A different way to be human – 2 October 2015

N T Wright, who prefers to be called Tom Wright, is a former Bishop of Durham.  Here he is writing about prayer, and this is what he says:  Prayer stands cruciform at the place where the world is in pain, to hold together Jew and Greek and slave and free. To hold together male and female, to hold together a battered and bleeding world and say, "No, there is a different way to be human. 

The sense of real pain and helpless loss felt by millions at the sight of a little boy lying face down, drowned, alone and lifeless on a beach, was pure prayer.  And for most it was entirely without finely crafted words.  Prayer, like the Hebrew Psalms, is at its most real when we are acutely aware of our inadequacy to heal the world.  It is good when we have arrived at a stage of life, or even a time of the day, when whatever may happen to us personally is scarcely the issue – and we are willing to bear in the presence of God whatever pain and sorrow we are seeing and hearing about – when we are free to express our love of our neighbour by asking, in the words of Simone Weil, What are you going through?... and actually needing to hear and understand the reply.

We know in our hearts, from the example of the Book of Psalms for instance, that Christian prayer is bound to be most meaningful at the point of pain.  That sounds gloomy or even dire, but it is true and it matters.  We cannot pray any prayer, even prayers of happiness and thanksgiving, in sanitary and safe isolation from human plight and distress.  Prayer means stepping outside our personal support and comfort systems.  In teaching about spirituality there is a nice Latin name, which I can’t remember, for the state of unconcerned bliss some people seem to hang out for, a foretaste of heaven, a retreat into a cocoon of peace and a sense of private well-being.  You can achieve that indeed by various spiritual ploys in any religion, or none – these techniques work, some teachers have got rich teaching them, but they are not Christian prayer. 

The hidden marker of all this is its humble sense of truth and rightness.  The NT writer to the Hebrews spoke of Jesus, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross [Heb. 12:2], a paradox, but true in experience.   Bishop Tom Wright identifies that in the context of prayer, what he calls cruciform prayer, as St Paul wrote long before, there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all are one in Christ Jesus [Gal. 3:28].  These distinctions are inappropriate and irrelevant in Christian prayer.  It is certainly a different way to be human, says Tom Wright. 

In the silence we practise there are no fences in sight, no high barbed wire to keep us safe, no notices restricting the sacred space to people we approve of.  It is really immaterial whether you are a Moslem, an atheist, or a lapsed Presbyterian.  If we are not ready for such heady exposure, if the thought makes us nervous, then it may be that the discipline of silence itself will slowly bring us this different way of being human.  The people who find silence most difficult are those unable to relinquish the illusion of control in life lest something bad happen, or lest they hear something they don’t want to hear, or learn something that might require change.   Silence and silent consent to God is the trail that leads towards the different way of being human.