When you got nuthin’, Part 1

We’re still out here on the road, traveling between Pascha and Pentecost.

We’re working on getting our Liturgical Long Hauler Certification—and, OK, yeah, there’s not an actual certificate or anything like that, but the world needs folks who can pray persistently.

We need more LLHs, too, because, even though we’re raising money to build a new temple, the intercessions that undergird that project are actually even more important than the funding.

But the Practice of Long and Persistent Prayer also generates lots of challenges. So, for just about every Persistence Pointer we’ve shared, we’ve also had to do a little Pushback Prep, and that’s what we’re going to focus on in this post.

Because we’ve been talking about the importance of keeping a list, and, several times during that discussion, we’ve mentioned how that practice will help us keep some emotional distance when we are praying.

And each time, right away, folks just want to know: Why shouldn’t we want to be emotionally invested in our prayers?

So, let’s back up and approach the issue like this:

There are things that we do every single day that just have to be done. We prepare meals; we pay bills; we go to work; we change diapers; we help the children with their homework; we take out the trash.

And if we are heathy and functional adults, we do those things regardless of how we may be feeling at the moment. I mean, sure, it’s great if we get a surge of satisfaction when we are cooking breakfast, but that’s not why we do it. We cook breakfast so our family will be able to start the day with some good food.

Our prayers work the very same way.

So, just as we balance our bank account and post the bills whether we feel like it or not, we should be able to offer our intercessions whether we’re having a really good day or a really bad day.

Just as we don’t expect any sort of emotional high after folding all the laundry, we should not think that our prayer time has been a bust if we don’t walk away feeling euphoric.

The bottom line is that we will be a whole lot better at persistent prayer if we don’t index those intercessions to our emotional life.

Of course, our sisters and brothers in American Christianity take just the opposite approach. In those versions of the Faith, prayer is basically an Exercise in Emotion. It’s an opportunity for folks to express their feelings and get those emotions validated.

But, in Holy Orthodoxy, we don’t regard our feelings as a divine feedback loop. What we believe is that, just like everything else in our lives, our emotions are to be offered up, in gratitude, to the Most Holy Trinity. So, whatever we may be experiencing—anger, fear, shame, wonder, relief, excitement—we don’t try to indulge and enhance those feelings; we don’t try to deny and resist them. What we do is simply give those emotions to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

But here’s the really cool part.

When we offer all that to the Most Holy Trinity, what we receive, in return, are things like joy and peace and hope and love.

And, immediately, you’re thinking, “Wait a minute! Aren’t those feelings too?”

That’s the way most American Christians read the Holy Scriptures. They figure that when St Paul lists the “fruit of the Spirit” in Galatians 5.22-23, the apostle is just talking about the same emotions we experience from time to time.

But our feelings are an intricate and complicated expression of biology and chemistry and cultural history and conditioned learning. What St Paul is talking about is a direct experience of the Divine Life of the Most Holy Trinity. And one of the most important ways we open ourselves up to that Divine Life is by regularly offering up all of our feelings.

Here’s how our Lord and Master put it: “He that is faithful in that which is least, is also faithful in much” (St Luke 16.10). So, if we want Christ Jesus to entrust us with the “true riches”, then we need to give Him our emotional life.

Which sounds like an exaggeration. After all, does the King of Glory really want our envy and our hatred and our lust?

Actually, He does, and we talked about that back during Great Lent.

But offering all of our emotions to the Most Holy Trinity does not mean that our intercessions will be cold and austere. We will still feel the love when we pray for our children; we will still feel the resentment when we pray for our enemies; we will continue to feel that mixture of guilt and affection when we intercede for our former sexual partners; we will always feel that deep down anxiety when we name our fears in the presence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

What will be different is that we will now have something to do with those emotions; we will pass them on to our Patron Saint or our Guardian Angel or to the Mother of God, and those feelings will then be received upon the Heavenly Altar as nothing less than a “savor of spiritual sweetness”.

But what if you just don’t have any emotions to offer?

What if you get to the point in your life where you’re so beaten up and beaten down that you’re just not feeling a thing?

We’ve all been there, for sure. So, we’ll tackle that next piece of Pushback Prep in our next post.

To get us to that post a whole lot quicker, we’ve got some Southern Boogie from Skynyrd.

And while you’re cruising on that tune, why not look into joining us in offering the Akathist for a New Temple (PDF/video)? You can also pick up some CSSB merch, upgrade your subscription to paid, commission an image in the Calming Room of our temple, or make a direct donation to our Building Fund.

We’ll catch you down the Road.