|
About Prayer |
|
|
Some articles on Prayer
Prayer Solves Nothing Sometimes we approach prayer as if it is capable of solving all our problems. Then we get cranky with God and give up praying because we don’t get what we want; we blame God, we begin to doubt him, we “punish” him by not going to Church, we question his own words “Ask and you shall receive.” I wonder whether we ever consider what prayer is really about. I wonder whether we approach prayer as the easy way out of our problems. It’s an common trap to fall into. But I guess if we give it any thought at all, especially as we get older, we pretty soon realise that if God is truly God, then he will not allow us to take the easy way out: he gave us gifts and talents and enough intelligence to get on with the job and become the full human beings he wants us to become. Why do we pray? Is it for our own satisfaction? Is it so that we become better people? Is it a subtle way of bribing God to take away the problem rather than having to face it ourselves? Probably a combination of all of these things! Surely as we get older we have to grow out of these attitudes to God. It was a wise person who once said that in our prayer we should seek the God of consolation rather than the consolation of God: it’s a matter of perspective. Prayer is ultimately about building a relationship with God, and if, in becoming more closely aligned with the will of God as it is found in our daily lives, we grow into better people, that’s all to the good – but I do not think that is the primary aim of prayer. Prayer is certainly not about turning us into nice middle class people. The God of truth is not into making life easier for us, giving us an easy road. So why pray? I think prayer gives us direction; I think it gives us courage to keep going even when we seem to be going backwards; I think it is about fidelity – it’s easy to pray when we feel good, but it’s better to keep praying however we feel. I think it is about constancy, in season, out of season, in good times and in bad times. That is where real love is expressed. Shakespeare wrote in one of his best known sonnets (116): “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” That applies to the love of God as well as to our human love. Our prayer brings us into a relationship with God, and all relationships have their good times and their bad times. God is unchanging; we are the ones who change, we are the ones who have moods and dummy spits; we are the ones who manage on our own when the times are good and go rushing off to the consolations of God when the times are rough. It is hard to imagine that Jesus’ personal prayer was always comfortable and all sweetness and light. There must have been times when the Father seemed a very absent parent to Jesus – the agony in the garden at Gethsemane was probably only one of many such experiences of desolation. The transfiguration didn’t come every day. In the long run, prayer for Jesus was about fidelity, listening to the Father, discerning his will for his Son – Jesus had no easier path to his destiny than we have. Hard and all as it is, we, like Christ himself, must seek fidelity in our prayer. Or, as Shakespeare put it in the same sonnet: love “is an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken. It is the star to every wandering barque … ” Our prayer is not about removing our problems, it is about having the courage to face them constantly in hope, it is about coming closer to the heart and will of God. The Archbishop of Canterbury at Prayer The Archbishop-designate of Canterbury, Archbishop Rowan Williams, an orthodox Christian left-winger and Welshman to boot, was in Australia earlier this year and was interviewed about prayer. An account of the interview appeared in The Tablet 27 July 2002. He had some wonderfully simple things to say about a matter that causes difficulties for those who take it seriously (and I have added some of my own reflections). One of the common things about prayer is that we feel out of our depth, but this is basic in prayer in the sense that we cannot contain what is given, and prayer is about what is given, not what we give. Prayer is a matter of intention, disposing ourselves to receive something; but it can also go on when we are not conscious of it. [Saint Therese of Lisieux even says that if we go sleep during prayer, we are still in prayer. And the Psalm says “Even at night my heart teaches me” (16:7).] The prayer I use most regularly is the Orthodox Jesus Prayer – “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner”, saying it over and over and over again. By repeating the Jesus Prayer, the mind is stilled and the heartbeat and breath slow down: you become anchored in time and place. In prayer we try to become steady and quiet, gathering our wandering thoughts and fantasies, and simply becoming what we are and just sit there being a creature in the hand of God. [This is easier said than done. There is no doubt that God is deeply present even in our most tumultuous prayer – in prayer it is the will that counts more than the achievement. For the most part, prayer is a struggle, but fidelity is the key.] Prayer is more than feelings. Not that prayer has nothing to do with feelings, but it is more about a habit of being; it is a sinking of our identity into something deeper. It is not about