Transcription by Daryl Chen

Krista Tippett: In the years in which I was on a whole new spiritual and intellectual adventure that changed the direction of my life — years which led to the creation of this show — I befriended a delightful, brilliant, straight-talking theologian named Roberta Bondi. We were actually placed together as roommates at a five-day consultation. We fell deep into conversation about all kinds of things — life and love and God, a subject that fascinated us both.

She’d written a book called Memories of God, and she’d written a series of books about the eccentric, dazzling wisdom of spiritual rebels and innovators known as the desert fathers and mothers of the third century. These were people who believed that the established church — at that time the Church of Rome — had grown cold and remote from very heart of the impulses that brought it into the world in the first place: the rootedness in wisdom and not mere knowledge and accomplishment, the humility over against power, the core moral and spiritual values.

Then, not that long ago in our world of institutions ceasing to make sense, someone I very much admire told me he was interested in picking up a practice of prayer. He had no idea how to begin or really even what this would be about – he just knew it was a longing he wanted to follow. The first thing that came to my mind to share with him is this somewhat eccentric, rich little half hour I had with Roberta, basically drawing out of her the down-to-earth, beautiful insights she’d shared with me in late nights in our precious days as roommates.

Her wisdom about what it means to be a person who prays, in conversation and relationship with God, whoever God is and whatever God means, has formed me ever after. I am so delighted 

[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating] 

I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.

Roberta Bondi is Professor Emeritus of Church History at Emory University. Her books include Memories of God, To Love as God Loves, and A Place to Pray.

Tippett: I think where I want to start is with your … I think what is a big part of your story of how you started to think profoundly about prayer and integrated into your life in a new way, which is through your experience with the desert fathers and mothers. Is that right?

Bondi: It is with the desert fathers and mothers, but it was as the desert fathers and mothers helped me deal with a really serious problem in my life. Personal problem.

Tippett: Do you want to say what that was or no? Was it …?

Bondi:  Yeah, are we actually recording things now? Mmm, okay. Well, I had discovered the Abbas and Ammas of the ancient Egyptian desert back in graduate school and had found them a wonderful antidote to the academic ethos that I was having to write my dissertation in. The desert fathers and mothers were free-spirited and spoke always from the depth of their hearts to the depth of their disciples’ hearts, and they gave me a space to live and function that I hadn’t known before I first encountered them back in 1966. 

But I finished my dissertation and I went off and I began teaching, and I had not figured out any way to incorporate them into my teaching and into my research because of the very reason that they did speak to the heart and from the heart, and that was what appealed to me. I continued to read them while I did my other teaching and to meditate over them and to mull over them. But they really forced the issue of prayer for me in the second year of my marriage to my husband, Richard. 

Richard and I had gotten married against my own expectation, but with great longing on my part. And I found after we got married that I had a very hard time believing that he could actually want to be married to me. And for one reason or another, and also not just that he would want to be married to me, but that something wouldn’t happen to interfere with that and bring the marriage to an end. So I found that for a long time, for nearly two years, that every time Richard would go out on a Saturday, for example. He would go out, oh, around 11 o’clock in the morning, and I’d say, “When are you going to be back?” And he’d say, “Oh, I’ll be back by one.” And then he wouldn’t ever be back at one. This is because Richard has no sense of time whatsoever.

And rather than say to myself, “Look, Roberta, you know, Richard doesn’t have any sense of time,” I would start looking at the clock about 10 minutes till one, and I would start thinking, Oh, I wonder if Richard is going to come home. Oh, I bet he’s in the grocery store, and he was walking down the aisle, and all of a sudden he just stopped dead in his tracks and he said, “What am I doing married to Roberta? I think I just won’t go home today.” Or that he would be filling the car with gas and a really cute young gas station attendant would come out and he would look at her and say, “I could be married to a woman like that. Why am I married to this old hag?” 

