Prayer and the Undress of the Soul

Fiona:    You know we’re always happy to see you, Donkey.

Shrek:    But Fiona and I are married now. We need a little time, you know, to be together … just with each other … alone.

Donkey: Say no more! You don’t have to worry about a thing. I will always be here to make sure nobody bothers you.

Shrek:    Donkey.

Donkey: Yes, roomie?

Shrek:    You’re bothering me.

Shrek 2 (2004)

 

Look at this terribly sweet and innocent Victorian kiddo kneeling to pray at her (or his? I have no idea) bedside. I think there’s a good deal to be said for kneeling to pray at one’s bedside.

I mean, I was only in the prayer room in the first place because I felt a bit weird about praying in my room while my roommate was in there as well. Not that I would have prayed aloud in front of her or anything, much as I value praying aloud for the focus and clarity it so often enables;¹ but I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel like something one should do with others present. And since the building in which our room is situated is, happily, equipped with a prayer room, it seemed sensible to offer said prayer room an opportunity to fulfil its intended purpose.

But something about it did strike me as funny when one of the other conference delegates staying in the house, presumably harbouring similar intentions to my own, began to open the door and, upon sighting me kneeling there headscarved and probably only about as far through as ‘your kingdom come’, immediately blurted an embarassed apology and shut it again as quickly as possible – pretty much exactly as I might have expected him to react if he’d walked in on me in a state of undress.

I’m not at all censuring or ridiculing that reaction; I would have done the same in his shoes, and more to the point, as I said, I was only in the prayer room in the first place because I wanted some privacy, so it was hardly any affront to me for that privacy to be maintained. Still, it did get me thinking: why is prayer this private thing that we don’t want to do in the presence of others, nor impose our presence upon others as they do it? Is my reluctance on these fronts a legitimate attitude stemming from what God has revealed and commanded, or just another foothold the world has in me, another way in which, to my shame, I am ashamed of the gospel?

Well, we can kick of by saying that we are actually commanded to pray in private: “when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret”. Plus, Jesus was always going off by himself to pray – like, he didn’t just pop down the corridor to the prayer room; he literally climbed mountains in order to get some alone-time with his Father, and all right, fine, mountains have other significances, but I think the point stands. So praying in private – and, by extension, letting our fellow-believers pray in private – is definitely something we should be doing. But why? The context of the command to pray in secret may help us here: in the previous verse, Jesus denounces those who pray in public places in order that people might see them undertaking this pious activity and think well of them. They’re hypocrites, he says; don’t be like them.²

The thing is, other people might well be fooled into thinking we’re terribly good and pious if we put together pretty-sounding prayers in their hearing, but God isn’t buying it for a moment. He knows our going out and coming in, our sitting and rising, and before a word of prayer so much as reaches our lips, he already knows it completely; he searches all hearts and understands all minds; he looks not on the outward appearance but on the inner self. He sees every way in which our conduct fails to match up with the way we present ourselves. He shines piercing light into every nook and cranny of who we are. There’s nothing we can hide behind or cover ourselves with to avoid his perception; before him, the soul is, necessarily, in a state of undress.³

Praying in front of other people inevitably lends itself to performance, to trying to win glory from a human audience – like, you know how everyone in the prayer circle is always kind of competing for the most enthusiastic set of ‘amen’s? Lord have mercy on us – but there can be no such hypocrisy when one is alone with God. One is wholly exposed in all one’s corruption, and has no choice but to be brutally honest about it. And this, I think, accounts to some degree for why praying in private is of such critical importance: only when alone with God do we truly come face to face with what we’re like – and only if we continue to see what we’re like, how sinful and weak we are, will we continue to seek forgiveness for our sinfulness and to depend on our Redeemer in our weakness.

