Babbling on - 2 March 2012

The second important point Jesus makes about prayer is simple enough, especially in the way he puts it: Do not go babbling on like the heathen who think the more they say the more likely they are to be heard. And it never fails to astonish me how easily this teaching gets ignored in much of the church.

I think we can say that Jesus felt quite strongly on this point, because of the language he chooses. “Blabbermouth”, is how whoever heard him rendered it in the Greek of Matthew’s Gospel. Timid translators have rendered it, “heaping up empty phrases”. Anyway, Jesus says it’s what the heathen do -- and a remark like that these days would earn him all manner of indignant letters to the editor.

Do not go babbling on... Your Father knows what you need... One of the beauties of good liturgy, which of course does have to use a lot of words, is still its economy. Thomas Cranmer knew how to say something succinctly and clearly.

We do contemplative prayer as much as possible without words or images, not because they are wrong but because Your Father knows... The minute we forget this, we start adding to the noise, the human clamour, which actually makes real prayer harder and harder.

I had a sharp lesson in this respect, once, many years ago -- called at night to the maternity hospital where the newborn baby of one of my parishioners had just died. It was actually impossible that this baby could have lived, but still, the family had not been expecting this to happen. They wanted me to say a prayer. I was shattered and helpless. There was nothing to say that made any sense, or would make them feel better. I said, “We’ll be silent for quite a while, and still. God is here, and God knows what we don’t understand.” And that was it. It was the best I could do. And a ward sister of the kind we used to have long ago said to me as I was leaving, Thanks for not going on about it -- you have no idea what happens here sometimes.

I think the silence which comes out of our frailty and human mortality, sadness and loss, confusion, unanswered questions and painful places, is the prayer God actually hears. So is the silence which may be flowing from our mature discovery over the years that any words we might have for God have begun to get fewer anyway, and that we would rather leave it to God. This kind of prayer may be inarticulate but it is true and it comes from our truth.