God’s kingdom - 16 March 2012

In Jesus’s teaching about prayer his fourth basic point is about its God-centredness. This sounds like stating the obvious, until we look again at what is much more common in practice. So much prayer is “beseeching”, in the old terminology -- seeking to make use of God, one way or another, or to make ourselves feel better. Last week an intelligent, active and highly involved woman wanted me to know how she had given up on the church because of the ways she felt she had been let down by the church. She had been brought up in a very conservative Christian family of Plymouth Brethren, I believe, and she loudly assured me, “I still believe it all” -- she meant the doctrine. I wanted to say to her, “But it’s not about you. It’s not about what you believe. It’s about God.” Jesus said:

Set your mind on God’s kingdom and his justice before everything else, and all the rest will come to you as well.

In contemplative prayer that is our task. So far as it lies with us, we become still, silent, available to God, consenting to God. We are asking for nothing, imaging or imagining or fantasising nothing, simply fully present as God is fully present to us. In the much warmer words of John’s Gospel, where Jesus is explaining the contemplative life to his disciples, he says: Abide in me, and I in you... It is a mutual abiding. In our prayer he abides in us, we abide in him, he abides in the Father. And thus, somehow, ineffably, we become involved in the very life of the Trinity. That is God’s kingdom, and God’s justice, where things are the right way up, where right and truth prevail. It is the place of unity and love.

I don’t understand these things, and I probably can’t explain them to you any better than that. And it is a truism that we learn prayer by doing it, in all our ignorance and neediness. The woman I mentioned earlier is struggling. She believes she first needs questions answered, wrongs righted, the church reformed, and all the damage of the past somehow transformed. It won’t happen. And in any case it is not about her, or me, or you. It is about God before all else, and where we place the attention of our heart.

Cynthia Bourgeault, a contemplative writer says, We've made such a mistake and done such disservice right from the start of our interior life of equating prayer with saying prayers and contemplation now with silence. Silence is not the absence of noise, it's the absence of selfishness.