Welcoming Prayer

Jesus I release my need for affection, significance and esteem, 
Welcome Jesus Welcome.
Jesus I release my need to feel safety, security & ease,
Welcome Jesus Welcome.
Jesus I release my need to have power, respect and control in this situation
Welcome Jesus Welcome.
Jesus I release my need to change reality and receive it as it is. 
Welcome Jesus Welcome

One way to think about the desires we have as mothers is in terms of attachments. We are attached to certain outcomes.  And those longings are usually for good things--health, flourishing, abundance.   But when we cling to any attachment more than God, our attachments become disordered.  Firmly attaching to God and God’s will, while detaching from our disordered attachments allows us to choose life, abundant life.

Welcoming Prayer is a wonderful tool that helps us order our attachments before God. Kathy learned Welcoming Prayer during her spiritual direction program from Adele Calhoun, a gifted spiritual director and author of the popular guide Handbook of Spiritual Disciplines.  Adele announced it by saying it’s a great prayer for parents of young children.  You can pray it while changing diapers, while mediating between bickering siblings, while facing your teen who’s taken the car without permission (or worse).  

While the origins of this prayer are unclear, its power seems to come from the fact that it addresses our three primal needs:  love, security, and control.  When these needs are threatened, our amygdala triggers flight, fight, or freeze and we can react in all sorts of ways that aren’t helpful. Think here of Tara spending hours scouring the internet to find out how to ‘fix’ her child’s learning disability instead of releasing her need for security and asking Jesus how he saw the situation. Or picture Kathy driving while her tantrum-ing 4-year-old screamed “I hate you!  You’re the most terrible mom!  You’re poop and I want to flush you down the toilet!” screeching to a halt, pulling her child out of the minivan and threatening to leave her on the sidewalk instead of releasing her need for love and control. 

There’s nothing wrong with our primal needs for love, safety or control—or desiring them.  The problem comes when we have an excessive desire, or in spiritual formation language, a disordered attachment to these needs. Welcoming prayer invites us to release our disordered attachments, relinquishing our needs into the hands of God.  We say, as an act of faith before it is even true, that we release our excessive need for each. And then we welcome Jesus into that space.

When teaching this prayer, most pushback comes around the last line “Jesus I release my need to change reality and receive it as it is.“   Reality is often full of injustice, hardship, suffering.  Shouldn’t we want to change it?  Doesn’t God call us to be part of shaping and changing our world?  Of course. Yet this part of the prayer is important for two reasons.  First, the issue, again, is our desperate, clutching need for reality to be something different.  We release our overly invested activism and trust God’s sovereignty.  We release our fantasies and our temptations to anesthetize our suffering, and invite Jesus into our reality.

Second, and maybe more important, God is experienced in the present.  While we remember God’s faithfulness in the past, and we trust God for our future, Jesus joins us in the present--he is with us, Emmanuel, in the messy truth of what’s real and happening NOW.  If we don’t allow ourselves to be present to what’s real, what’s actual, we miss the transforming presence of Jesus. 

Releasing our need to change reality doesn’t mean that we say we are apathetic about life. It simply means we are open to the will of God in our life, even through things we know God hates, like injustice and hatred. Railing against the present reality, rather than looking for what God is already doing and offering, is a way of choosing death. Releasing our demands for our versions of love, safety, and control, allows us to welcome Jesus into our realities as they are right now. Into the mini-van with a tantrum-ing child, rushing home from work to make dinner, rocking the baby who just won’t fall asleep, resenting the toddler who won’t stop raging, rejoicing over the kid who finally learned to ride a bike at nine, checking the self-harming teenager into an inpatient unit, and helping that same teenager pack her suitcase for college. Without judging ourselves or our families, we tell Jesus, “Well, here it is. The reality of it.  And the reality of how I’m struggling in the midst of it. Here it is, Jesus, and I welcome you into all of it.”