Or that he, and then I would go from that particular fantasy into a whole different set of fantasies involving car wrecks or sudden illnesses that struck him down and they couldn’t find his ID to call me and, and that sort of thing. And it was really quite excruciating. And I should have known better. Of course, I knew better. But it was a kind of extreme anxiety, I guess, about loss. 

And one Saturday when it was just unbearable and it was about three o’clock in the afternoon, which was about two hours later than Richard had said he would be home, but not any later than anyone with any sense would’ve expected him to come home. I was sitting there on the couch and wringing my hands in anguish with the dry mouth and stomach ache. 

And all of a sudden the Abbas from the ancient desert started saying to me, “Roberta, Roberta, we have something to say to you.” And I said, “Shut up and leave me alone; I’m worrying.” And they said, “Uh-uh, come on now. Come on, listen.” I said, “Shh, I’m worrying. Leave me alone.” And finally I said, “All right, all right, what do you have to say?” And they said to me, “Well, now you know that the main thing we’re doing out here in the desert is prayer. And you have spent a lot of time studying us and working on us, and you might consider whether this might be something for you.” 

And I said to them, “Oh, come on now, look, I am a rational, reasonable woman, and I’m an academic, and this is what you’re suggesting just is not really for me.” And the answer to that was “Ha, ha, ha. You might also consider as part of this that you have put Richard into the place of God for you. You know how we say or suggest that no one or no thing can fill that hole in your life except God, that your identity rests only in God, and that all other loves come out of that. And that if, and that no human being can ever fill that. Of course you feel the way you do.” 

So I was very embarrassed, and I cleared my throat several times, and I said, because I knew, of course, instantly that they were right. I had put my whole being somehow into Richard. So I said, “Okay, all right, all right. I’ll try it. I’ll try it.” So I went, then at that point, I went out and got well, first I let Richard come home and yelled at him a little bit. And then I went out and got a book that had a pattern of prayer in it that was similar to what was used in the early church. And that was what started me on my discipline of prayer. And I am, I can say several things that I learned out of that, that I like to share with others. 

And one of the things is, No matter what your reason for starting, it’s a good reason. You don’t need any kind of noble reason or highfalutin or serious reason. Any reason to begin a pattern of prayer is a good reason because prayer is about everyday life. It isn’t the great spiritual mystery that is too high and lofty for the likes of us. 

And another thing I can say about it is that there isn’t any one right way to do it. And this was something that I learned from the Abbas and Ammas of the ancient desert. There’s a wonderful story in the sayings of the fathers about a monk from another part of the world that came to visit the desert in Egypt. And he went to see Abba Arsenius, who was famous for his very stern, very silent regimen where he really was not at all hospitable to visitors. Now there was a reason for this. In his previous life, he had been a nobleman in Rome and had been surrounded by flatterers all the time and people who always had something they wanted to get out of him. So he adopted in the desert a discipline of silence which was appropriate. This is the kind of the opposite of what he had known before that. But he was also famous, so a lot of people tried to come and see him. 

And this one visiting monk tried to go and see Arsenius, and he got a local brother to take him to Arsenius’s cell and the brother led him to the cell and they went in and sat down and waited for Arsenius to speak because that was the polite way that you were supposed to be when you visited a monk. You waited for him to speak to you; you didn’t speak first. And of course, Arsenius didn’t speak. So they sat there and they sat there and finally the visitor from another part of the world said, “Uh, take me to see Abba Moses. I can’t stand this any longer.” 

And so they got up, and they went to see Abba Moses, who had an entirely different disposition  but was also Arsenius’s close friend. And the brother who was the guide to the visitor was puzzling over this whole thing. How can these two men be so different? One so hospitable, one so stern, and he was given a vision on the spot. 

And there aren’t very many visions in the sayings of the father. So the very fact that it was a vision catches our attention in a special way. But in this vision, there were two boats on the Nile. And in one of them there was Arsenius and he was speaking with the trinity in the boat while they floated down the Nile, and in the other boat there was Abba Moses, and it was full of angels and they were all eating honey cakes.

