Read an Excerpt
MYSTICALLY WIRED
Exploring New Realms in Prayer
By KEN WILSON Thomas Nelson
Copyright © 2009 Ken Wilson
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8499-2001-1
Chapter One
You Are Mystically Wired
You are mystically wired. Yes, you. That is, you are adapted or designed to reach beyond the limits of the ingrown self to connect with the wonder of life beyond the self, including the life of God. If that sounds too good to be true, consider the possibility that it may be too good not to be true.
This has enormous implications for your understanding and practice of prayer. We live in a time when the landscape of prayer is shifting dramatically. Not long ago, many for whom science is the most reliable form of knowing viewed prayer as a holdover from our naïve past. The mystical modes of prayer were thought to be symptoms of mental disease. Many of history's contemplatives were retroactively diagnosed as the unfortunate if happy victims of a seizure disorder.
But that perspective is fading fast. Scientists, radiologists, and neurologists have been taking the praying brain seriously of late. These researchers have performed brain-imaging studies on monks and nuns who are engaged in meditative prayer to see if they can detect any changes in the brain that may correspond to the prayer experience.
Their findings suggest two intriguing possibilities. First, when subjects report having a particular experience in prayer, it appears that they are not simply making it up. Real shifts are taking place in their brains that convey genuine experiences of something.
At least I'm not making this up. That was behind my relief upon reading their work a few years after undergoing a significant shift in my experience and understanding of prayer.
That is the first intriguing possibility, and the second is like it: we all seem to be wired for experiences that have been commonly characterized as mystical. Yes, that includes you. The praying subjects examined by the scientists were accessing portions and functions of the brain that we all have. We all seem to be mystically wired to some extent at least.
Curious, Praying
I'm no scientist, but I'm fascinated by the research being done in this area. Neither am I a mystic, but I suspect that the prayer of the mystics is more accessible to us than we've been led to believe. This compels me to try to understand what can't be fully understood and, fool that I am, attempt to put it into words-as much for my own sake as yours.
You will find out soon enough: I'm a Jesus follower, a prayer practitioner, and a pastor (in that order). I didn't grow up with a strong religious orientation. "Spirit" was a category of reality that interested me only as a kind of curiosity-like the Amazing Kreskin bending forks with "psychic energy" on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson interested me. But I'm part of a growing segment of believers who are intentionally informed by as much of the vast Christian landscape as possible: the serene liturgical part, the activist social justice part, the heartwarming evangelical part, and the "let's experience God" Pentecostal part. God is supposed to stretch our understanding, not confine it.
Belief is like a marriage partner: you fully embrace it; you learn to live with it; you also argue with it (though not usually in public); and in the arguing, if the love is working, you grow closer to your belief. I'd like to be as close as possible to mine, and I write from that place of conviction, even as I expect some of you, including those who share my beliefs, to take it all in with a grain of salt.
Matters of faith can be examined, inspected, discussed, and considered, but they can't be known from the outside. But Christianity is a "taste and see" religion, which means we can try it out before fully embracing it. I've tried to write Mystically Wired for those who like to kick the tires before taking the car for a ride.
I consider myself a slow learner in these matters. Some of my intensely spiritual friends call me "slow fizz." I suppose I've seen enough people flame out with spiritual intensity to appreciate the benefits of a slow learning curve.
Brains itching to Pray
We tend to pray whether or not we feel we are very good at it. We tend to pray whether or not we believe that prayer is a valuable thing to do. We tend to pray whether or not we believe there is anyone out there listening. Apparently we pray because we need to, as though our brains are itching to pray.
By the time we were fit to be called Homo sapiens-man, the wise-we were operating with a new capacity among living creatures: to anticipate the future with an eight-cylinder imagination that went roaring into the future to scope it out and prepare for any contingencies. With that capacity came some crippling by-products: worry, fear, anxiety, and dread regarding anticipated dangers.
At a very basic level, prayer is what the brain does, or wants to do, to cope with that conundrum. Prayer is perhaps one of the chief ways that we cope with an overactive fight-flight-freeze response. We pray to calm ourselves in the face of hostile opposition, real or anticipated.
Prayer is also what the brain does or wants to do to transcend the boundaries of the self, to sense a connection with what lies beyond the praying self. A certain kind of praying (and not all praying is alike) can empower our naturally self-centered selves to reach beyond the limits of our self-interest, which is ultimately in our best interest.
