...”
It is this type of inner prayer that leads us to be genuine with ourselves and reconcile with others. For Lent is a
time for reconciliation - to restore relationships and ease tensions. And living in a time when our lives are
filled with all kinds of tensions - within our families, around our borders, and even woven throughout our own
universal Church - we need now, more than ever, to make time for this deep and silent prayer which restores
inner peace. Etty Hillesum, Dutch religious author who died at the age of 29 in Auschwitz once wrote,
“Ultimately we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace within ourselves, more and more
peace and to reflect it in others.”
So how will you spend your Lent? Certainly different forms of almsgiving and fasting are all good and there is
no such thing as a bad form of prayer. But I do invite you to make the time go into your inner room and close
the door, stop the babbling and just listen...just listen...and maybe, just maybe, be awakened to a renewed
sense of what the Gospel calls us to so that our Lent will be a time for us to live out the Gospel and allow a
sacred encounter with one another, with the stranger, with the outcast, and with the other person each of us
needs to be reconciled with and allow God to fill your dark spaces with God’s abundant love and mercy and
thus foster healing within ourselves.
2 Deacon Jim Knipper