Readings: Mark 7:24-30 Matthew 6:7-13
We pray: may the words of my mouth and the meditations
of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, o God, our rock and our
sustainer. Amen.
Don’t call me
God. I’ll call you.
Well, I don’t mean
it to be that way.
It’s just that
prayer tends to be on my terms,
when I’ve got the
time and inclination,
and even then, I
do all the talking,
as though God
didn’t already know what was in my heart.
Yes, I’m aware
that conversation is a two way business
but I guess it’s
easier for me to talk
because I’ve got a
bit of a hearing problem,
and God’s voice is
so terribly quiet
that listening can
be hard work.
It means tuning
into a huge silence
in order to pick
up a whisper or two.
I’m not good with
silences.
They make me feel
disconnected.
I want to shout
down the line:
‘Are you
working? Is anybody there?’
I think I need
some practice,
still times to sit
with silence
and feel
comfortable with it
so that I
recognise the voice when it comes.
And who
knows? Maybe one day I’ll discover
that the best part
of prayer
is to let God do
the talking.
Joy Cowley’s words.[1]
I wonder if that
sums up how we struggle with prayer.
Certainly resonates with me.
For how many of us
is prayer a time when we reel off our requests, opinions, observations and
then, figuratively speaking, hang up on God.
Rowan Williams in the chapter on prayer in the book ‘Being Christian’
picks up on this very clearly. He quotes
the early church scholars in their understandings of the Lord’s prayer – it
begins ‘Our Father,..’ that’s our Father – we have been adopted into
relationship with God through Jesus – we are one with Jesus in saying ‘our
father’, recognising the closeness and intimacy, the oneness of parent and
child. So what are doing hanging up
after we have cried out for help? That’s
not prayer – that’s a tirade. Instead we
need to be emptying ourselves of our limiting images and allowing God to speak
into our hearts.
We get to talk to
God in a new way through Jesus, one where we are taken to the very heart of God
– is that not worth looking for, seeking out?
To grow in our Christian life, to hear, to learn, first we acknowledge God
in us. Our words of prayer come
after we have emptied ourselves of our priorities, and allowed Jesus to
take us to the intimacy that he shared with his Father.
Prayer is God’s
word in us, not us trying to get God interested.
And do we think
prayer is only a time of well crafted words once a week on Sunday – again some
more Joy Cowley words:
The way I see it
Lord,
there is outer
prayer and inner prayer,
words written for
the eyes and the mouth,
words spoken for
listening ears,
[and] words
stumbling along in the mind
falling over each
other in an attempt to express the inexpressible,
words rushing up
from feelings of
love or gratitude
or distress…..[2]
All of it prayer,
all of it – the explosion of joy where no words will do, the deep felt need of
God in despair, the words you have agonised over for Sunday worship and the
words that trip of your tongue in a moment of deep revelation. All are prayer. All are connections with God in Jesus. All are way in which we discern the eternal
action of God in us and through us in this world.
Another point that
Williams makes is that prayer is best experienced most meaningfully when other
issues in our lives are dealt with. That
being quiet before God needs to be at a very deep level, that if we are not
reconciled with those we are divided from, forgiving those we begrudge, at
peace with our world and our part in it –our listening and prayer will still be
filled with our priorities and distractions. Moreover, if we are serious about
understanding that, in prayer, Jesus lives in us, then how could we not want to
live in his way of peace, justice, reconciliation – and expect the result of
prayer to be the increase of the same.
We pray because Christ is in us, and in prayer Christ works in us.
And the final
point that Williams makes is that prayer is about faithfulness, fidelity. And this is probably one of the hardest
things for many of us - the habit of prayer, the constancy, the deepening
understanding that prayer is not in our control, but in fact a journey into the
unknown, where we are often uncertain as to what is going on, often baffled or
feeling we have been hung up on, but where we persist because that is who we
are, that is God alive in us.
We have all
struggled with distractedness when we pray;
concentrating
really hard until all those wayward thoughts
intrude or we
begin to doze, we have all felt as if we are in a no-where place, we all have
tried to shape prayer into a one way conversation – our way!
But in truth, our
life in prayer, our life with God is well beyond our limited imagination or our
control, but this we know: it is a place
of mystery and growing, it is a place of surprise and intimacy, of
enlightenment in the very moment of darkness, of frustration and deep
contentment, of change and absolute peace - it is, after all, about allowing
God in Jesus Christ to live in us and through us – what else would we
expect? Amen
Margaret Garland
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