Lord Jesus Christ,
in this sacred and solemn week
when we see again
the depth and mystery of your redeeming love,
help us to follow where you go,
to stop where you stumble,
to listen when you cry,
to hurt as you suffer,
to bow our heads in sorrow as you die,
so that, when you are raised to life again,
we may share in your endless joy. Amen.

(Source: Living a Life-giving Lent)

In response to my quote from Thérèse of Lisieux yesterday, my friend Randy at Bible Study Geek posted an excerpt from an old book on prayer. A snippet:

What is that attitude of heart which God recognizes as prayer? I would mention two things.

In the first place, helplessness.

This is unquestionably the first and the surest indication of a praying heart. As far as I can see, prayer has been ordained only for the helpless. It is the last resort of the helpless. Indeed, the very last way out. We try everything before we finally resort to prayer.

This got me thinking further about the need for us to be helpless in order for prayer to be meaningful. (In fact, I posted a comment on Randy’s blog that kind of turned into a draft of this post.)

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We have a way of bringing into the uncharted land of prayer a false map of what prayer should be like. This expectation is useless, yet we nevertheless use it as the measure by which we judge our prayer. “If I am doing this correctly, my prayer ought to be this way.” This judgment is simply a thought, and it is important to see it as just a thought. John Chapman writes in his Spiritual Letters, “One must do [this practice] for God’s sake; but one will not get any satisfaction out of it in the sense of feeling ‘I am good at prayer,’ ‘I have an infallible method.’ That would be disastrous, since what we want to learn is precisely our own weakness, powerlessness, unworthiness. And one should wish for no prayer, except precisely the prayer that God gives us — probably very distracted and unsatisfactory in every way.”

— Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land