An Interview with Jane Vennard

Jane Vennard teaches prayer spirituallity at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver. She leads workshops and retreats, serves as a spiritual director, and is a member of the Face to Face advisory board. This is the first of a two-part interview on prayer and spiritual direction with editor Rich Brown.

Most of us were taught to pray with our eyes closed, head bowed, and hands folded. What happens when prayer occurs with head raised and eyes and hands open?
That’s often an exercise I do with people at the beginning of a prayer workshop, so they begin to open up the possibilities that there’s not only one way to pray, there’s not only one position. Of course, it’s different for different people. When I open my eyes and raise my head it changes my breathing. I get more breath simply because I’m not bowing my head. More importantly, though, my gaze falls on God’s created world. And so, when we bow our heads, we act out the scripture of going into our closet, and closing the door to pray. But for me so much of prayer needs to be in the midst of the world. When our eyes are wide open we see all of God’s creation, whether we’re in the forest, on a mountaintop, or in the inner city.

When you move between those two extremes—the secret closet and exposed to all creation—how does that change your relationship with God?
They’re different aspects of the same possible relationship with God. It’s a little bit like human relationships. Sometimes we have the very quiet, private, secret, intimate moments with someone we love. And at other times we want to run with them through the world. I think our prayer life needs both, because if we only do one or the other we miss some new ways of deepening that relationship with God.

It’s not unusual to be raised in a church to value prayer as an intellectual exercise—the mind’s at work and the rest of the body is at rest or, at least, not drawn into the experience. How do you begin to break out of that restrictive mold?
It is restrictive, honoring only one aspect of our relationship with God. Now it’s a wonderful thing to have an intellectual relationship with God, but we may simply change our body position to bring in new elements. It may be talking and listening to God while we’re in motion. I have a friend who swims her prayers, and she says it’s absolutely wonderful because she has the feeling in her body of being held up by God. It’s reminiscent of scriptural passages of falling into God’s loving arms. At the same time, she says you have to breathe, and so she prays in rhythm with her breathing and the action of her arms and legs in the water. That moves prayer out of her head and into her whole body. For many people, it’s simply a matter of being given permission to try putting their body in different positions and in motion to find new ways to pray.

Some people use prayer beads of some sort. Of course, that’s long been part of many religious traditions, most notably Catholic Christians with the rosary. Yet this is completely foreign for others. What can they learn from the simple practice of fingering prayer beads?
I call that praying by hand. Once again, it “invites” the body into the process. Especially for people who are unable to move their bodies, to walk or swim, praying by hand is a wonderful practice because the physical movement of their fingers over the beads helps them focus. A lot of the people I know who use prayer beads offer prayers of intercession, and so each bead represents a different person they’re praying for. There’s a rhythm of moving from one person to the next and the next. There’s no set order, but as individuals come to mind the beads help them stay focused on their intentions for those people. Other people like to use the prayers and just fingering as a way of letting their minds go still. They’re not saying any words, but the hand movement helps them stay focused.

Is it hard for you to let your mind go still?
Oh, absolutely! In fact, it’s practically impossible. One of the things I’ve learned by studying Eastern meditation for a while is that I had the feeling that I was supposed to be able to quiet what they call the “monkey mind.” But I found it very difficult to do that. In fact, the only few times I did the thought would come, Wow, you’re doing it, and I’d be back in the middle of my conscious mind.

Then it would have the opposite effect by actually increasing the activity the harder you were trying not to do it?
Yes. The image I use about quieting my mind comes more from Thomas Keating and the Centering Prayer movement: I’m not supposed to quiet my mind; the mind is made for thinking. What I practice is to move underneath my thoughts and physical sensations and feelings. The image I have is that they’re racing along and I’m aware they’re there, but I’m not at all connected to them, or hooked by them, or impacted by them. I find that image much more helpful. When I mention this to the people I teach, it underscores that the mind is made for thinking—it’s not going to stop. But we can go to another place beneath those thoughts where we can focus on the presence of God in our lives.

What does that do for you, when you go underneath?
I find, and also what people report to me when they use this, that there is a still place—the still small voice—the place where I can be, as scripture says, “not worried about tomorrow;” the place where I just am. It’s that eternal now, which is all that we really have; and it’s our mind and feelings that take us away from that eternal now where God is. It relieves me of rehashing the past and planning the future because there’s just “now.”

