Portrait Work

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Chapter Four

student: Something happened on Tuesday night, and I can't decide whether it was a good sign or a bad one.

professor: Tell it to me plainly, and we will decide together.

student: I was praying before sleep. Nothing unusual. Halfway through I noticed I was speaking to a face. It was the face from a picture Bible I had as a boy: a kind, tired man with very clean hair and a lamb across his shoulders. I haven't opened that book in twenty years. And there he was, and I was talking to him.

professor: What did you do when you noticed?

student: I tried to fix him. He seemed too soft, so I made him sterner. Then he was too stern, so I softened him again. I think I spent the rest of the prayer adjusting him, the way you fuss with a painting that won't come right. When I finished, I realized I hadn't said anything to anyone. I had been doing portrait work.

professor: That is an honest description, and a very common one. Go on, because I suspect there is more.

student: There is. I got annoyed and let the face go altogether. I told myself I would pray with no picture at all, just to Him. For perhaps ten seconds the room went very quiet, and I felt, I don't know how else to say it, looked at. Not watched, the way a camera watches. Known. And I didn't like it. I put the face back. It was a relief to have him again.

professor: There is that word again. You remember what we said about relief.

student: That it comes when a demand goes away.

professor: Then ask yourself what the demand was.

student: I suppose that I be seen. That's embarrassing to say.

professor: It is the least embarrassing thing you have said to me, because it is true, and very few men get far enough to say it. Let us take the two halves one at a time. First the face. You think you ought to be ashamed of it.

student: It seems childish, praying to a drawing out of a Sunday school book.

professor: The drawing is not the trouble. You are a creature with eyes and a memory, and your mind will supply a picture whether you ask it to or not. The trouble begins only when the picture stops being a way of reaching Him and becomes the thing you reach. Think of a man who carries a photograph of his wife. There is nothing wrong with the photograph. But if she walks into the room and he keeps talking to the photograph, something has gone badly wrong, and improving the photograph will not fix it.

student: So the more I fussed with it, the worse it got.

professor: The more you fussed, the more the prayer became about your own workmanship. That is the quiet danger. A man can spend years getting his picture of God right. It will feel like devotion the whole time, and he may never once have spoken to anyone who could answer. A picture cannot answer. That is its great convenience.

student: Convenient for whom?

professor: For you. A face you have made will never surprise you. It says what you give it to say, and it is exactly as stern as you set it. In the end it is a very safe thing to kneel in front of. Which brings us to the ten seconds.

student: When there was nothing.

professor: When there was no picture. I would not call it nothing. You said you felt known. Did that feel like something you had made?

student: No. That's what frightened me. I couldn't adjust it.

professor: Then admit that for ten seconds on Tuesday night you were not doing portrait work. Something was there that you had not put there, and it looked back. You have been told all your life that prayer is you speaking to God, and so it is. But far more of it than anyone admits is God speaking to you, or simply regarding you. And the regarding comes first.

student: Why would that be so uncomfortable, if He is good?

professor: Because you are not yet entirely good, and you know it. Being looked at by goodness is like being carried into a well lit room: every mark shows. When the first man heard God walking in the garden, he hid. Notice that God did not come shouting accusations. He asked where the man was. He knew perfectly well. The question was an invitation to come out.

student: And I put the face back instead.

professor: You put up a screen, yes. Most of us do. We say we want to meet Him, and we mean we want to meet our idea of Him, which is far easier to manage. We don't want the real thing nearly as much as we think we do. That is not a charge against you. It is only the truth about where you are starting.

student: Then what do I do with the face next time? Throw it out?

professor: You cannot throw it out, and you need not. What you can change is whom you are addressing. When the picture comes, and it will, speak past it. Say something like this: Father, this is only my picture of You, and it is certainly wrong somewhere. I am not speaking to it. I am speaking to You as You really are, whom I hardly know yet, and who knows me all the way down.

student: That's a frightening prayer.

professor: It is the only safe one. Every other prayer can be answered by your own imagination. That one can only be answered by Him.

student: And if I say it and feel nothing?

professor: Then you will have spoken to a real Person and felt nothing, which happens between friends every day and is no evidence against the friendship. Paul wrote that for now we know only in part, but we are already fully known. That is the order of things. Your knowledge of Him will stay partial for a long while. His knowledge of you is not waiting on yours.

student: I had filed this whole week as a failure. I thought I had found out that I can't pray properly, that my imagination is childish and I need to grow up before I try again.

professor: Then let me file it somewhere else. You did not discover that your picture is childish; every picture of Him is childish, the most learned man's included. What you discovered is that there is Someone behind the picture. For ten seconds He was there without it, and you felt the difference at once. You could only tell the face was a picture because, for a moment, you were in the presence of the One it was a picture of. That is not a failure of prayer. It is the first time in a long while that your prayer reached the right address.

student: So what I thought was the worst part of the week was the best.

professor: The fright was the best part. The face was the second best, because you caught it. The only poor part was putting it back, and you have told me about that, which means you will not do it so easily next time.

student: You might have warned me it would feel like that.

professor: I might have, and then you would have gone hunting for the feeling, or made one up to fill the gap. It was better that you found the door yourself. My business is to set you thinking and then step out of the way. This week I had the pleasure of finding that, by the time you reached the door, Someone else was already standing in it.

This is one piece of the archive, find the rest of the Student and Professor conversations over on TikTok.