Prayer Posture with John Mark Comer | Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools Podcast

[Music] John Mark my friend thank you so much for being with me and contributing to this conversation happy to be here uh I'm so excited to talk with you about uh contemplative prayer silence and Solitude or what I call in my book be still and know uh I know that this is a practice that's near and dear to your heart as it is to mine we've been able to have many conversations about this that no one has heard and so it's it's it's nice to have one that that some will hear so I I want to get into the practice of silence or silence and prayer and I want to end on all the how-to and everything but but let's start with where does this originate because most people that I imagine listen to this will emerge from Traditions who have been given the idea that pray is talking it's a very active thing it is talking to God and and it is that but it's something much more broad than that so can we start just with the history where does the idea of silence as a spiritual practice come from well I mean obviously in the life of Jesus you see this undulating Rhythm and kind of back and forth between time and the Greek word is the aramos which is sometimes translated the desert but it's not necessarily a desert like sand and no trees it can be translated the Wilderness the wild Place some translations in the NIV are the lonely place or the quiet places actually one translation of this kind of Greek word or Ramos and so you regularly see Jesus sneaking away to the Ramos the desert place the wild place the lonely place the quiet place the solitary place all valid translations and then coming back to deep webbing of community and I think prayer tends to operate like much of the spiritual life best in full Solitude and deep Community but sadly many of us spend our spiritual life in like middling social settings yeah which is almost like you're not getting either end of the deep end of the pool you know and Jesus seems to go really deep on both sides and you know you of course you have the Luke line Jesus often this is Luke 5 Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed yes and so for Jesus Solitude and you see that kind of a in Luke's formula there are lonely place or It's A Ramos desert place and prayed these things go together so Solitude and prayer are kind of two sides of the same coin Solitude is where not all prayer but a very specific type of prayer is done and of course you have all the stories about Jesus praying all night on the Mountainside and they're silent ironically as to what was happening in that moment I think I always assumed because I grew up in a tradition where prayer meant asking God to do things in the world right and that is a dimension of prayer but I think I grew up in a tradition where that was the whole dimension yeah and obviously it's a beautiful biblical and crucial aspect of prayer but more and more I highly doubt that Jesus was maybe he was but all night long up asking God to do things in the world and you wonder there's that one story where after an all-night prayer session then he called his disciples to him and chose those he himself wanted so something was happening in that night that was discernment getting in touch with his Desire with getting in touch with God's purposes through his life something else maybe listening something there was happening that was maybe much closer to listening than to talking and I just think listening is at the heart of prayer and at the heart of discipleship and listening is done in the quiet yeah you know if something I've noticed is that if you look at the Saints throughout history like people whose lives have really made a significant Mark for the kingdom who have been shaped and and formed in the way of Jesus in a way that others took took notice of and a remarkable way they are always people who seemed to be still internally even those who were activists externally extroverted activists kind of people yes there's this deep inner quiet and unhurry and Stillness and so I've been I've started to think of a quiet inner life being the canvas on which God paints his masterpieces and yet I also live in a world in a culture that does almost nothing to cultivate a quiet inner life within me and almost everything to clutter my inner life and I have a personality that leans towards yeah activism activism extroversion everything like that so I wonder if you could talk just a little bit about the way that we're being spiritually formed if we don't intentionally cultivate a practice of Silence yeah you know when you're Henry now and you can just say things more bluntly than when you are Tyler Satan or John Mark Comer and I just think of his line you know quote without Solitude it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life end quote and I don't think I would say it so bluntly because my pastoral hat is on and I'm thinking well yeah but what about the young parent who just had a three month old has a three-month-old baby and what about the person in red residency or the person working three jobs or whatever and so you just are so sensitive pastorally to that that we shy away from saying what I think noun was right without Solitude it is virtually impossible to have any meaningful life with God and I would say the same about community and by Community I don't mean social settings at church I mean deep webbing of relationships with other followers of Jesus so I think