That story illustrates for me, not only the difference in temperament for Christians from one person to another, but also different styles of practice and ways of practice. The sayings is really careful in its depiction of variety and prayer and variety within the Christian life, so that sometimes it seems when I’m talking to people about prayer that one of the main points I have to keep making over and over is there is no right way. The important thing is to find your way. There simply is no right way. And if a particular way feels really wrong to you or just feels like I can’t figure out what’s going on here or I can’t get the hang of it, try it, and if it doesn’t work after a while, try something else. Many people get benefit from lots of words; many people get benefit from hardly any words.

Tippett: I’m not sure we’re gonna use my voice at all with you, but you often talk about just the importance of just showing up for prayer.

Bondi: We often have a kind of notion as part of this highfalutin, noble picture of ourselves as prayers that when we pray we need to be completely attentive and we need to be fully engaged and we need to be concentrating and we need to be focused. But the fact is, if prayer is our end of a relationship with God, that’s not the way we are with the people we love. A large portion of the time, the people we are most likely to be completely focused on all the time are people we either don’t see very often or total strangers that we’re trying to make a good impression on. But with the people we really care about, we simply are in their presence. We’re going about our lives at the same time in each other’s presence, aware and sustained by each other, but not much more than that, some of the time or large portions of the time. 

This translates into, well, let me tell you a story about when I first started teaching in the seminary where I teach now. It came pretty much simultaneously with my marriage to my husband Richard, and I had been married before and I had two little children, and I was, I had changed from the school I’d been teaching at before to the seminary involved, not just a change of schools, but a whole change of approach and a change of subject as well. Plus, I had always been a very shy person and I had small classes where I was teaching before, and I suddenly found myself thrust into a class with 175 students, co-teaching it with two other theology professors or church history professors, so that everything I did was on display all the time to two colleagues as well as all these students.

And it was very nerve-wracking. That would be understating it considerably. And I found that I could never sleep the night before I lectured because I was worrying. And I could never sleep the night after I lectured because I was worrying. And then it would be time to lecture over again. 

So I was trying to adjust to all this new teaching and this new approach to things and also to being remarried with my small children in a new town with new responsibilities. And I would just find when I came home at the end of the day, I would be so exhausted that I could hardly contain myself. And I would be met at the car, usually pulling into the driveway, by my two children and my husband, who would all come out to tell me all the things that had gone wrong in the day. Like the washing machine had overflowed and the rug in the dining room was soaking wet. And that furthermore the cat had peed on the rug in the dining room one more time. 

Anna Grace would be feuding with her teacher at school, and Benjamin would be fussing that he had had a fight with his friend Elizabeth across the street. And I would think, Oh, I just want to go back to school. I’ve made a mistake with my life. And then I would tell myself, Well, if I could just bring a sandwich to school, and I could just eat my sandwich and be quiet a little bit before I came home. And then they could have their supper, and I’d just get there after it was all over and. But, of course, this was just a fantasy. I would come into the house and Richard and I would fix supper, and then we would sit down and eat, and I would fall asleep with my head in the mashed potatoes. And I would tell myself this again, “Oh, I’m just a failure as a wife and mother. I’m just not available. I just shouldn’t even try to come home.” 

But the fact is that I knew all along that I should come home and that however it was, it was better that I was there than that I wasn’t there. That my family needed me, that being part of a family means showing up for meals, and prayer is like that. However we are, however we think we ought to be in prayer, the fact is we just need to show up and do the best we can do, and that’s what’s called on in our relationship with God is just to show up. So that our requirements that we put on ourselves really have very little to do with the actual fact of the situation. It’s like being in a family. We just show up.

Tippett: And you’ve also talked about how, you know, if for whatever reason a person finds it hard to sit down and do any kind of formal prayer, or there’s an inner resistance, which I think a lot of us feel, it’s okay just to invite God to be with you while you read a good novel or eat a meal, right? Which is … but that’s a pretty radical idea.

