The Bag on the Step

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Chapter Three

student: I want to tell you about my prayers this week. I think they have been going very well, and I think that is the trouble.

professor: That is not a complaint I hear often. Go on.

student: You know my mother does not believe. For about a month I have prayed for her every night. Properly, not a line added at the end. I kneel and ask that her heart be opened, that she might see what I have come to see. Some nights it is the most earnest thing I do all day.

professor: I do not doubt it. And the trouble?

student: On Wednesday she rang me at work. She had run out of the tablets for her hip and asked if I could collect them on my way home. I told her I was busy and asked why she never plans ahead. I said it in the voice. You know the voice.

professor: Everyone knows the voice. Almost nobody knows when he is using it.

student: I did collect them in the end. But I left the bag on her step and did not go in. That night I knelt and prayed for her soul with real feeling, and halfway through I remembered the step.

professor: What did you do then?

student: I stopped. I could not go on. It felt like praying in a borrowed coat.

professor: Then before we go any further, let me ask you something plain. When you pray for her, what exactly do you ask for?

student: That she would believe. That she would turn.

professor: Turn from what?

student: Her pride, I suppose. The way she waves things away. When I mention church she says it is nice if it makes me happy. She has opinions about how I live and she is not shy with them.

professor: Now hear that list as if a stranger had said it to you. Nearly every item on it is something she does to you.

student: I had not noticed that.

professor: Very few do. I am not saying she has no faults worth bringing before God. I am saying you have been praying over her faults as you feel them, and those are seldom the ones He is attending to. A man who prays about his mother's sins without great care will find he has only been rehearsing his grievances on his knees. The posture does not purify the grievance. It only makes it harder to recognize.

student: Then who have I been praying for?

professor: A woman you have assembled. She is built out of your mother's views on religion and a handful of remarks that stung. You can tell she is not the real one because she has no hip. The woman you pray for at night never runs out of tablets.

student: But surely her soul matters more than her hip.

professor: More, yes. Separately, no. You speak as if she were a soul with a body parked outside, and you have been ringing only the front bell. She is one creature. Think of what He did in that fishing town when Peter's mother in law was in bed with a fever. He did not preach at her bedside. He took her by the hand and raised her, and she got up and saw to their supper. The body was the door He chose. He was not above using it.

student: So I should pray about her hip.

professor: Her hip, her sleep, the length of her evenings in that house, whatever it is that makes her short on the telephone. Pray for her in detail and by name, as the woman you will actually see on Sunday. And then watch what happens, because this is the part nobody warns you about. A man who has spent the evening asking God to ease his mother's hip finds it very difficult to leave her tablets on the step the next day.

student: The prayer changes what I do.

professor: The prayer and the doing were never meant to be two things. Real prayer runs downhill into conduct the way water finds the low ground. When it does not, when a man can pray with tears for a woman and then speak to her like a clerk, you may be fairly sure he has been praying to an idea of her. An idea never needs collecting from the chemist.

student: It all sounds very small.

professor: Small is where it is tested. One of the apostles put it sharply: a man who claims to love God, whom he has never seen, and does not love the brother standing in front of him, has told himself a lie. Your mother is not a distraction from the spiritual life. She is the nearest examination room it has.

student: This is where I get uneasy. If I start praying about her tablets, it feels as though I have given up on her soul.

professor: Say plainly what you are afraid of.

student: That I will settle for being a nicer son and she will never believe.

professor: Then consider this. You have been praying for her to be persuaded. What do you suppose she would find persuasive?

student: I do not know. She has heard me talk about it.

professor: She has also heard you on the telephone. When she tells you it is nice if it makes you happy, she is not dismissing it. She is watching to see whether it makes you anything at all. The best argument she will ever meet for what you believe is not something you will say. It is the voice you use when she needs a favour on a Wednesday. You have not given up on her soul by coming in through the kitchen. You have simply found the door that is actually open.

student: So this week was a failure of prayer.

professor: No. You have filed it under the wrong heading, and I would like you to move it. You thought the week was about your mother's soul and your failure to reach it. It was not about her soul at all. It was about yours. He has been at work in you from the middle outward since the day you turned, and this week He arrived at the telephone. The moment on your knees when you remembered the step, you called that the prayer breaking down. It was the prayer being answered. You asked Him to open a heart, and He did. It happened to be the one kneeling.

student: That is not very flattering.

professor: It is far better than flattering. It means He is near, and busy, and taking you seriously. A man whom God had left alone would have finished his prayer that night with no trouble at all.

student: What should I say to her on Sunday?

professor: I shall not tell you. You will know when you are standing in her kitchen, and it will be better than anything I could hand you now. Notice that I have only asked you questions today. You did the finding. That is all a teacher of my sort is for: to set a man's mind moving, then stand aside, because a mind that moves honestly has already turned its face toward the Father.

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