It was so good...

I have been trying, since my thirteenth year, to pray. Sometimes it has gone well, sometimes not. But always my ability or nonability to pray has been directly related to my everyday life and to my knowledge of myself. When I begin to experience my difficulty in prayer, it is usually because I am refusing to let go of my present understanding of who I am and preventing a new understanding from emerging.

For example, if I have clung to some ideal picture of who I should be and have denied another part of myself that is struggling to be born, then I am inauthentic; and the God I have been praying to is no longer real, because he was fashioned from that idealizing part of me that is now dying. As my former self dies, so does the inadequate god who is fashioned out of the need to have a divinity who conforms to whom the self thinks it should be.

However, when I let go and let myself grow and emerge by embracing all sides of myself, God is again accessible, because the true God is he who loves and affirms and redeems who I really am and not just who I would like to be. In otherwords, the acecptance of the truthe about myself opens the way to the truth about God, and both truths are one at the prayerful center of the person.

True prayer demands honesty with myself, for it is only the real "I" who can talk with God. And I do not mean to imply here that only the integrated self can pray, but simply that honesty with myself enables me to pray correctly. If, for example, I need to be "worthy" or "perfect" or "holy" before I can pray, then I will probably not pray at all, or if I do, it will be a pseudo, self-satisfied self talking to itself rather than with God. We commune with God as we honestly are and not as we would like to be.

The idealized self is always dying in prayer, because it cannot bear the truth. And if we let it die and pray from who we are becoming, then our image of God changes as we understand more clearly who we are.

And our prayer changes accordingly. It may move from the adoration of the all-good God to bitter complaining and bickering with an unjust God who is letting me suffer or who is abandoning me for some reason. If I experience God as betraying me but say instead how wonderful and good he is, then I am praying a lie. God will only be who he is objectively if, while trying and wanting to believe that, I pray to him as I am experiencing him subjectively, for the good God redeems and corrects my honestly expressed but false understanding of who he is.

I believe this sincere wrestling with God is what Francis experienced during that torturous year in the cave at the beginning of his conversion and at other times through his life, culmination in the fifty days of darkness that preceded his singing of The Canticle of Brother Sun. He felt abandoned and betrayed by God; and because he let himself pray what he truly felt, God showed him that He is faithful to who He is and to His promises, even though at the time we might experience Him otherwise.

Because Francis was honest enough to acknowledge his doubt and despair and God's infidelity, as he experienced it, the true God at the center of his heart again rose to the surface of his consciousness to affirm the truth of Francis' perception: God had abandoned him, that he might once again give back to God the privilege of being God, independent of Francis, outside his control.

Whatever God deigns to give us of himself is pure gift and not something we earn or deserve by becoming that "perfect" person we think we should be. We are who we are, and any perfection, or completion, in us is the work of God responding freely to our honest prayer that he change in us what we previously thought we could change by ourselves.

Who we become in God is then his work and not our own success in conforming to some ideal. The self we become in true prayer is seldom the self we envisioned, but it is a new and marvelous self that God fashions out of the gradual redeeming of the false self we now acknowledge as the work of our own misguided idealism. We then know God in what he has done in us to enable us to discover our true face. And in that face only do we see the reflection of God as he really is."