silence is indispensable and you're right it is incredibly hard and I think human beings have always been bent to run away from our pain yeah and I think one of the reasons people are terrified of Silence in general is it will force you to Face Reality the reality of your life uh the good and the Bad and the Ugly it will force you to face your pain like I was doing a kind of a man night with my two sons and some other young guys from our church and we were just kind of doing a campfire together and so we're looking for like man conversation questions and so I did the okay guys what's your deepest fear you know we started going around the circle that's a great question I think so my 16 year old son who's more like your personality is extroverted as they come Super Active kind of guy he said my deepest fear is silence and solitude I'm absolutely terrified of what would happen to me in that space wow I thought that's pretty articulate and pretty honest and I think he's probably speaking for a lot of people so I think from time immemorial human beings have looked for coping mechanisms and cultural narcotics to numb their pain or Escape their pain or bypass their pain where and often Christians then just use Christian spirituality as a pain company mechanism to deny reality rather than face it with Jesus and heal through it so you know this whole concept of spiritual bypassing where you use like quote God it's not actually God it's your perception of God to like try to just skip over your family wounds or your pain or your failure or your guilt or your shame and so it's so funny how we our sin just corrupts everything so we'll even use prayer to escape reality rather than to move more deeply into reality so I think there's a human thing there that then is just massively exacerbated before we even get to the iPhone just through urbanization like Susan K pain and you know it's a tragedy when people think of people have to disclaimer this when people think of solitude as like spirituality for introverts it's just as tragic as when people think of community as spirituality for extroverts the reality is we go no matter where you fall on the introvert extrovert Spectrum whether you're a higher introvert like me or high extrovert like you we need both and even if we gravitate toward one or the other and experience them differently emotionally we need them both spiritually but uh so it's a tragedy when people think of solitude as an introvert thing but Susan Kane not a Christian in her book on introversion which beautiful but quiet the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking just writes about the history of what she calls the extroverted ideal and how historically an agrarian culture is up to the Industrial Revolution people were less extroverted and more comfortable with quiet with silence and with deep relationships but with industrialization say 150 years ago as people began to move into cities first off you went to living by total strangers what you and I consider normal you know even if you're not in a city you're in a Suburban context you're surrounded by all these people you've never even met most people don't even know their neighbors anymore yeah so that's Sebastian younger in his book tribe talking about the same thing early American yeah and that if you live in a Suburban or Urban context in the west today you interact with people constantly almost all of whom are strangers to you and your strangers to them and you present differently to them yeah and the early data psychologically is that that is wildly damaging to the human person yes and then she writes about how the economy began to change and it required what she calls the extroverted ideal so whether you're an introvert or an extrovert you live in an extroverts world so if you live in the western kind of Modern urban Metropolitan unless if you're a farmer or something you live in a world where you have to like hey how's it going great to see you be confident which some people do really well in other people don't and so she just writes about how and it's all to do with urbanization with the market with you know if you're a farmer you don't need grades necessarily you need the same level of social skills if you're in sales then you need to be able to schmooze up and like make great relationships right off the bat so there's this whole thing that's been happening in our culture where people have been moving away from Silence into a world of noise and where already you had this human propensity to run from the quiet place from the deep places and then of course technology interrupts not another layer it's like a bomb on top of that where now we have this digital appendage to our lives that is intentionally designed to consume every waking moment every little scrap of free time you have that used to be given over to things like prayer or even just a reflective life when you're just bored at a stoplight in your car or you're stuck in the elevator or you're waiting in line for the plane to board all of those moments were like little portals to come back to God and yourself and now pretty much all of those moments have been swallowed up by text messaging and Twitter and whatever you know yeah so I think it's like a it's an ancient human problem that's massively exacerbated I have an interesting reflection on this as someone who uh it is more on the extrovert side of the spectrum so when I first began and and I think I'm someone who's always been an intercessor naturally