No show - 24 February 2012

In chapter 6 of Matthew’s Gospel Jesus lists four primary qualities of true prayer. I would like to deal with one of these each week for four weeks. In the first of these, he teaches that prayer must be rooted in the sincerity of the true self rather than in the ego’s self-consciousness. I think this is a distinction which would be completely mysterious to most church-going people. But Jesus put it simply:

Be careful not to make a show of your religion before others... When you pray, go into a room by yourself, shut the door and pray to your Father who is there in the secret place, and your Father who sees what is secret will reward you.

The most obvious example Jesus gave is the pharisee in the temple, who stood and prayed loudly, and thanked God that he was not as others are. That is pure ego, and yet I imagine he was quite sincere. When we hear that story, if we are smart, we know to avoid the trap of thanking God that we are not as that pharisee. The church has what it calls the Prayer of the People, the Liturgy, the prayer that we do all together, publicly, and if we do it devoutly and sincerely, it is good. But as we know, even in the finest congregations, much of it can become noisy or showy and ego-ridden.

Jesus prefers prayer in secret. There is a clue in his phrase, a room by yourself. The Greek actually says, your room -- but in Galilee in those days that would have been a rare luxury indeed, a private room with a door! (I love Luther’s German, so gehe in dein Kämmerlein, go in your little room.)

Jesus means the room in an inner, spiritual sense. It is the place a contemplative knows, where God meets with the true self whom God knows and loves, rather than with the ego which is always doing and thinking things and is always conscious of what others might be saying and thinking.

The mantra is what clears this little room, and makes it open and fresh. Setting the ego to one side is always difficult, as we know, and in a lifetime we never get it quite right. But in Christian Meditation we practise the Kämmerlein, the little room. That is where we are truest, stillest, quietest, and our demands settle down and all the clatter we make is a distant echo. And so it becomes a place of love, because we are free for that.