When I Talk to You

"You can't pray a lie"
- Mark Twain

A writer's life, I have always understood, is a contemplative life. A life which forces us to look inside, as we visciously poke and prod at our fleshy inner being. It is a life which makes us look back in horror at the alarmingly messy trail we've left in our wake. And hope-fully, it is an avenue through which we learn to articulate the vision that we can see before us as honestly and as best as we can.

But I'm also slowly awakening to the realisation that the contemplative life doesn't necessarily equate the praying life. I don't mean to say that the two are mutually exclusive entities. Indeed, they are not, and it is sometimes hard to know where one ends and the other begins.

Nonetheless, I have become aware, as Mark Twain so deftly puts it, that we simply can't pray a lie. I may lie in my writing - shaping and forming my thoughts into coherent arguments that would soothe a sore and guilty conscience. To present to myself, if not to anybody else, a highly edited version of my life that I would like to believe in.

But it is during my praying that I am forced to tear away the masks I have become so fond of wearing. It is in my praying that I stand as naked as Adam and Eve. And though I hide in the bushes whilst God walks through the garden, I discover of course, that not only can I not hide anything from Him, but that my nakedness hardly fazes Him at all.

It is during these times that I am made aware of what I am really thinking, come to terms with those things that gnaw insidiously at my soul, and realise that there are heartfelt hopes that I really do hold for those around me.

It is a painstaking process of learning to remain in prayer. To resist the urge to run and hide in places of false security and strength - in the workplace, in the social spaces, in the consumer world. Yes, praying is the remaining in the fearful presence of the Almighty and Holy One, but it is also standing in the place where love and grace, peace and forgiveness may begin to flow.

Amen.