But it’s better than that. Remember how when the first man and woman ate the fruit and became suddenly aware of their nakedness – that their fleshly nature was a source of shame before God – their initial reaction was to cover themselves, and to hide from him? It’s obvious enough from what I said above that that was never going to work, but God did more than see through the attempted covering to their true nature; he shed the blood of a sacrifice and he clothed them.⁴ On one level it’s true that we’re all in a state of undress before God, but he doesn’t merely perceive our shame and leave us in it: he sheds the blood of a sacrifice, the precious and perfect blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and he clothes us. We are not ashamed before him; we wear Christ’s righteousness as a covering, and not a covering like the fig-leaves of our hypocritical performances, but a clean and sure and effective covering. This, rather than our shame and undress, is what God chooses to see when he looks at us.⁵

 

Like, some credit at least to the first humans’ sewing skills, because I have no idea how you make this jazz into a plausible outfit.

And so, as our undress before God is real, so is our clothedness. And so, as it is vital to pray out of the sight and hearing of others, so it is vital to pray together with them, hypocrites as we shall doubtless prove ourselves when we do. God our Father sees us as the very righteousness of his own Son and equips us to grow into that identity – gradually to care less about whether our prayers are enthusiastically ‘amen’ed by our brothers and sisters, and more about whether they are building them up in the faith. Plus, we’re to confess our sins to one another, that is, to reveal to one another the undress and the shame of our souls. After all, we’re all one body – one great temple of the Holy Spirit, even as we’re each individually a temple of him too (still blows my tiny mind that God who governs the universe should have made his home in me) – and one body shares one state of undress, as it were. If we’re all already covered by the blood of Jesus, there’s no need to seek further, necessarily inferior means to cover ourselves from one another’s eyes. Whatever our sin and shame may be, we are committed to forgive and bear with one another as God forgives and bears with each of us.⁶

So what does this all mean for my instinctive insistence on privacy in order to pray? Well, it’s definitely right that I should be seeking to spend time alone with God, and I’m sure there are plenty of good reasons for that beyond the issues of hypocrisy that I dealt with above, not least because Jesus prayed alone a lot despite the fact that he was never hypocritical in front of others. But at the same time, my motivation for privacy in prayer should never be shame, because God has covered my shame and my undress in clothing me with the blood of Jesus. If God my Creator and Judge has perceived the fulness of my sinfulness and chosen to break its power over me once and for all, then the possibility of my brothers and sisters perceiving certain aspects of my sinfulness can surely hold no great dread for me. Obviously all things are to be done for edification – no mere honesty for honesty’s sake – but sanctification should certainly move me towards greater openness with others about what I’m really like, or in other words, away from hypocrisy.

Before God we are undressed, and yet clothed; prayer is an intensely private thing, and yet just as vitally a corporate one; our sins are covered forever and ever, and yet we are to expose them in the sight of God and his Church. What a strange time this age of grace is, strewn everywhere with ostensible contradictions as we sojourn in the present world as citizens of the next. But for now we keep praying, whether alone or assembled, that we would conduct ourselves as good ambassadors of Christ, and that he would hurry back soon to claim his throne: your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.

Footnotes

¹ Thanks to Andy Croft at Soul Survivor for that pro tip. Genuinely revolutionised my prayer life. Try it if you haven’t.

² That’s Matthew 6, of course, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+6&version=ESVUK; flip forward to chapter 14 for an example of Jesus going up a mountain by himself to pray.

³ Bits of scripture I’m riffing on in this paragraph include Psalm 39, 1 Chronicles 28:9 and Jeremiah 17:10, 1 Samuel 16:7 (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:12, by the way), and John 3. Have the Psalm, because it’s  insanely awesome and I love it: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ps+139&version=ESVUK.

⁴ Like, you already knew it was Genesis 3, but here’s a link anyway: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+3&version=ESVUK.

⁵ Certain bits of Revelation 3 are pretty relevant here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation+3&version=ESVUK.

⁶ Just so you know I’m not pulling this stuff out of the air, I’ll cite James 5:16, the middle section of 1 Corinthians 12, 1 Corinthians 6:19, 1 Peter 2:5, and Colossians 3:13, but I hope it’s apparent that what I’m saying comes out of a broader picture of scripture than can be indicated by plucking out a few specific verses.