If there’s one word that is the antithesis of North American culture it’s “still.” And it seems as if things are speeding up all the time, yet you’re talking about deliberately slowing down. That’s pretty countercultural, isn’t it?
Prayer is definitely countercultural. What prayer is focused on—and the intention of prayer is to be as fully as possible in the presence of God and to trust the mercy of God—is very countercultural. Not only in the stillness, but also in, “What are you doing sitting around? There’s more to be done. Things you have to do. And if you don’t take control of your life, then what’s going to happen to you?” And so it’s countercultural in many ways, and yet I believe the psalmist, who wrote, “Be still and know that I am God.” It’s not that God isn’t in our busy, hectic lives, but we need to be still to truly know the depth of God’s love for us.

Can you fit all this in a day planner, though, to schedule being still from 8 to 8:30? Doesn’t prayer just become one more activity among many?
Yes, it can become one more activity. But some people do that. What we’re talking about now is the discipline of prayer and how we plot that out. Some people say they spend an hour every morning being with God. Sometimes that means moving into a quiet space, and for some people that includes reading scripture or doing stretching and breathing exercises to remember the glory of God in their physical incarnations. There are many different practices. A lot of people do schedule those, while other people look for the opportunity to practice stillness and “attention to God” in a more haphazard way but with a real commitment to, and in fact, spend some quality time with God. One thing that happens to people of faith is that we trust that God is with us in everything and that our relationship with God is ongoing, that we’re not going to be abandoned. So we can slide into that place that says, “If God is with me as I’m racing down the freeway, why take time away?” And yet what we know about relationships is that if we don’t spend quality time with the person we love, something goes out of the relationship. Some of the life, some of the passion, some of the deep knowledge is sacrificed. A friend of mine has the prayer practice of spending some quality time with God every day. Some days it’s in the morning, some days it’s at lunchtime, some days it’s late afternoon, sometimes it’s right before she goes to sleep. But she’s committed to doing nothing else but attending to her love for God and God’s love for her every day. And that for me is much more workable, because I’m not sure where I’m going to be from one day to the next.

Some people never get around to making time for God until some crisis occurs. They get a diagnosis, or there’s an accident, or there’s something else with family or friends where they’re suddenly confronted with terrible news. And that’s when they begin to pray.
I think that’s true, and in many cases very natural and normal. What I witness in some people is that when the crisis settles they continue to pray. Somehow it’s the crisis that brings them into much deeper awareness of their need for God in their lives, and they continue with their prayer. Often we’re made to feel guilty about that—that we should be praying whether we’re in crisis or not. But I think God delights in our return to God at any moment. It can be a crisis that brings us back or a joyful time or one of those wonderful surprises that God gives to us—as we watch a baby chick being born, for example. The hope, of course, is that we continue to return more often and not wait for the next crisis.

Sometimes, the crisis moment brings with it a period of time when it’s hardest to pray at all.
Cardinal Joseph Bernadin, the Roman Catholic bishop of Chicago who died of cancer a few years ago, put it well in his last book, The Gift of Peace. He wrote about the horrible pain in his illness, what that pain did to him, and that he was not able to pray. One of the things he said was that this is why he prayed when he was well, so that in the midst of the crisis he wouldn’t have to pray. It’s not that he put his marks in heaven or anything like that, but that he was so used to being in the presence of God that even without prayer he was still there. I think of Cardinal Bernadin as a very holy and compassionate man, and for him to say there were times when he could not pray was very helpful to me. It says to me there will be times when I can’t pray, and as I develop my prayer life over time, that will suffice. And to that I add that when I cannot pray I count on the prayers of others—my loved ones and friends and strangers.

The experience of coming very close to death—and not dying—can be life changing, can’t it?
The worst thing sick people can do is feel guilty that they’re not praying. Ongoing prayer and attention to our relationship with God when we’re well, when there isn’t any big crisis, there’s just the day-to-day relationship of being in God’s presence with us at all times—that’s how we begin to trust more and more. So when these times come, even though we’re not praying, somehow deep in us that trust is there.

