Joining Jesus’ prayer – 1 February 2013

One of the more tantalizing contemplative sayings goes something like this:  There is only one prayer in the universe, the prayer of the Risen Jesus.  What we do is join that prayer in silence and stillness.  It is a statement which causes some wrinkled brows among the faithful.  What about all our intercessions, and prayer chains?  The Prayer Book is full of beautiful prayers which we use.  “I have been saying my prayers all my life,” said one person at a seminar.  Although I didn’t say so to him of course, he had mentioned himself three times in just that very brief sentence – and that is the point.  It’s not about me, what I want, what I think, how I feel, my concern for others, even. 

Contemplative life and prayer is a long process in which self is being displaced – and we become steadily freer and more willing to hear the one true prayer, Jesus’s prayer, which starts to become our own prayer, sublimely set out for us in John 17.  It is an eternal prayer of unity, that ultimately the world will reflect the unity and diversity, in love, of the divine Trinity (to say it theologically).   It is a prayer we can learn to hear as a kind of hopeful miracle even in the depths of human confusion and depravity, pessimism and despair.  Jesus prays to the Father, in the Spirit:  …that they may all be one.  As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe…   And so on… if you read this chapter attentively you find that Jesus also prays about joy, about glory, about love, about knowing. 

This is his prayer, for his disciples and for God’s world in every age.  It is the prayer which ultimately leads to the very best that the Christian faith has to offer.  The Benedictines would say that all of life, work and play, becomes part of that prayer – there is no separation between work and prayer.   For St Paul it leads inevitably to a theology of unity in difference, between Jew and Greek, male and female, rich and poor, slave and free.  To hear Jesus’s prayer and to join it is to be no longer able to live by violence, discrimination, bigotry.  Those who have heard Jesus’s prayer and made it their own are already changing the world, because their own hearts are being changed. 

The rabbis had a saying that if only all Israel would observe the law perfectly for one day, the Messiah would come.  I think we could wistfully say that if only all Christendom could be still and listen for one day, then just perhaps, as the tumult and shouting dies, and the public moralists and the charismatic leaders and the keynote speakers all depart, there could be heard the faint sound of the song of the Trinity.  There is already love in the universe, there is already all that God finds very good.  Our task is to stop, and be silent, and to join what is already there.  The kingdom is within you, said Jesus, in your midst.  Christian Meditation is a way of making sure we are not so busy and noisy that we fail to see it.