On one level, prayer is asking God for things. And immediately, it seems to many, there is a
problem. It presupposes a God who won’t
do something unless we ask, who then may or may not “grant” what we ask – and so
can seem capricious. A child dies
despite the urgent and fervent prayers of many.
Then it may be that God is thought to have healed someone when everyone
prayed, but to have let others die when they didn’t. The Book of Psalms, I have to say, often
implies this level of prayer – those Psalms reflect exactly the ways we all
react at times.
When it was suggested to me that perhaps I didn’t know
everything, at about the age of 17½, I began to learn to be more
respectful – and in this case, more respectful of the desperation people can be
thrown into by the realities of life and death, when human resources run
out. People defend these levels of
prayer because life is cruel and unfair.
And so we need to be respectful also of prayers for peace,
for an end to violence… prayers we pray year after year, despite knowing that violence
never ends. I too have written thousands
of words in prayers for every noble cause, some of them in very elegant prose. In Fiddler On The Roof, someone asks the
rabbi if there is a special prayer for the Tsar. Certainly,
says the rabbi… “God bless and keep the
Tsar – far away from us”. Then we
have all the majestic prayers of funerals, of the Solemnising of Matrimony, of
Ordination – always hoping, I have sometimes thought, that God is impressed
with our use of language. The church
lives by its prayer – and all of its prayer assumes that God, out there, will turn
his attention and hear the prayer… and, we hope, respond.
When Jesus’s disciples asked him to teach them to pray, he
said, When you pray say, Our Father… If you turn to John 17, which almost
immediately follows the Abiding passages we have been mentioning in past weeks,
you encounter Jesus’s own prayer when he knew what was about to happen. And his first word is: Father… Jesus himself abides
in this bond of love. In our abiding we
join in this bond.
There is really only one prayer in the universe, and that is
the bond of love and unity we see when Jesus says Abba, Father. We come to the threshold of that same
bond of love when from our hearts we say, Father. It is no longer asking God to do things. It is joining the hymn of prayer which is
always flowing in God’s creation, the ceaseless bond of love and re-creation
between Father and Son and Spirit. If
you read John 17, you see how it is a constant call towards unity and peace,
re-creation and renewal. We select
silence and stillness. We stop our
words. We do what we can to set self
aside and to be present, as God is always present. We become part of the river of prayer of love
and unity which is nothing less than creation itself. Our deep inner consent means that we are
content to be part of God’s renewal of all things.
In her fourth talk to the NZCCM meditators in Hamilton,
Sarah Bachelard told how Christian Meditation opened for her a prayer blessedly free of my agenda,
demands and expectations. As time
went by, she learned how God does not have to be persuaded to be nice to us – God is already and irrevocably for us, for
all of us. This is what we now have
to know and live, and at times, speak.
Far from making intercession redundant, she says, Intercession becomes the spirit that imbues our whole lives… all our
prayer, our meditation… and all our action…
There is only one prayer…
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