Bondi: Well, I, the way I would put it is if we have a hard time with setting up any sort of discipline of prayer and try several things and can’t find something that works for us, that almost, for certain, we are struggling with something internally that’s wounded us in the past. And whether this is, I’ve had several students over the years who have come from the kind of religious backgrounds where all of their prayer has been regulated from the outside, so to speak. They’ve been told, “This is what you have to do and this is the way you have to do it, and if you don’t, you’re, you’re not doing it right.” That’s one thing that causes difficulties. 

Another thing that ongoingly causes difficulties to many people is their image of God. The God to whom they’re trying to pray is, in fact, destructive. When they think of God, they are associating God with someone from their very early nurturing, or they’re thinking of God as someone that they heard about is children who frightens them or who demeans them or who thinks very little of them or maybe even who hates them. So that when they sit down to pray, they’re face to face with this person who, if they are in the presence of that person for long, something within them tells them, “This is bad for me.” I can’t do this. 

And so when a person has that reaction, which is fairly common, then I suggest when I’m talking to students or people in retreats that they find a way to learn that God isn’t that person that they thought God was. And so I suggest, Take a time, go deliberately say, “This is going to be my prayer.” Sit down in a rocking chair or something comfortable, and say, “God, I need to find out you aren’t who I think you are. What I’m asking for is simply to learn to be comfortable in your presence. And so I’m going to do a pleasant thing for say, 5 minutes or 10 minutes.”

And often I tell people to set a timer for this because it’s still hard enough for them that they have to know that it has an ending to it. And then to sit there and read the novel or work a crossword puzzle or do hand work or something, and then when the timer goes off, say, “Thank you very much, God, that was very enjoyable.” And then go and do something else. 

And that after a while, that’s a way of learning that God is a safe person to be with. And you know, maybe it takes 6 months, maybe it takes 2 years, maybe it takes 10 years. God’s got plenty of time, and we’re not doing this because we want to be good people or we’re following a command, but because we’re made to long for God and it’s for our own wellbeing and happiness. And so we find it for that reason, not because we ought to.

Tippett: I think you also say that the desert Abbas and Ammas felt that prayer was as natural to us as breathing if we can recover that impulse in ourselves. 

Bondi: You know what? They were convinced and they, it was not just the Abbas and Ammas, but the early Christian Church of that period were really convinced that this is what it meant to be made in the image of God. This was one important portion of it that we were made to naturally mirror God and be in relationship with God in such a way that it was easier for us to be in relationship with God than for us not to be in relationship with God. That our natural … the bent of our minds and our hearts was naturally toward God, and that this is where our deepest, most natural fulfillment would come. And that’s what they were telling me when I was sitting on the couch, and we were having that little discussion 20 years ago or more.

Tippett: Okay, this might be my last question, but I want to also make clear that you don’t — beause it sounds so lovely what you’re describing now and so peaceful — but you also like the image of the Nagging Widow or Jacob wrestling with the angel. I mean, you say, “It’s not about us being passive. And it’s not always a tranquil relationship. And that it’s okay for it to have that dynamic.” 

Bondi: Oh, that’s right. During the difficult times in my life, and I seem to be one of those people that manages to have a lot of difficult times in my life, prayer is often … is generally difficult because our prayer reflects the rest of our lives. We don’t become different people when we go into our prayer, and if it’s going to be a real relationship, it has to be a truthful relationship. 

Now, one of the Abbas was asked one time, Which was the most difficult virtue to acquire? And he went through the whole list of one virtue after another, and then he concluded by saying, “But prayer is the hardest of the virtues because prayer is warfare to the last breath.” In prayer, we are likely … and it’s certainly what we want to see ourselves as we really are, we can’t expect that we are going to be healed of the deep wounds of our heart without seeing what those wounds are and having to live back the events that caused those wounds in the first place. And that is not ever a comfortable experience. That is a miserable experience. It’s like going into hell. 