that's like a spiritual pathway between me and Jesus and so when I was first introduced to Solitude and silence I began to practice it regularly like every morning a couple of minutes you know yes and I didn't like it I I wanted to do more active spiritual practices with Jesus and occasionally I would there would be like some great Insight or moment of Revelation but it was few and far between it was like 10 or less of the time and and when that wasn't the case it felt like that was a waste or I didn't do it right or something like that but how I began to experience over time is a return to my naked and unashamed self because I have the personality type that leans toward performance and silence strips you of all of that right there's no one for me to tell I can't even perform to God I can't do my spiritual practice to God I just am before God yeah and and I am and you can't perform to yourself right and and so I'm used to doing all that in my personality then I also happen to be a pastor so a lot of people paid to do it yeah no I just made a lot of my work is like in a dysfunctional view for God yes and so when I'm silent before him I just am and I can be loved by him and I think I can return maybe as close as I get right now to being aware of my belovedness before him is in solitude and silence and then I've noticed this about my myself I think it's good and it sometimes worries me that I'm just getting old you know but I've noticed that I used to fill my life with noise like my commute to my audiobooks music whatever I just was and now I so rarely hit play on anything just every time that I'm cycling somewhere on my commute if I'm in the car most of the time I just roll the windows down if I can if the weather's good enough and I just I'm quiet but I find a desire to return to quiet um lives in me now that didn't before yeah yeah and that's where understanding quiet like Community because I would tell a very similar story about my journey into Community which came later for me and first was not very fun but now it was like this intro I can't imagine my life with Jesus without it and uh you know coming from a different personality structure but I think you begin to find Solitude as the place where we most deeply experience the love and truth of God and then you begin to crave it's not silence that you crave though I mean if you're an introvert you are or maybe there's you know there are aspects of I think the human soul and even the brain that are built for non-stimulation at periods but you began to just crave those moments with the Trinity you know and we all experience God in our own unique ways Gary Thomas has that whole idea of spiritual Pathways almost like a spiritual personality test you know what I mean like they're just different there are ways from me that I just come alive in God and other ways that other people come alive with God that from for me are much more of a discipline um but I think regardless of what your personality is there's something happening as it does around a table and Community there's something happening in the quiet that we are just experiencing Union with the Trinity yeah and everyone who's ever then spoken verbal prayers has had the experience of like trying to think of things to talk to God about and their experience where prayers flowing out of me yeah and some people call that praying in the spirit and some people mean different things and they say praying the spirit but where it's like oh there's this open faucet and to me Solitude and silence is often the place that those prayers begin to flow from when I am experiencing myself as beloved before him then prayer begins to flow out of me more naturally so look at you you and there are different types of prayers that I think work better in different settings like for me intercession nine times out of ten I want to do it with other people like if there's something in my life where I feel like the spirit of Jesus is leading me to co-labor with him to see something I I don't like to do that that in the quiet of the early morning with my cup of coffee I like to do that with other people like out loud standing up my arms in the air praying to Jesus not that you can't do intercession alone you know no I do it alone I do exactly you said you don't like to do that but yeah but uh but there there's a type of prayer that is less about trying to change what is and more about trying to surrender to God in what is yes and that I far prefer to do alone yeah so what about for someone that's just looking for a place to start where would you suggest someone begin when it comes to Stillness before the Lord well I think you know we're embodied beans and you've said some really great things about this lately I think what did you say were we have an embodied faith and a Wandering mind I think you said recently and I think we need to take the body as seriously as possible as we present our whole self before God so there's not a right way there's not a wrong way there's not a technique I mean I love the roll Heiser line like the Only Rule of prayer is show up show up I just can't just show up regularly it's the Only Rule there's no way to be good at it or bad at it to succeed or fail just show up and show up regularly but um and maybe this will be more true for personality types like mine than others but I find Stillness to be so incredibly difficult at an as an inner state to reach so finding ways to get into an embodied Stillness that helps cumulus all the