, and, as you know, a spiritual brother of the Desert Elders. On May 15, 200, Tippett interviewed three people of prayer, the third being Roberta Bondi, who shared her appreciation for the witness and life of the Desert Mothers and Fathers. I thought you might enjoy reading their conversation. Here's that part of the interview as
Ms. Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett, and this is Speaking of Faith from American Public Media. Today, "Approaching Prayer" in three very different traditions and lives.
(Music excerpt from "Veni Sancte Spiritus" from Chant, performed by The Benedictine Monks Santo Domingo de Silos)
Ms. Tippett: This is an eighth-century prayer in Latin, "Veni Sancte Spiritus," "Come, Holy Spirit," sung by the Spanish monks of Santo Domingo de Silos. Monastics, monks and nuns, pray ritually many times each day for the world, they say, for all the rest of us. And many in the West are increasingly drawn to ancient contemplative practices.
(Music excerpt from "Veni Sancte Spiritus" from Chant, performed by The Benedictine Monks Santo Domingo de Silos)
My next guest, theologian Roberta Bondi, is part of this movement. A professor emeritus at Emory University, she's written beloved, practical books about how she learned to pray when she discovered the writings of the earliest Christian monastics.
Prof. Bondi: Sometimes it seems when I'm talking to people about prayer that one of the main points I have to keep making over and over is there is no right way. The important thing is to find your way, and this was something that I learned from the Abbas and Ammas of the ancient desert.
Ms. Tippett: Abbas and Ammas were Christians from all walks of life who, around the fifth and sixth centuries, retreated from a church, which they felt had been corrupted by its own power. They went into the deserts of Egypt and Syria to pray. Politicians, generals, and peasants sought their advice on matters both spiritual and secular. Abba and Amma are Semitic words for father and mother, and their insights were collected by their followers and passed down across centuries as the sayings of the fathers and mothers. The theology of the desert transformed Roberta Bondi's image of God. The Abbas and Ammas imagined a God more understanding, more compassionate than human beings ever are towards each other or towards themselves. They were Christianity's first mystics and psychotherapists rolled into one. Their eccentric, earthy sayings changed Roberta Bondi's way of thinking about religion. Still, she held prayer itself at a scholarly distance until a crisis of confidence early in her marriage to her husband, Richard. One day, as often, he was late coming home.
Prof. Bondi: I was sitting there on the couch and all of a sudden the Abbas from the ancient desert started saying to me, "Roberta, Roberta, we have something to say to you," and I said, "Shut up and leave me alone. I'm worrying." And they said, "Oh, oh, no. Come on now. Come on. Listen." "Shh, shh, I'm worrying. Leave me alone." And finally I said, "All right. All right. What do you have to say?" And they said to me, "Well, now, you know that the main thing we're doing out here in the desert is prayer, and you have spent a lot of time studying us and working on us, and you might consider whether this might be something for you." And I said to them, "Oh, come on now. Look, I am a rational, reasonable woman, and I'm an academic, and this is, what you're suggesting, just is not really for me." And the answer to that was, "Ho, ho, ho, you might also consider as part of this that you have put Richard into the place of God for you. You know how we say that no one or no thing can fill that hole in your life except God, that your identity rests only in God and that all other loves come out of that, and that no human being can ever fill that. Of course you feel the way you do." So I was very embarrassed, because I knew, of course, instantly that they were right. So I said, "OK. All right. All right. I'll try it."
So, well, first, I let Richard come home and then yelled at him a little bit. And then I went out and got a book that had a pattern of prayer in it that was similar to what was used in the early church, and that was what started me on my discipline of prayer. And I can say several things that I learned out of that that I like to share with others, and one of the things is you don't need any kind of noble reason or highfalutin or serious reason. Any reason to begin a pattern of prayer is a good reason, because prayer is about everyday life. It isn't the great spiritual mystery that is too high and lofty for the likes of us.
Ms. Tippett: You often talk about the importance of just showing up for prayer.
Prof. Bondi: We often have a kind of notion as part of this highfalutin, noble picture of ourselves as prayers that when we pray we need to be completely attentive and we need to be fully engaged and we need to be concentrating and we need to be focused. But the fact is, if prayer is our end of a relationship with God, that's not the way we are with the people we love a large portion of the time. We simply are in their presence. We're going about our lives at the same time in each other's presence aware and sustained by each other, but not much more than that.
