A reflection on prayer, Trinity 18, 20 October 2019
We hear a lot of tales that God is dead to modern Britons. But I’m
really not convinced. A couple of years ago, research found that more
than half the country’s adults (51 per cent) still pray. And of those,
20 per cent do not class themselves as religious. Over seventy per
cent of those surveyed pray for their families – many now doing so on
the go — while exercising or cooking. Fifty-five per cent of those who
pray do so in a crisis, perhaps when all else fails.
Prayer has been a bit of a mystery to me –my predominant experience of
it growing up, equated it simply with requesting for God to change
things. As many of you know, I had a deeply disturbing existential
crisis at theological college, ending up agnostic. And one of the many
challenges I remember encountering was the thought: if people are
suffering why would God wait until we ask for him to help before
intervening. Does God really intervene at all?
I had friends who would pray for parking spaces when they went
shopping – and I found it difficult to feel respect for a God who
would answer that sort of prayer while not answering the prayers of
those who were hungry, those persecuted for their faith, those being
tortured. Combined with my growing agnosticism, I stopped praying for
about eight years.
So, how to make sense of Jacob wrestling with God, and the persistent
widow in today’s Gospel reading. This poor widow is one of the weak
and vulnerable in society. And yet, what is she praying for? She not
praying for riches, or favours to get ahead. No, she is simply asking
for justice.
At the outset, the Gospel writer tells us that Jesus’s parable is
about “the need to pray always and not lose heart.” But this is
troubling. Are we really supposed to harass God until we wear him
down? Is that what prayer is — bothering a hardhearted God until he
reluctantly gives in?
Thankfully, that’s not what the parable says. The parable is working
by way of contrast: Unlike the heartless judge in the story, God ‘will
quickly grant justice’ to those who cry out to him. But this raises a
more troubling question, because our experience of prayer contradicts
it. Too often, God does delay. And our most fervent prayers — for
healing, for justice, for protection, for peace — these go unanswered.
Adding to this challenge – if God sometimes answers prayer, why
doesn’t he do so more often?
The Welsh poet/ priest, RS Thomas, described prayer as like throwing
stones at the sky’s window hoping to attract the attention of the
loved one. Both Jacob’s wrestling with God, and the persistent widow
demonstrate a discipline, and that prayer can be hard work. The
parable begins with the exhortation, do not lose heart. It encourages
us to keep praying, because something happens when we pray.
Returning to my own experience - having given up on prayer for many
years, I came back to it in a different sort of way. I discovered
silent contemplative prayer. It involves slowing down and stopping
long enough to feel the pulse of the universe – it quietens our
restless hearts and minds. It focuses the mind, to stop thinking
about what happened yesterday or will happen tomorrow, or what you’ve
forgot to do, or must do, and so on. In a word, one becomes present…
present to oneself, one’s emotions, one’s body.
During my three-month sabbatical last year, the quote that stood out,
and has remained within me, was one from Buddha. Buddha was asked,
‘What have you gained from meditation?’ [It’s a very Western
acquisitional sort of question] He replied, ‘Nothing’. ‘However, let
me tell you what I have lost: Anger, anxiety, depression, insecurity,
fear of old age and death.’
What a wonderful reflection on the importance of meditation. I have
gained nothing from meditation…. But I have lost anger, anxiety,
depression, insecurity, fear of old age and death.’
We do this at St George’s on Monday evenings at 6pm. And it's a
counter cultural challenge to our frenetically paced lives. To stop
and to be still, to become and live in the present. It requires the
sort of discipline and persistence our widow showed. I wonder whether,
as we think about our Mission Action Plan in the coming months, we
might consider starting a practice of mindfulness.
So, does prayer change things? I wonder what you think? It’s
impossible to make any sort of causal link to the intercessions we
rightly pray and what happens in the world. Chaos theory suggests that
a butterfly flapping its wings at just the right point in space/time
can led to a hurricane. Another way of putting it is that small
changes in the initial conditions lead to drastic changes in the
results. Is it possible that our heartfelt prayers today might change
things?
The one thing that silent contemplative prayer has been shown to do is
to change us. It softens our hearts, fills us with God’s love, and
sensitizes us to hear the cry of those in need or distress.
RS Thomas expresses so well some of my struggles with prayer, and I’d
like to end with it.
Folk Tale
Prayers like gravel
flung at the sky's
window, hoping to attract
the loved one's
attention. But without
visible plaits to let
down for the believer
to climb up,
to what purpose open
that far casement?
I would
have refrained long since
but that peering once
through my locked fingers
I thought that I detected
the movement of a curtain.
In R. S. Thomas, Selected Poems,
(London: Penguin, 2003), p186.