The Two Prayers We Can Pray

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It seems like now would be a good time to go back to the basics. There are two basic ways to pray that Jesus describes in a parable about two men who went into the temple to pray (Luke 18:9-14). One man says, “I thank you God that I’m not like other people.” The other man says, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.” I mostly pray the first prayer. Not literally. Because that would be too obvious. But too often underneath whatever self-deprecation and vulnerability I’ve packaged my words with is the need to congratulate myself that I’m better than other people. There are so many subtle forms that this prayer can take.

I thank you God that I’m not like those people who thank God they’re not like other people.

I thank you God that I understand clearly how much of a wretched sinner I am (unlike those fundamentalists who pretend they believe that).

I thank you God that I can recite scripture in my prayers to show the evangelicals I’m praying with that I’m just as biblical as they are.

I thank you God for giving me such wise and perfectly intersectional Facebook statuses.

Sometimes I mix the two prayers together:

Lord, have mercy on us wretched white people, especially those other white people who aren’t asking your forgiveness for the sins of our race like I do.

I have a really hard time distinguishing between prophetic duty and hubris. I really do think I’m supposed to speak out against falsehood and injustice. But too often, I’m praying the wrong prayer. Maybe I’m the only one with this problem. But I see what seems like a whole lot of self-justifying bravado going on around me. There’s so much righteous outrage in the air right now. And there are many things to be legitimately angry about. White supremacy. Liberal elitism. Environmental racism. Moral depravity. Colonialism. The loss of any concept of the sacred.

I don’t want to denigrate anything that anyone else is saying or doing about the legitimate causes you’re fighting for. I don’t want to make presumptions about your motives. But I do think that one of the greatest and most neglected weapons that Christians have against the evil in the world is our own repentance. What would it look like if the place each of us started was to ask for God’s mercy on our personal sin? What if that were actually the starting point in our quest to repair the world?

Eastern Orthodox Christianity promotes what they call the Jesus prayer as one of the most powerful catalysts for spiritual transformation. It’s based on the prayer from Jesus’ parable: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Many Orthodox have prayer ropes with more than a hundred knots they go through multiple times a day, saying that prayer over and over again.

I got a set of prayer beads from an Orthodox priest about five years ago. And I started saying the Jesus prayer with them every day in Greek. It somehow felt more sacred to say it in its original biblical language. But I’m realizing that I probably need to switch over to English because I’m not pondering the words deliberately enough. I’ve learned that you can say a prayer aloud hundreds of times without allowing it to temper your heart. Or maybe I would be even worse if I didn’t pray the Jesus prayer.

Any ritual can lose its meaning. The larger question is: how can we speak our truths from a place of humility? Can we say the Jesus prayer in our minds as the preamble to whatever critique needs to be made of whichever fellow sinner needs to be corrected? How can I make everything I say and do look like the mercy I need from God and the mercy I desperately want to become?

I don’t know how to fix the world’s problems, but I can say the Jesus prayer. More importantly, I can try to live it.

The Rev. Morgan Guyton serves as the director of the NOLA Wesley Foundation, which is the United Methodist campus ministry at Tulane and Loyola University in New Orleans, LA. He blogs at Mercy Not Sacrifice on Patheos.com, from which this post is republished with the author's permission.