Praying to Get through the day
As one who started the discipline of daily prayer with the bogus view that prayer was a measure of holiness and therefore something I ought to be doing in order to be "a good Christian," I eventually learned what many praying people already know: that we pray in order to get through the day. Of course, prayer is like anything else we do to get through the day. We can do it more or less helpfully.
For years, my prayers were riddled with pious anxiety. Time to pray was often time to ruminate, to chew on the cud of my problems. When this is a staple of your praying, it can take a lot of willpower to sustain the habit of daily prayer. It took every ounce of mine. Being a full-time pastor who was, in effect, paid to be Christian, I felt an extra responsibility to keep working away at the discipline of prayer.
Through a series of unfortunate events, I ran out of energy to pray in a disciplined-that is to say a daily, intentional, and focused-way. Oh, I wanted to keep praying, but the effort required was more than I could muster.
I worked out a compromise with my praying self: I would find a prayer book, so that I could at least say some prayers even if I wasn't making them up from scratch; and I would explore the prayer disciplines of silence and solitude, in hopes of giving my weary brain a rest.
"Easy Does It" Prayer
Prayer with these aids was easier than prayer without them. This discovery came with a twinge of guilt. Perverse as it may sound, I felt that it was cheating. I feared that my aided prayers were somehow less authentic than my spontaneous ones. I imagined that I would soon regain my former strength and go back to a more arduous prayer style.
Instead, using these aids, I began to slip into a mode of prayer that was too lovely to dismiss. Prayer was working for me as never before. Prayer became more deeply restful, restorative, and strangely, creative. I no longer had to make myself pray. Instead, I looked forward to praying and schemed to do more of it.
Learning to pray can be like learning to slip out of that old party favor: the Chinese finger trap made of woven bamboo. You place your index fingers in opposing ends of the tube and push. You're in. When you try to extract them, the weave tightens. You're trapped.
Ah, but you're smart, so you learn! Easy does it-gently push your fingers back in until the weave loosens, then gently twist as you extract them. Voila!
Easy does it every time.
The brain is equipped to pray in wonderful ways, but we have to learn to gently and persistently cooperate with the way the brain works. The same applies to tapping into many of the brain's marvelous capacities. Take language, for example. Most brains come equipped with an innate capacity for sophisticated language. Nevertheless we need steady exposure to language and plenty of space to gain proficiency, which we do haltingly, bit by bit.
The ancient disciplines of prayer-the biblical disciplines of prayer-are designed to help us cooperate with the way the brain is innately equipped to pray. We gain proficiency by gentle, persistent practice.
A Shifting Landscape of Prayer
Anyone who seeks to sustain a life of prayer soon realizes that there are times when prayer scratches the itch that got you praying in the first place-and times when you wonder if praying makes any difference at all.
I had experienced blessed seasons of prayer before, but nothing like what this new "easy does it" approach, with prayer aids, facilitated. For about a year and a half I was in a kind of wonderland of prayer. It was, I suppose, a growth spurt, or perhaps a year and a half in intensive care.
Whatever it was, prayer was different. I noticed more wonder when my eyes were open, detecting God's winking-at-me presence in the so-called ordinary things of this world. Relationships with key people in my life were affected by what was taking place in prayer.
Prayer began to feel less like mental activity and more like going somewhere, in spite of the obvious fact that I was sitting in my usual praying spot. None of what I'd learned from the "how to pray" or "have to pray" books-the ones I stopped reading because they dulled my appetite for prayer-had prepared me for this. So I began to read a few works by or about the old Christian mystics. The language they used was remote, almost intentionally inaccessible; but for all that, it felt as though we were sampling the same manner of experience, at least in the broadest sense. This was despite my having mixed feelings about the word mystical.
I've since realized that many people have deeply moving experiences in prayer that they rarely speak about because they simply don't have an adequate vocabulary and fear being misunderstood. These people are often not the most pious either.
The shift in my praying affected my reading of the Bible. I saw things I had never noticed before: the apostle Paul, for example was a flaming mystic whose emerging theology was rooted in divine encounters in prayer-to say nothing of Jesus or the people who wrote the Gospels, Luke and John in particular.
It's a bit like buying a new car: you see the same model everywhere you go and wonder why you never noticed that before.
Years later, I'm convinced of three things. First, it is possible to learn to pray in new ways; we can fall into praying ruts, but we don't have to stay there. Second, the kind of praying that was once thought to be reserved for unusually gifted (or afflicted) people called mystics is more accessible to ordinary people than previously thought. And third, the pressures of modern life, despite the modern conveniences, have heightened our need to learn and practice some of the ancient, biblical prayer disciplines.