Ms. Tippett: Well, let me tell you a story about when I first started teaching in the seminary where I teach now. And I would just find when I came home at the end of the day I would be so exhausted that I could hardly contain myself. And I would be met at the car, usually, pulling into the driveway by my two children and my husband, who would all come out to tell me all the things that had gone wrong in the day, like the washing machine had overflowed and the rug in the dining room was soaking wet. And I would think, "Oh, I just want to go back to school." I would come into the house, and Richard and I would fix supper, and then we would sit down and eat and I would fall asleep with my head in the mashed potatoes. But the fact is that I knew all along that, however it was, it was better that I was there than that I wasn't there, that my family needed me, that being part of a family means showing up for meals. And prayer is like that. However we are, however we think we ought to be in prayer, the fact is we just need to show up and do the best we can do. It's like being in a family.
(Sound bite of music)
Ms. Tippett: Theologian Roberta Bondi. Here's a saying of the desert father Abba Zeno.
Reader: "If a man wants God to hear his prayer quickly, then before he prays for anything else, even his own soul, when he stands and stretches out his hands towards God, he must pray with all his heart for his enemies. Through this action, God will hear everything that he asks."
(Sound bite of music)
Prof. Bondi: You know, one of the Abbas was asked one time which was the most difficult virtue to acquire, and he went through the whole list of one virtue after another, and then he concluded by saying, "But prayer is the hardest of the virtues because prayer is warfare to the last breath." In prayer, we are likely, and it's certainly what we want, to see ourselves as we really are. We can't expect that we are going to be healed of the deep wounds of our heart without seeing what those wounds are. It's also not a peaceful activity when we discover or come face to face with the reality of the world.
Ms. Tippett: Talk about some of those images you find in scripture that it's all right for us to struggle and even fight with God and even nag and demand things that feel important to us.
Prof. Bondi: Well, one of my favorite images from scripture since the time I was a child was always Jacob wrestling with the angel.
(Sound bite of music)
Reader: "That same night Jacob arose and took his two wives and his two maids and his 11 children and crossed the ford at the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched the hollow of his thigh, and Jacob's thigh was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, 'Let me go, for the day is breaking.' But Jacob said, 'I will not let you go unless you bless me.' And he said to him, 'What is your name?' And he said, 'Jacob.' Then he said, 'Your name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with man and have prevailed,' and there he blessed him."
Prof. Bondi: This is, I think, my very favorite because it has all the elements of real prayer: God sneaking up on Jacob, you know, because it's really God, this angel is, sneaking up on Jacob unexpectedly in the night, which is often when God comes to us with anxiety-producing information about ourselves or about our situation. Jacob's absolute persistence in saying, "Look, all right, you started this. I'm not letting you go." And his absolute, steadfast commitment to the fact that if he hung in there, there would be a blessing in it, which is my experience over and over and over. But wrestling is the way it is a lot of the time.
I have a friend who plays in the Atlanta Symphony, and someone asked him once what it was like to play piccolo in a great symphony like the Atlanta Symphony, and he said, "Well, it's actually long stretches of boredom interspersed with short periods of pure terror." And I wouldn't say it quite like that, that prayer is like that, but I would say that prayer is long periods of ordinary shared life together with intense periods of wrestling with really serious stuff that can scare us to death but can also bring us into real life with God and real life with ourselves in a way that we can't otherwise have it.
(Sound bite of music)
Ms. Tippett: Roberta Bondi is Professor Emeritus of Church History at the Candler School of Theology of Emory University. Her books include Memories of God and To Pray and to Love.
To end this hour, we have a reading on prayer taken from the writings of poet and memoirist Patricia Hampl.
Reader: What is prayer?
I make a list:
Praise
Gratitude
Begging/pleading/cutting deals
Fruitless whining and puling
Focus
There the list breaks off; I had found my word. Prayer only looks like an act of language; fundamentally it is a position, a placement of oneself. Focus. Get there, and all that's left to say is the words. They come: from ancient times (here, the round of Psalms, wheeling through the seasons endlessly in the Office), from the surprisingly eloquent heart (taciturn Thomas last night with his intercession, precise as a poet), from the gush and chatter of the day's detail longing to be rendered.
So what is silence?
Silence speaks, the contemplatives say. But really, I think, silence sorts. An ordering instinct sends people into the hush where the voice can be heard. This is the sorting intelligence of poetry, marked by the unbroken certainty of rhythm, perfect pitch, the placing of things in right order as in metrical form. Not rigid categories, but the recognition of a shape always there but ordinarily obscured by—what? By noise, which is ourselves trying to do the sorting in an order that may be a heroic effort but is bound to be a fantasy.
(Sound bite of music)
Tomorrow we begin a new Church Year, with the First Sunday in Advent. The Gospel to be read in many of our churches will be from St. Mark, Chapter 13: 24-37:
