The Trust in Prayer

One fall day in 1996, I sought my plausible dissertation advisor, James E. Loder, on the fifth floor of the classroom building, Stuart Hall, knowing he had a precept class ending at lunchtime. What I received in that encounter was not what I wanted, nor what I sought, but what I needed, and so much more powerful than what I had imagined. Today, over thirty years later, the encounter in that classroom arises in my awareness as an icon of sorts, a crystallization of trust in a process that would send deep roots into the soul-soil of my vocational journey I can still recognize today. I was Given a trust in prayer, but not as I was taught to pray. Prayer sometimes happens to us, when we allow it to do so. Providing a trust in the visceral wisdom of the body, if and when we allow it, discern it, recognize it as not our own yet intimately our own. This moment also demonstrated the faithful response and willingness to unknow together, whether as individuals or in an entire witnessing community. I continue to learn about this kind of prayer that happens more than anything else.

I was in the doctoral Methods of Practical Theology seminar, having begun my PhD at Princeton Seminary a couple months before with summer German. Co-taught with a new assistant professor of practical theology/pastoral care, the seminar was beginning to develop uncomfortable and really confusing undercurrents of competition and posturing. I’d not experienced any such competition before amidst independent study work with him years prior. Most in the room had either studied or been in therapy with Loder before, though there was a Lutheran grad student in the preaching area who looked as befuddled as I was at the dynamics unfolding each Tuesday afternoon. I determined the best course of action for me to reaffirm my affinity, even primacy, in his attentions was to set up a meeting with him. The precept let out and he remained in his chair, talking with a student, who then left. I entered the room alone.

Loder looked up at me with a big smile, saying hello. I nodded and sat down in a chair across from him. “I’d like to get on your calendar,” I said softly. He nodded, smiling and pulling his pocket-calendar out to see what might work. I had mine out as well.  “Hmmm…” he began.

Then something erupted within me, unexpected and undesired. 

“Oh. NO. I can’t meet with you” blurted out of me. 

I don’t know who was more surprised between us, him or me. I felt a wave of belly tears coming up, impossible to stop. “No…” I repeated. “I cannot meet with you.” I looked at him through tears, befuddled and embarrassed. He looked at me, befuddled and uncertain. 

“Well…” he began, pausing for a long while… “Shall we pray then?” I nodded. He clasped my hand and began to pray. I’m sure neither of us would remember today what he said. Well, maybe he does, given he’s on the ancestral plane/communion of saints plane of existence. I surely don’t.

But that day, after the spoken prayer, I nodded at him through my tears, then bolted out of the room. I let the tears flow freely, some sobs, some releasing, as I walked down the two flights of stairs. I had no idea what I was doing or where to go. It was lunchtime. I went to the cafeteria.

A circle of friends in both MDiv and PhD degrees was sitting in the back left, like we often did. I walked up to the table, standing between two of them. “Lisa!” I heard, many noticing the tears. “What happened?! Are you okay?!” 

I felt something in my belly shift open, crack open. I laughed aloud, taking a deep breath. 

“I just broke up with Loder.” Unknowing and shy, I shrugged my shoulders and smiled, sheepishly. 

The table burst into laughter accordingly. Someone pulled up a chair for me and we began the business of afternoon conversation. 

Today, thirty years later, I can feel it in my body as if it were yesterday. How the prayer happened to me, unspoken but for what needed to be said. I can remember the upswell of tears. The speaking that came first, the knowing that only came much much later. The faithfulness of Loder in his own befuddlement, turning to spoken prayer. The walk down the stairs in Stuart Hall, tears overflowing. The smell of the cafeteria and the sunlight pouring in through the back windows. The smiling faces drawn to immediate concern and then erupting into laughter with me. 

Which led to the eighteen months of coursework in which I had no contact with Loder, but for a card I had sent him. It had a Helen Keller quote on the front, which I knew he would recognize as meta-communication that it was Spirit’s work in me that day. I used the card to confirm my commitment to study with him in my dissertation years, even as I said I would only see him in the occasional seminar until then. 

This story came pouring out of me this past week, musing with a friend about praying with a longtime colleague for the first time, though we’d worked together for twelve years. I had shared a wee dram with him, given he is now transitioning out of his affiliation with my seminary and moving into his fulltime work in his new seminary administrative job. It’s going to be a tough year, including some extraordinary challenges (from hugely dysfunctional impositions into his own family), so I had reached out simply to listen, if he needed. He and I are vastly different theologically–though probably less than he imagines. We’ve shared in prayer as faculty colleagues in collective settings, but I don’t recall a time when he and I prayed together, as brother-sister in Christ. In twelve years’ worth of times shared. But as our time was drawing to a close, my body recognized the leadings and so I invited it, extending my hand in a handshake-like invitation. He received. I prayed. He prayed.

It was all so familiar to me, to my body, but I don’t enter into that space except for with spirit-friends. I guess I don’t pray like that with another unless my body recognizes what it didn’t know/unknew that day. Interesting that it arose this week, amidst some seed-planting about returning to Loder’s work in some fashion. Is there something for me to offer, contribute, here, with his life and work? Here is where I learned the kind of prayer that happens to you, and what a faithful response to such unknowing can look like in more familiar Christian practice. I was studying with a man of Spirit who knew to trust the unknowing, even as he didn’t know what was to happen either. Here is one of the key moments in which I was given a trust in the visceral wisdom of the body, not my own yet also intimately my own.

Perhaps exploring some of how this moment shaped the work that Loder and I did together could prove fruitful. I know that his work could be an interesting bridge for church renewal and mainline/denominational folks into the life of the Spirit. 

The invitation is always there, after all.