Crisis times can also bring out an anger with God that God’s not doing anything about it, even though we keep asking: “God, do something about this! This isn’t fair!” We may see other people healed or changed or strengthened or helped, yet nothing’s happening to us.
First of all, I think being angry with God is great. The anger itself is a form of prayer. As we are angry with God we are somehow engaging God and who we understand God to be. I also think, particularly with intercessory prayer, it has to do a lot with how we understand God, how we believe God is—in other words, our “theology of prayer.” If we believe that if we pray right and hard enough God will do our bidding, we have a different image of God than if we understand and believe that God’s presence is with us at all times, to sustain us in whatever happens but does not, in fact, necessarily come in to intervene. That’s a theological question. One of the things I feel most strongly about prayer is that to become deeply praying people we have to struggle with our images of God and our theology of prayer: Who is God? Who is this God I’m in relationship with? Is it a God who’s waiting for me to pray right so God will intervene? Is it a God who loves me unconditionally and who simply weeps with me as I weep? Is it a God who intervenes for some people but not for others? Those are the really hard questions, and my experience is that if people don’t wrestle with those questions their prayer life may well get derailed. If they’re expecting something but don’t get it, they may say, “Well, that’s it for prayer.” But if they have an understanding of God’s infinite and unconditional love for them no matter what’s going on, I think the prayer begins to be deepened—even though God doesn’t answer the prayers in the hoped-for way.

One of the most fascinating and complex Bible stories is Jacob wrestling with God. For many people that story says it’s not only just OK to wrestle with God, it’s almost imperative.
Yes. It’s really a wrestling with God to find out who God is: Who are you? Who am I engaged with? Who am I longing to be with? Who am I desiring intimacy with? It’s not an exact parallel, but I take it back to our human relationships once again. If I’m going to get close to somebody, there will be things we’re going to have to wrestle about—maybe not physically wrestle, but we’re going to have to wrestle with how we see the world, and who we are, and who we are together, and what friendship means. All of those are wrestling questions, and for any relationship to become intimate we have to do that. When we wrestle with God we may cry out in anger and grief, “Why didn’t you save my child?” “Why didn’t you come to my rescue?” We have to ask those hard questions. For me, it’s in those hard questions that I find that God’s mercy will abound, even if I don’t understand how it’s appearing in my life at that moment.

Jacob wrestled with God to find out God’s name, but in the end he still didn’t know. Instead, he got a new name. He was the one transformed by it all.
That really does, in fact, point to one of the things that’s so important about prayer: the mystery of it all. Jacob didn’t learn God’s name, yet somehow he was transformed. Jacob went in with one agenda and came out with God’s agenda. Again, here’s the countercultural aspect: In our Western world we don’t want to believe anything we can’t understand. For me, God is a God of mystery, and therefore my relationship with God, which is prayer, is going to be mysterious. The point is to embrace the mystery of it instead of trying to dictate or figure out or understand or tell others exactly what it is. Our prayers draw us more fully into the world and, like Jacob, our world is transformed. But Jacob didn’t go into the world knowing who God was. He went into the world transformed. And it’s our transformed beings that will contribute to the building of God’s kingdom.

Henri Nouwen once said that doing theology can make prayer impossible. All the discussion, debates, and arguments about God and God-issues make having a simple conversation with God practically impossible. How do you respond to that?
I witness that in seminary. Students come with an active prayer life and as they start doing exactly what Nouwen was talking about, they say, “All of a sudden God isn’t the God I thought God was and so I have no relationship.” I encourage my students to use images that help them stay connected to God, realizing that those images are not all of who God is. If one of the things that helps you feel close to God is, for example, God as “loving Spirit,” then use that name knowing that it’s only one image of many. It’s a stepping down of the abstraction.

It’s one thing to say that God is the “ground of all being,” but how do you pray to that?
Exactly. But if the “ground of all being” reminds us of the nurturing mother or father, we can use that name for God. The Bible is filled with images that can help us with such abstractions. It may be impossible to pray to the “ground of all being,” but what about to a “sustaining God” or the “rock of my foundation,” or simply walking barefoot in the grass and feeling God under my feet? That can lead to powerful prayer.

For some people the most meaningful part of the recent movie The Passion of the Christ came at the very beginning, when Jesus was in Gethsemane—on his belly clenching the dirt and standing and kneeling and walking, but all the time he was praying.
Jesus wrestling in the garden is so much of what we’ve been talking about. It’s the wrestling with, the richness, the complexity, the many layers of Jesus’ relationship with his Abba. And for prayer, that is such a wonderful image for us to hold. It’s earthy, it’s physical, it’s emotional, it’s struggle, and ultimately it leads to the light.

Part 2 of the interview is here.