Beseeching God – 26 July 2013

This is from Lady Julian of Norwich, in her writing, “Revelations of Divine Love”.   So our customary practice of prayer was brought to mind: how through our ignorance and inexperience in the ways of love we spend so much time on petition.  I saw that it is indeed more worthy of God and more truly pleasing to him that through his goodness we should pray with full confidence, and by his grace cling to him with real understanding and unshakeable love, than that we should go on making as many petitions as our souls are capable of.

The Gospel lesson for next Sunday is perennially misunderstood.  Jesus had been away, praying, on his own.  The disciples asked him to teach them to pray, because, they said, John the Baptist had taught his disciples.  We don’t know what John had taught about prayer.  Jesus proceeds to give them a somewhat abbreviated version of what we know as the Lord’s Prayer.  He then goes right on to teach, by parable and by direct instruction, that there is no need to keep asking God for things.  True prayer is trust and love, in the knowledge that God not only knows precisely what we need -- which may not be what we think we need – and is love, mercy and goodness toward us.

As a student, long ago, I spent two summers working with a senior minister in Auckland’s inner city, and got to lead Sunday worship quite frequently.  After the first occasion my boss suggested that I ceased using words like “Beseech” in the prayers.  He said it was unnecessary and demeaning.   We do not need to beseech God.  And as Lady Julian points out, all the beseeching in the world simply shows what she calls our ignorance and inexperience in the ways of love.

But the fact is, most people, if they pray, do so to ask God for something, often with some urgency.  Christopher Robin wanted God to bless everyone, although to his credit he did seem to think God shared his fun in the bath.  A lot of praying is scarcely distinguishable from superstition or voodoo.  Some modern extempore prayers are simply excruciating.  But I suspect, the notion that God provides things if we ask often enough or in the right way, or that God has somehow to be propitiated or beseeched, is all too basic ever to be altered much.

The journey into contemplative life and prayer however is a journey away from all this, because it is a journey out of fear.  While we still try to live sensibly and prudently, we are learning to set aside fears of the future, of what might happen, and of mortality.  The silence and the stillness, with only the rhythm of the mantra, clears the space for our consent to God.  Lady Julian writes somewhere, Utterly at home, he abides lovingly within us.  St John has Jesus saying, Abide in me, as I abide in you...   It is enough to know, in Lady Julian’s most famous words, that all will be well – not because nothing will go wrong, but because in St Paul’s words, my life is hid with God in Christ.