feeling good: we may feel terrible and God is in the midst of that; we may feel nothing in particular and God is there; we may feel holy and wonderful and that may have little to do with God. So we need a realism about our feelings; we need to distinguish between what God is doing and what we are feeling. Two powerful axioms about prayer stick with me: “pray as you can, don’t try to pray as you can’t” and “the less you pray the worse it gets”. [About that first recommendation: don’t ever think that you have to pray the way someone else prays. Find what suits you and stick with it.] Doctor Williams sees our present culture as a culture in crisis: we have lost a sense of what we are in each other’s eyes and of how to live in such a way that we can make sense of one another and to one another. It’s about the common habits, the common decencies, the common conventions of life together. This is partly because we do not see ourselves in relationship with God: if we were to see people as related to God before thy are related to me, we would treat them differently. He was in New York on 11 September 2001, trapped in a building for some time. When asked “Where was God on that day?” he replied: in the messages of love sent to families from people preparing to die, in the matter-of-fact heroism of the rescue workers, in the simple acts of kindness and support which people offered to each other in the midst of it all, “and having been trapped for an hour in the middle of it I witnessed some of those acts of practical, undramatic, unfussy goodness”. The Archbishop of Canterbury has given us much food for thought. The Search for God Cannot Wait “Everything else can wait. The search for God cannot wait. Love one another.” When Beatle George Harrison died last November, he was remembered for many things, but it is extraordinary that it was his personal spirituality, his personal search for God, that struck a chord in so many hearts. I was a young teacher when the Beatles hit the scene in the early Sixties and I clearly remember the furore they caused among adults – the long hair, the collarless coats, the music, the power they had to pull a crowd. It was all rather worrying: what sort of influence would these wild men from Liverpool have on our youngsters? It was the long hair and the beards of the Beatles, and Peter, Paul and Mary, which worried us respectable people as much as anything else. Where would it end? Well, we’ve moved on forty years since then and we are still asking the same questions of Eminem and Limp Biscuit. I am not suggesting that questions do not need to be asked, but I am suggesting that we have to find the good in all the things that go on about us. It is what George Harrison calls “the search for God”. It is because of the Beatles, KISS (remember when they were Knights in the Service of Satan, and remember when the MCP staff ‘performed’ KISS to much acclaim at the 2001 Multicultural Night?), and Eminem that we ask the questions, that we are able to find the good in all things. Remember the controversy over the years concerning the exhibition of Piss Christ (a crucifix in a jar of urine) and the image of Mary constructed in part with elephant dung? Remember the picketing of the films Jesus of Montreal and Dogma? I am not passing judgement on the merits of these phenomena; I am simply asking that we think before we condemn. Where are we coming from in our judgements? We are all children of our upbringing, but we must not remain children in our thinking. Our search for God – that is, a sense of truth, a belief in God as a person who loves us to such an extent that he took human flesh, suffered and died for us, someone to whom we relate in personal love – is so important, so life-long, so never-ending and incomplete. Our search for God is so challenging that we cannot ever assume we have the full answer. Only the fundamentalist can believe that the answers are fixed and unchanging and readily knowable. Doing the rounds of the emails last year was a response from U.S. evangelist Billy Graham’s daughter, Anne. When confronted with the question “Why does God let these things happen?” she responded that having ousted God from American schools, they had no right to complain. To me, that represents an understanding of God which is worrying: a petulant being, a spiteful, revengeful being – “If you don’t play by my rules, I’m taking my ball and going home.” Now, I certainly believe that in our westernised world we have not of late been prepared to give God the time and place that human beings ought to give to the One who created us in love and redeemed us in love and sanctifies by his constant presence. It is we who have to take responsibility for our personal stance towards God, but let’s not believe that God ever takes his divine ball and goes home, leaving us to it. The God who loves does just that, loves in good times and in bad, he does not walk away from us however little we are aware of him. It is we who have the responsibility to give God the time he deserves and we need if we are going to be fuller, richer human beings. And if we do not do this, we are not likely to reach the fulness of our human potential: it is our choice, not God’s fault. And it is a life-long quest: the life-long quest, the most important quest, as George Harrison so simply and powerfully put it.
|