Ways of praying – 19 October 2012

Whoever wrote the Letters to Timothy listed different ways of praying.  He wrote:  First of all then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings, should be made for everyone… (I Tim 2:1).  This is generally what we do – although we should avoid the excesses of the Afro-American woman, Aibileen, in Kathryn Stockett’s amazing novel, The Help, who could make people straighten up simply by threatening to add them to her prayer list.  On the other hand, it was indeed moving to see large groups of Moslem worshippers in Pakistan, and in the UK, praying for Malala Yousufzai, age 14, shot by the Taliban and now desperately ill – all because she had been encouraging girls to go to school to break their cycle of ignorance and slavery to men. 

John Cassian was a travelling ascetic who for a while was taught by the early Desert Fathers.  He later wrote about this, and he describes how Abba Isaac taught him about prayer.   Abba Isaac said that eventually in our journey there comes what we now call contemplative prayer, in which we are still, and in which very little matters more than being still.  Even avid practitioners of words and deeds now begin to feel they might let go of words, of thoughts, of images, and of the need to be justified by results.  It is a very big prescription.  We can scarcely do it ourselves.  And so we do what we can, we sit, still, and silent, and say our word, our mantra.  That is what we mean by poverty, in prayer, because that is all we can do. 

Jesus said to go into our room and shut the door.  Well, we can do that.  It works, if other people in the house understand the message of the shut door.  If they are threatened or irritated by it, or amused, then that is something to negotiate.  Meditators I have talked with say that toddler grandchildren are the worst.  Contemplative prayer may not be possible with a demanding prepubescent in the house – or for that matter, certain teenagers, or an inhabitant with dementia or something else very needy.  All of those situations are represented in the people I know in the Benedictine Oblate community. 

But then, Jesus’ statement can be read more intelligently.  The door that is to be shut, for the time being, is the mind’s door to words, thoughts, images.  God is already there.    It is akin to the Holy of Holies in the Jewish temple, the innermost room, where there was nothing, no furnishings, no instructions, no protocol, nothing you could hide behind, or possess, control or manipulate or own.  Nothing to do but be there.  There was no liturgy for use in the Holy of Holies, words had ceased.  There was silence and stillness, and what Rowan Williams called enigmatically a ray of darkness.  And those of us who may have reached a little maturity in the Christian pilgrimage, and have seen a thing or two, may indeed find something familiar and reassuring about that.