science now behind habits and like the power of cues yeah you know and his whole like multi-million dollar advertising age yes and so it's why there's certain that like there's all these things that trigger your nervous system based on memory and all this complex Neuroscience I could not explain the advertisers are currently trying to manipulate that just cue us to certain behaviors so I think building a kind of habit or ritual or whatever you want to call it structure for your body that helps lead you into the presence of God and into Stillness is really important so for me and this will not work for certain people or it will not be helpful for others but for me doing it first thing in the morning is by far the best time because I'm just by the end of the day my brain is just mush and so any kind of like directed attention form of prayer is very difficult for me at night and in the middle of the day I'm so task oriented that Stillness kind of prayer is really hard for me to get to because I'm so in I'm just a very task oriented personality and so it's really hard to like click out of that into kind of a resting form of prayer you know so I'm trying it I'm learning but the morning hour for me and I'm not even a big morning person but a morning hour it's very important to me to give my conscious attention to God if at all possible before anything else no phone no work no email no news the only thing that can interrupt that time is basically my children or my wife and if they need me you know and um and so a dedicated time and then I create like little rituals to kind of Mark that time like for me you know making coffee in the morning I have my little Chemex set up and I'm trying to turn it into like this little like way to like begin to you know Center myself I have a couple of uh things I recite like Psalm 23 just on my pillow before I get out of bed super simple simple stuff I'm barely awake you know but just trying to resolve to recite Psalm 23 first thing once I am awake lying on my back before I climb out of the bed yeah and um and then things like posture are really helpful for me like I prayed for years on a couch you know uh and I recently just started sitting on the floor with my legs crossed with my chest kind of up and so I can breathe really deeply and has been so helpful like it's the silliest little thing and it has like enriched my prayer life so much I find it so much easier to pay attention to God to attune to God God to calm to God just that change to kind of sitting up with my shoulders back and you know and it kind of I can only sit that way for so long so it kind of like keeps my mind from wandering it keeps me praying because I know at some point I'm 42 and my back's hurting too bad but I gotta get up and I'm like all right I think we're done praying for the morning I think that's it so um yes I think some of those embodied rituals I find very helpful but again this goes to personality some personality type spontaneity and creativity is really important for them so doing a different thing every single day would be really meaningful I'm gonna go for a walk one day I'm gonna paint and draw another day I'm gonna say a liturgy another day beautiful I find silence so wildly interesting with God that I'm trying to like make my bodily postures around silence very stayed because what I experience in that place of Silence Is So fascinating and different and I'm not in control of it what's happening with God In Prayer so it's kind of like you know a lot of the great artists are like the opposite of into fashion a lot of the most famous fashion designers in the world just wear black T-shirt and black jeans every single day you know a lot of the great artists and designers and musicians wear the same outfit every day and it's not because they're not creative or they're boring it's because they're actually opening up more space in their life for creativity and they're just saying I don't want my creativity to go to what outfit I'm wearing today I want it to go to what song I'm writing or what you know and so I think in a little way for prayer I put these kind of pretty uh pretty strong rituals around my prayer time because what I experience in the silence with God is like the opposite of boredom I just I personally I don't know if that's me or what I just find it to be this weird mixture of so calm but fascinating yeah and you know I think I would the only thing I would add is if there's someone that's just starting out I would say rhythm is more important than duration yeah yeah so so if it if spending a half hour in silence sounds like a nightmare then just go for a minute yeah you know go for five go for two but do that daily or regularly to cultivate a rhythm in my experiences if you give God a little bit of space to work with he'll take to work with the space and then yeah he will grow an appetite for him in your inner life and don't want you to reach for more and I think one of the things is you know we can't yes to that like I'm thinking of Jesus in The Sermon on the Mount when the first thing he said about how to pray was not about what to pray but where to pray and how go into your closet and close the door um so his first things like find a place like and this was a like an old school closet like a pantry you know and go find a place get along with God but don't I think it's really important to not judge and evaluate your experience yes so certain personalities will do this and they'll feel like I did a bad job or