Learning to pray: an interview with Roberta C. Bondi - author and teacher at Emory University's Candler School of Theology - Cover Story - Interview

Christian Century, March 20, 1996

One of my favorite sayings of the monastics is that prayer is warfare to the last breath. Prayer is hard work--and painful a lot of the time because it makes us face parts of ourselves and accept parts of ourselves that we'd rather not.

What have been some of the "warfare" issues for you?

One of them has been fighting the barriers that stand between myself and God, barriers that have to do with the images of God that I have carried in my head. For years and years I couldn't call God Father in my prayer because my relationship with my human father was so painful. My father was so authoritarian and judgmental that to think of God as Father meant I could experience God only as judgmental, authoritarian, and contemptuous of me as female.

The point when I realized I had to do something about this barrier coincided with the moment I realized I had to do something about my relationship with my human father, whom I had not seen for years. I didn't want to see him, but the Ammas and Abbas that I had spent all my time working on and with whom I had many conversations on prayer kept saying, Look, the goal of the Christian life is love of God and love of neighbor, and if your father isn't your neighbor, nobody's your neighbor. This is not optional.

This was part of the warfare. The other part was realizing that I was going to have to choose deliberately to address God as Father in my prayer and work through scripture passages and so forth, and figure out exactly what I had in my own heart--what I believed. A whole lot of the warfare of prayer is about figuring out the discrepancies between the theology in our heads and our actual working theology and facing that discrepancy head on. What if I prayed to God as Father and found out that God really was who I was afraid God the Father was--and that God rejected me as my human father had as a child? I've had several other points at which I've had to confront my worst fears in my prayer, confront God and say, "Is this really true about you? I've got to know this from firsthand experience and not just as something that I read about in books."

You have made a rigorous effort to be honest before God and to achieve some self-knowledge. Perhaps not everybody would have either your persistence or your analytical inclination.

People have different levels of needs. A lot of what has driven me has been pain which has been so unbearable that the choice has been either to deal with it or go under. I think many of us get help from therapy in understanding what our problems are, and it doesn't occur to us to take our problems into our relationship with God. We somehow have the idea that our relationship with God is different from other relationships. But theologically this is what it means to be made in the image of God--that our human relationships are mirrors of our relationship with God.

What would you say to somebody who comes into your office and asks you to help get them started in a discipline of prayer?

Actually, this is a requirement in my course on "Theology and the Christian Life in the Early Church." I tell students that there's no way to understand the monastics unless you're trying to approach things from their angle. This is not just intellectual stuff, it's about a relationship with God. I don't care if they end up feeling at the end of the semester as though they haven't succeeded--whatever that means; they've got to commit themselves to trying.