Exploring Mystically Wired
In the first four chapters, we will explore some new ways to understand the vast landscape of prayer. Much of our difficulty praying has nothing to do with our supposed lack of effort or some intrinsic inability to pray. We lack a coherent framework for prayer. The thought world of the Bible is a world apart from the one we inhabit. As a result we have a great deal of trouble making sense of prayer, and this hinders our praying. Much of your difficulty praying, in other words, is not your fault.
In chapter 2, You Are Mystically Challenged, we'll explore why we feel so inept when it comes time to pray. In chapter 3, The Year of Praying Differently, I'll tell the story of how I stumbled into new-to-me landscapes of prayer. This will provide a foretaste of some of the prayer vistas and prayer disciplines that we will consider in more depth later in the book.
In chapter 4, Where Do We Go When We Pray? I'll suggest a way that we can reimagine the heavenly realms. We pray in or in relation to them but their existence as true realms can seem dubious to our modern minds. But the old story of faith and the new story of science are reassembling in some exciting ways, and it's just in the nick of time to help us pray.
In these first four chapters, don't think too much about how you might put any of this into practice. There will be time for that later. First, just consider some fresh ways of understanding prayer. To that end, you won't find any practical tips for prayer until the end of chapter 4.
Chapters 5 through 10, however, are loaded with things you can try to explore new realms in prayer. Keep your eye out for these prayer disciplines in particular: silence, stillness, prayer at intervals through the day, meditative practices including use of the Jesus Prayer, reflecting on scripture, and something I call "the prayer of love and remembrance."
I hope to help you appreciate how well these disciplines fit how our brains actually function. I think this understanding will help you practice each discipline more intelligently and motivate you to gently persist in forming some new-to-you prayer habits to enhance your praying.
These disciplines are designed to promote praying that is connected, calming, at intervals, in-depth, and eye-opening. We're mystically wired, and there's no reason not to get on with it.
Chapter Two
You Are Mystically Challenged
"Take the next forty-five minutes to be alone with God."
I was on a short-term mission trip with my daughter and her youth group. The leaders tossed this instruction at the kids as though it were a simple thing to do, like brushing your teeth.
Time alone with God for forty-five minutes? How is that possible? It sounds hard. Why does it seem so hard to be alone with God? Because, in addition to being mystically wired, we're mystically challenged.
I grew up thinking that spiritual experience was something that came crashing in from another planet, another world, another order of being. Coming to faith meant becoming aware of a realm within or beyond myself that I didn't grow up recognizing-the realm of spirit, the realm of supernature to my all-too-familiar nature.
Bolstered by a few respected guides like C. S. Lewis, steeped as he was in a spirit-infused medieval mind-set,1 I forced myself to blindly trust that "spirit" was indeed a legitimate category of human experience. But alone with my thoughts, I couldn't help but wonder if I was only fooling myself.
If I had applied the Bible's view of the human body to prayer, I might have been able to acknowledge that whatever I was experiencing, spiritual or otherwise, was happening in and mediated by my body, with a special assist from my brain. Instead, I assumed that an altogether different part of me, the spirit part, was functioning almost independent of my brain.
That's part of the reason we feel mystically challenged. We think we're supposed to do our praying with something we're unsure of: our "spirit." When we pray, it feels like our brain is doing the praying when it ought to be something other than our brain doing the praying.
Maybe we're not trying hard enough.
Too Hard to Pray?
Effort is a confusing concept when applied to prayer. Of course it takes effort to pray, inasmuch as prayer is something that happens in and with our bodies and is therefore an activity that burns calories. Prayer requires a kind of mental effort, and mental effort can be tiring. (The brain uses more energy than you might think-about 20 percent of our caloric intake fuels the brain.)
Scientists have been puzzled for years about why we yawn, but now it seems that we yawn to cool off our brains when they have been concentrating too hard. But we don't have to cool off our brains while we are sleeping. The brain doesn't stop working while we sleep; it keeps our essential body functions functioning without any concentrated effort on our part. Why can't prayer be more like that?
Though prayer does require mental effort, there are many different kinds of mental effort: concentration, attention, and intention, to name a few. It takes a different kind of effort to relax than to do math.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from MYSTICALLY WIRED by KEN WILSON Copyright © 2009 by Ken Wilson. Excerpted by permission.
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