Beholding: Deepening Our Experience in GodSample

Holy Recreation

Beholding takes prayer out of the small pockets of conscious mental dialogue and makes it a life lived out fully in the Trinity. Beholding is the practice of gazing into God, gazing into us, gazing back into Him.

Our Christian ancestors used the language of placing our minds in our hearts and learning to pray from there. David expressed this as his soul’s singular ambition in Psalm 27:4:

One thing I ask from the Lord,
this only do I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,
to gaze on the beauty of the Lord
and to seek him in his temple.

The language of prayer can sometimes conjure ideas of work, striving, and fixed agendas. But prayer is actually the birthplace of our deepest knowing and creativity. It offers us the profound simplicity we need—a simplicity that can flow beneath all the complexity of our world and our sense-making of it; a simplicity that sustains us.

Our relationship to God shapes our relationship with all others and the world around us. Get that right, and our lives tend to follow. How we pray affects everything—our study, our theology, our view of those who aren’t like us, our view of ourselves, our use of material resources, our treatment of the created environment—and ultimately shapes who we are becoming.

Often prayer is taught only in the context of praying for things. It’s the place we seek forgiveness, provision, or world peace, not holy recreation. I can’t help but feel our inability to see prayer as a place of abiding rather than achievement has driven a performance culture in the church and robbed many of us from the spiritual fruits Christ promised us.

By reforming the culture of our prayer, by opening a space wide enough to embrace being with God as much as being for Him, by returning our hearts to our first love, reshaping the language and practice of how we approach God, and rediscovering the art of beholding, I believe we’ll find fresh water and sustenance for the times we live in. We’ll draw water from the deep wells that have kept God’s faithful nourished for millennia past.

In what ways does prayer feel like work to you? How does that contrast the psalmist’s longing in Psalm 27?