To whom do I pray?

 

Father,
I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will.
Whatever you may do, I thank you:
I am ready for all, I accept all.
Let only your will be done in me, and in all your creatures.
I wish no more than this, O Lord.

Into your hands I commend my soul;
I offer it to you
with all the love of my heart,
for I love you, Lord,
and so need to give myself,
to surrender myself into your hands,
without reserve,
and with boundless confidence,
for you are my Father. ~ Charles de Foucald



For most of my adult life I've had a distinct dislike for this prayer and others like it. I always felt like I should like them, these prayers of complete surrender, complete trust in an all powerful God. But I didn't. These types of prayers always feel to me inextricably tied to a vast unknowable, omni God. A God who shapes my life as a master puppeteer might, pulling me this way and that. And complete surrender means being okay with that manipulation. Complete surrender of the sort in this prayer means believing that God is all things omni and that I will simply be grateful for whatever evil befalls me. 

I just can't do that. 

But maybe I don't have to.

Today I was reading Prayer by Joyce Rupp and discovered that she also has a history of not being able to pray this prayer. She was even alarmed to find that a group she was a part of wanted to use this prayer as the focal point for a high school retreat.  She said, "We can't ask these young people to pray that prayer. I can't even pray it myself!" And then someone lightly and playfully said to her, "That doesn't say much about who your God is, does it?" (27, 28). 

That doesn't say much about who your God is. Hmmm...

That one line caught me completely off guard. It caught Rupp off guard as well, though for somewhat different reasons. I realized that I had been reading prayers of surrender and then allowing those prayers and various other social/cultural influences to shape an image of God for me. And it was an image I couldn't live with, so I assumed that the prayer was the problem. But maybe the problem isn't the prayer at all. Maybe the problem is my starting point. I suddenly wondered what it might mean to allow God to shape this prayer, instead of allowing this prayer to shape God. What if I actually entered into a prayer of this nature approaching the God that I do know. The God who loves infinitely, who holds me in vast and squishy arms. The God who laughs hilariously with me and who weeps a river of tears when we witness suffering, when I am suffering.

 It seems so simple now. That's not to say that I can magically pray all the words of Foucald's prayer with complete trust and abandon. But I no longer feel the need to reject it outright. And I sense within myself a willingness to explore what it might mean to surrender myself into those squishy arms and to trust that they will not let me go.