a good job more kind of rule-oriented perfectionist personalities like me other personalities will will judge it like did I like it or not like it did I enjoy was it fun or not did I experience God or not more kind of fun living that's really not all that helpful necessarily either so I think more thinking of it as I'm just giving this moment to God as an act of love yes it's like you know when we say to our wives sorry that sounded weird when you say to your wife I say to my wife yeah it's not a group situation I love you I'm not giving her new information she's heard that a thousand times but there is something about saying that sentence that is participating in an act of Love yeah and I you know what I mean it's it's an active it's just a phrase that I've said a thousand times it doesn't have much meaning anymore but it is still an act of Love toward her and so I think whether it's a minute or five minutes or 20 minutes having a time of Silence in the morning you may love it you may hate it you may feel close to God you may just feel your mind go a thousand different directions welcome to Being Human you may feel like you're really good at it you may just feel like this is ridiculous I don't even know if I'm a Christian but just view it as I'm just offering this to God in love and if it's an act of love then the equality of the experience all those factors you mentioned suddenly aren't the defining thing right and one of the things you learn about prayer especially this type of prayer whether you want to call it be still prayer a silent prayer contemplative prayer is different than like intercession you're not so much trying to get things done out there in the world which is important very important it's a very good place you're trying to let God get things done in here in you to become somebody who can go out into the world so it's less about what you do and more about what God is doing in you in order to do through you so it's less about control and more about surrender less about performance and definitely not about performance and more about just love and offering and I mean that's so it's all about just letting that stuff go in God's presence and that I think when I think about contemplative prayer which means different things to different people and different times in church history I just understand it as looking at God looking at me in love yes and that's all it is and that's so key you saying the the ultimate aim because at the end of the day this is not about having a really good practice of contemplative prayer at the end of the day it's about becoming someone who can lovingly sit with another and be fully present to them undistracted it's about becoming someone who can notice a stranger with compassion in your heart for them it's becoming someone who is intentional and interruptible as Jesus was as he went throughout his life and all of that can grow up in you through a simple practice of Stillness yeah and if Jesus needed it I was reading this morning coming into this time kind of prepping for a Time and I happen to be reading Richard Foster's book on prayer at the same time as yours which is wonderful and he said this throwaway line he's like if Jesus needed silent prayer we probably need it too regardless of our personality type and the point there isn't that odd or a should it's I think when the disciples said to Jesus teach us to pray which is an extraordinary moment it's the one time they say teach us to do something and they don't say teach us to heal the sick teach us to cast out demons teach us to preach the gospel teach us to draw a crowd of thirty thousand people go for three days without eating teach us how to overturn Injustice those are all incredible things that Jesus did they say teach us to pray and I don't know this is reading between the lines but my theory is that they must have discerned that this extraordinary outer life and work of Jesus all of this stuff was somehow coming from the way that he was living in this extraordinary deep inner connection to the father and out of this place something was happening with Jesus when he disappeared early in the morning and went away to mountains and was off a stone's throw away in the garden something was happening with him and the God that he called father out of which this extraordinary life was being lived and I Think Jesus was definitely not a monk he wasn't he wasn't even a desert father a mother and we both love those people yeah Jesus was an active person yes and I don't know if he was an introvert or an extrovert or how that even I'm sure he was an ambivert whatever however that applies I don't know but he was an extraordinarily active person but with the Deep kind of rhythm of quiet contemplative spirituality that it just seems like was the Wellspring of this life so that I think that we're all going to have to move our own way you know I'm having to move more toward action because I would love to just read books and think all of the time other people are going to have to move more towards silence and reflection but I think there's something in this Jesus paradigm the deep in our life with the father out of which a life of love and service flow that I think there's something there that that's what we're trying to learn as Disciples of Jesus well said foreign [Music]

Channel: Tyler Staton

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Id: inqVOicaZGc

Length: 29min 48sec (1788 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 24 2022