Yesterday I read the following line in Andrew Wilson's new book on happiness:
A nineteenth-century journalist compared happiness to a butterfly that escapes you when you chase it but might alight on you if you stop chasing and just sit down quietly.
and sixty seconds later a butterfly landed on my knee. No word of a lie. I was lying in a hammock on holiday, reading a book about happiness and a butterfly rested on me as if to underline what I'd just read. I didn't snap a photo of it but I'm telling you it happened. I shout-whispered to one of my sons to come over and see, but he came too close and it flew away. I don't think a butterfly has ever settled on me spontaneously before, the fact that it happened when it did kind of spooked me.
At this point I thought it best to at least consider that God might be wanting to speak to me through this. Is there some deeper meaning in it perhaps, an answer to a longing in my soul perhaps, or was it just a cosmic fluke and lucky happenstance?
I lay in the hammock thinking about this for a few seconds before concluding, along with the tenor of the book I was reading, that the reason for it all was: delight. If it had any great meaning at all, it was yet one more display of God's delight in the things he's made, an invitation to 'enter into the joy of my master' (Matthew 25:23). You see, moments like this express the cheerfulness and childlike wonder of the eternally happy God, and if that isn't a satisfying enough answer then maybe we've misunderstood who God is:
He causes grass to grow for the livestock
and provides crops for man to cultivate,
producing food from the earth,
wine that makes human hearts glad –
making his face shine with oil –
and bread that sustains human hearts.
Psalm 104:14
The psalmist seems to think that wine's ability to make our hearts glad isn't just a happy by-product of creation but an inherent purpose within the thing itself. God gifts us good things and he endows those things with a fittedness for us to enjoy, he 'makes them up' (the impact of his world on our senses) as a man might make up a story - to quote C.S. Lewis. I love how Chesterton put it: Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun, and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
I realised that I needn't ponder nature's speech for long, poring over what it might possibly mean like some pagan general the night before a battle. And neither do I need to settle for the materialist's answer of 'meaningless'. Instead I can say, along with the psalmist, that the world overflows with God's delight, that he is the happiest being within and without the created universe.
Now to the title of this blog, my prayers and their 'backfiring'.
Lately I've taken to writing my prayers down in a journal, using it as a chance to slow my brain down enough to draw deeper parts of me to the surface. I've been sort of, using prayer (which might also be part of the problem), as part of an attempt to pursue better emotional health. Generally it's helping, I feel healthier. Slowing, writing, blessing, it all makes me feel more present in my praying especially if I then read it all aloud. However I've also noticed ways in which it isn't helping. I've been ruminating a lot recently, replaying grievances and struggling to move past stuck feelings of betrayal or failure. The episode with the butterfly and insights about God's happiness helped me to realise something, something that's fairly obvious once you think about it, that prayer can easily get bogged down when it spends too much time in inner space thinking about itself. Using prayer as a space to regurgitate my feelings or my reactions to things, even when I'm bringing them to God, can make my feelings and my thinkings bigger rather than smaller. There's really no joy there. After all 'nothing good lives in me' (Rom. 7:18).
Consider the structure of the Lord's Prayer for example. Before we're invited to pray about our needs we're given twenty-three words to pray that have a Godward, heaven-focused direction. That ought to give us a clue about what makes for healthy and effective prayer. When we forget this, our prayers falter and we feel our tyres spin beneath us. Prayer becomes preoccupied with internal dilemmas.
Joy, worship, delight, gratitude, they're all important means of pushing me out of myself and propelling me up into the heavens. "Come up here" the angel says in Revelation 4, and that's exactly where we must go with our prayers. When my 'I' becomes too large, when I get stuck in my head, that's almost exactly the problem - my head, my thoughts, my regurgitating my life and its events. Instead, when I pray like Jesus taught me to, when I look up and out at God and marvel at his goodness and grace, I find that I start to feel better and become freer too. Journal your prayers but begin with delight, gratitude and awe. Write poems, scatter a page with adjectives and superlatives about who God is and about all that God has made. Marvel at the mystery revealed: Christ in me the hope of glory. Christ in me, not me in me.
In another recent episode of prayer one morning I looked up to spy one of my sons goofing around in his bedroom. He was throwing himself onto his bed, practising dramatic deaths and feeling his mattress spring him back to life. In other words he was exulting in being a child, without an intrusive or inhibitive thought in sight. This is worship, this is enjoying the good gifts God gives us.
I realised in that hammock that I don't need to interrogate events in nature, straining them to yield their meaning. If God wants to speak directive words to me I have his Spirit, his word, and Christ's body the church. Which frees creation up to do what it does best - tell tales of the glory of God and invite me in to my master's happiness. Nature sings songs of the Father's delight, it reflects the Son's beauty and it transcribes the Spirit's laughter writing it longhand on my heart.
We Christians sing a lot, not only because we of all people have something to sing about, but because it's the healthiest posture to pray from. Worship, delight, laughter, exulting, adoration, marvelling, all of it lifts me higher than any navel gazing ever could. Gazing into my Beloved's face, wonderstruck by his goodness, frees me and heals me in equal measure.
My prayers get traction when my life takes on a bigger meaning than mere worry could ever lead me into.