So that’s one grounds, one circumstance in which prayer is most certainly not a peaceful activity. It’s also not a peaceful activity when we discover or come face to face with the reality of the world. I remember several years ago being confronted for no reason that I can still understand, with all the sexist language of the Old Testament. And not just the sexist language, but also the imagery of it and thinking, I’ve been praying these psalms all these years. And all they’re full of is images of warriors and arrows in a sheath being like, you know, the sons of the good man being like arrows in the sheath and so forth. And there’s no place for women at all in in here. And this is the God I’m praying to. This is God’s altar. What am I gonna do with this?

And just going through a period of just rage at God and feeling tricked that I’ve been praying these psalms and that my vocation was as a seminary teacher, and so that I was committed to the church, and it was just horrible. It was a combination of rage that God interspersed with great gusts of tears and general misery, and I don’t think that God or I, either one, had a very good time of it through that period.

But there have been other long periods too, when prayer has just been excruciating and long periods when it just felt like I would sit down for my prayer and God would take a look and say, “Well, I think I’ll go look after the children in China for a while. Call me when you’re finished.”  Now that’s just the nature of prayer. That’s the realistic version of it. 

Tippett: And why is the Nagging Widow? Talk about some of those images, talk about some of those images you find in Scripture though, that it’s all right for us to struggle and even fight with God and even nag and demand things that feel important to us.

Bondi: Well, one of my favorite images from Scripture has, since the time I was a child, was always Jacob wrestling with the angel. This is, I think, my very favorite because it has all the elements of real prayer: God sneaking up on Jacob — because it’s really God who this angel is —  sneaking up on Jacob unexpectedly in the night, which is often when God comes to us with the anxiety-producing information about ourselves or about our situation; Jacob’s absolute persistence in saying, “Look, all right, you started this, I’m not letting you go without a blessing”; and just his persistence and his perseverance and his just refusal to let go; and his absolute steadfast commitment to the fact that if he had hung in there, there would be a blessing in it.

Which is my experience over and over and over with working through the hard things in my life and my memories that I’ve worked through. The thing that’s kept me at it so many times is the understanding and really the belief that if I really do face these things in God’s presence, the hard things, and wrestle through them, that this is not because it’s good to face hard things or because there’s something noble and helpful in suffering, but because the promise really is, if I keep on this long enough, there will be the blessing on the other side. There will be the resurrection. I’m doing this for the sake of the blessing, for the resurrection, so that I don’t have to do this anymore. It seems significant that for whatever reason, that was the last, we only have one account of Jacob wrestling with the angel on that particular occasion. He may very well have, there are obviously plenty of things in Jacob’s life worthy of much wrestling later on, but, but wrestling is the way it is a lot of the time. 

I have a friend who plays in the Atlanta Symphony, and someone asked him once what it was like to play piccolo in a great symphony like the Atlanta Symphony. And he said, “Well, it’s actually, long stretches of boredom interspersed with short periods of pure terror.” And I wouldn’t say it quite like that, that prayer is like that. But I would say that prayer is long periods of ordinary shared life, together with intense periods of wrestling with really serious stuff that can scare us to death but can also bring us into real life with God and real life with ourselves in a way that we can’t otherwise have it.

Tippett: Those are your last words. Go in peace, my child. 

[music: “Eventide” by Gautam Srikishan] 

Roberta Bondi is professor emeritus of Church History at Emory University. Her books include To Pray and to Love: Conversations on Prayer with the Early Church; Memories of God: Theological Reflections on a Life; and In Ordinary Time: Healing the Wounds of the Heart.

[music: “Eventide” by Gautam Srikishan] 

Tippett: This episode was produced by Chris Heagle, Zack Rose, Julie Siple, Kayla Edwards, Tiffany Champion, Carla Zanoni, and Andrea Prevost. 

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On Being is an independent production of the On Being Project, based in Minnesota and New York City.