I have spent the last few weeks writing about my two prayer heroes: Teresa of Avila and Rees Howells. I wrote a bit last week about both how holding together the contemplative and charismatic has shaped my faith and about Rees’s unique approach to partnering with God in intercession — only praying for what he feels like to pray for by the Spirit, in the style of Romans 8:26.

Today, I want to talk about one more principle from the life of Rees:

Prayer is Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers

For those who missed my brief overview last week, Rees was a coal miner born in 1879 in Wales who was deeply impacted by the famous Welsh revival. Shortly after his Pentecostal experience, the Holy Spirit leads him on a journey of inviting him to pray for ever-increasing prayer assignments until they come to pass — starting with the healing and restoration of an alcoholic man rejected by his community and ending with praying for events throughout World War II (it’s crazy…I highly recommend reading about it).

What impresses me most about Rees as he follows his call as an intercessor — to stand before God on behalf of men and women in the fashion of, perhaps, an Old Testament prophet or priest — is how much Rees feels led to identify with those he is praying for through embodied practices.

While Rees’s prayers are definitely deeply spiritual — he speaks of many mystical experiences such as finding “the Holy Ghost travailing in him,” receiving God’s love for those he is led to pray for, and spending hours at a time caught up in joy unspeakable and full of glory — he is always ready to embody his prayers as the Holy Spirit leads.

He pays a homeless man’s rent for two years, forgoes meals, and goes on extended forty-day fasts as he is praying for the hungry, and even becomes willing to die on behalf of a tubercular woman that he is praying for, convinced that they only way to pray like Christ is to be willing to die like Christ for those he is praying for.

The end effect of this, however, when you read about Rees’s life in total, is not necessarily the prayers he sees answered but the man he becomes by praying.

Notice how I titled this reflection — prayer is an invitation to become the answer to our prayers, not to answer them ourselves. The key word is “becoming.” Not once does Rees take it upon himself to answer a prayer he is praying (outside of direct leadership of the Holy Spirit), but every time the embodied prayer that he prays shapes him to be the kind of person that is the answer to the prayer.

In my opinion, a theology that says that we must “pray with our feet” and (1) takes relationship with God out of the equation — what is He asking me to do? How is He inviting me to respond? and (2) ignores the formative effect of prayer on who we’re becoming, is anemic, and will inevitably lead to burnout. There are simply too many problems in the world! How can we pray for them all and answer all of our prayers too?

Rather, I believe the solution is found in Rees’s simple, Spirit-led process of receiving a burden from God, whether it was for the houseless community, the sick around him, or the hungry, being willing to embody his prayers in such a way that the Spirit mysteriously leads him to become the answer to whatever it is he is praying for.

Curiously, (or perhaps not curiously), this seems to be what Paul is getting at in Romans 8. Last week, we reflected on how we can partner with God’s heart for the world by listening to the “groans” of the Spirit within us (v. 26).

Immediately after this, Paul writes:

Paul ties the inward groans of prayer to the outward process of becoming conformed to the image of Jesus. In other words, learning to hear and pray the groans of the Spirit within us is intricately tied to who we are becoming in the world. And who we are becoming is those who bear the image of Jesus to hurting and broken people around us. Thus, we become the answer to our prayers by embracing a Spirit-led process of first feeling God’s heart for the world through intercessory groans and becoming God’s answer for the world by becoming the hands and feet of Jesus.

I’d love to invite us to take a moment to breathe in and out. Perhaps as you breathe in, pray “Come,” and as you breathe out, pray “Holy Spirit.

Ask God: Is there anything on your heart or mind that I could partner with you in prayer for today?

Ask God: Is there any way that you are inviting me to become the answer to that prayer?

Jesus, teach us how to pray.

P.S. Thank you for praying with me! I’m preparing for a four-part Advent series starting next week that I’m tentatively calling “How Advent Helps Us to See Our Unfulfilled Longings as Invitations to Prayer: Insights on Waiting for God from Psalm 42 and St John of the Cross.” I’m excited to pray through Psalm 42 and the mystics in light of waiting for the advent, or “arrival,” of Jesus, and I think it will encourage anyone who has ever forged a deeper relationship with God in the crucible of inchoate desire. I would love to have anyone who would benefit from this join us, so please always feel free to share my subscription link (ryanpmurphy.beehiiv.com) with friends. Thank you all!