In honor of the Feast Day of my prayer hero St Teresa of Avila, I’m writing on 4 things that Teresa has taught me about prayer that I would love to offer to you as an encouragement on how they can help us enjoy prayer more.

Last week, I talked about how growing in prayer is possible, the importance of having prayer heroes who inspire you to love God more, and Teresa’s vision of prayer as the art of relating to a Person.

This week, I want to suggest that, for Teresa:

Prayer Starts and Ends with Jesus.

Teresa encourages her nuns who are just in the beginning stages of building a prayer life:

Teresa was, at the end of the day, a Reformer. She lived in an era of reformation. Two years after she was born and just 1,500 miles northeast of her, Martin Luther nailed his famous theses to a church door in Wittenberg and turned the church upside down. Then Teresa and her spiritual director St John of the Cross were caught up in a needed reformation of the Carmelite order, which was part of the broader Catholic counter-reformation.

Teresa’s reform was about drawing the communities she was leading back to the simplicity of loving Jesus in prayer.

On one hand, we might think “duh,” of course, prayer is all about Jesus! And yet we find ourselves in an era of church where prayer is often made more complicated than it needs to be.

For me, this complication of prayer (part of the information overload in our era of access) often comes to me as a should voice.

I should be sitting in silence and solitude more. I should be practicing the Sabbath. I should be reading my Bible more. I should be practicing a daily office. I should be making sure that I’m engaging in mission and justice as much as I’m praying. I should be praying about the political headlines. I should be praying more, or earlier, or more frequently.

Has anyone heard the should voice before?

Teresa comes to her nuns and essentially tells them to forget all of the content about prayer that was swirling around them (“I'm not asking you now that you think about Him or that you draw out many concepts or make long and subtle reflections with your intellect”). In other words, stop overthinking this! Don’t worry about the shoulds!

She tells them the only should they should be doing is looking at Jesus.

Can we all just take a deep breath? Prayer is as simple as looking at Jesus and talking to Him. Growing in prayer is as simple as keeping the conversation going day after day, year after year. And, if we get off track, if we lose that sense of ongoing communication, getting back on track doesn’t take a silent retreat or a big fast, it simply takes looking at Him.

Then, Teresa says, once you are looking at Him:

Teresa is famous for her own name for which she calls her Lord and Spouse — “His Majesty.” Her language, like many 16th-century mystics, is reminiscent of the intimate language of Song of Songs. “This is my beloved and this is my friend,” the bride says in 5:16.

A few centuries later, in South Africa at the end of the Apartheid era, Pastor Trevor heard voices in the middle of the night. He cautiously made his way downstairs to see what was going on. Surprisingly, instead of intruders, thieves, or something even more nefarious, he found his house guest, Dallas. On his knees…praying…out loud. As if Jesus was sitting in the chair across from him!

The renowned philosopher Dallas Willard, arguably one of the greatest Christian minds of the twentieth and twenty-first century, known for reintroducing the evangelical church to spiritual disciplines like silence, solitude, and fasting, was found not in some contemplative moment taking deep breaths, lighting a candle, or reciting a liturgy. Neither was he found asleep, as one would expect in the middle of the night! Instead, Trevor found Dallas talking to a Person.

I’d love to encourage us this morning: it really is all about Jesus. If you’ve felt yoked by a vision of prayer that is anything other than friendship with God, I’d love to invite you to set that yoke down this morning.

I’d love to invite you to take some deep breaths.

Thank God for His presence with you and in you.

If you’re able to, pull up a chair next to you.

Picture Jesus in it.

And just talk to Him.

That’s it!