Beam of light in a cave

Prayer

Mother Mary Clare SLG wrote a little booklet, Learning to Pray, which was one of the most foundational teachings for me when I was learning to pray. I had become a Christian when I was 15, been baptised and confirmed, and was trying to find out what this ‘prayer’ thing was. Somehow I had missed out on learning this basic thing, but I sensed a call to do it and to encounter the depths of God I knew must be contained there – because the Christian life as I saw it lived around me, and as I lived it was not enough, and not close enough to Jesus’ call in the gospels. I asked some people about prayer, including my parish priest and a man who has since gone on to become a bishop, but sensed that what I was asking made them uncomfortable – they responded by saying ‘well, you just do it.’ For a long time I confined myself to saying the Office and to brief prayers of petition. It was not until I encountered Mother Mary Clare’s booklet, and the spiritual director who gave it to me, that I began to understand what prayer was about, and began to really pray.

Prayer is the gateway to the vision of God for which we were created. It is the means of free and conscious intercourse between the creature and his [sic] Creator and it expresses the union between the two. It is the art of spiritual living and will be incomplete if it includes only the art of the presence of God without the necessary complement of the practice of the presence of man [sic]. (Mother Mary Clare, 1)

My own experience of prayer accords with another of Mother Mary Clare’s suggestions. She writes (17) that “[p]rayer is essentially a love affair with God, not schemes or techniques or ways of prayer, but the most direct open approach of each of one us as a person to God our Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier.”

The encounter between God and Colin which takes place in prayer is intended to draw me deeper into a relationship with God, by and for whom I was created (Ward, 59). There is a great privilege in being able to come to God in prayer, because God is both creator of the universe and a loving parent. To be able to be able to do that, and to know that I am accepted ‘warts and all’ is a profound gift, the experience of which I can offer to others as a teacher of prayer. Indeed, my experience over the past few years is that others, not limited to those I direct, but groups and individuals, have sought me out and asked me to help them to learn to pray.

The prayer I practice falls largely into the forms described in the various readings. I read the Daily Office each day, using the form from Common Worship, as I find a form which is traditional in shape but contemporary in language helpful. Winward (14) describes the corporate nature of the Office, which is one of the aspects I find most helpful. I am comforted by the awareness that my sometimes weak and feeble attempts at saying the Office are part of the overall opus dei of the church, joining with Jesus in the prayer which goes on unceasingly in the relationship between the persons of the Trinity. Winward’s characterisation of the Office as theocentric (16) is another important part for me – it allows me to focus on that which is important for me in my calling as a Christian and as a human being – to give thanks to God for God. The flow of the church’s year (Merton 216), the psalms and scripture is sometimes comforting, sometimes dull, sometimes confronting, and sometimes transcendent, as Norris (1996, 90ff) notes in her description of the role of the psalms in prayer. The discipline of saying the office is another valuable aspect, as returning regularly day-by-day to the routine of setting aside time and space, as well as making a firm intention to pray, forms me into he who God would have me be. St Benedict (chapter 43) exhorted those who sought to follow his Rule to prefer nothing to the work of God. As I seek to live in the spirit of the Rule, as a Benedictine Oblate, I try to find a way to build opus dei into my daily life as a response to God, as a way of participating in the sanctification of the world (“… this deep healing,” mentioned by Bobrinsky [113]), and as a discipline which brings about conversion of life.

Conversatio morum is touched upon by Bobrinsky (115), where he describes the transformation of the human through nourishment by the Word of God and Christ’s Body. This transformation allows the human to be an icon of Christ to those she meets, bringing the love and healing of God into a broken world and into broken lives, to hold the world together (Norris, 1998, 58) – this is the work of the director, and is one of the fruits of prayer.

Winward’s description of the heart (17, cf. Ward, 61) in this context is something I find particularly helpful. The orientation to prayer, and towards God, is not simply something which is of the will, or based on emotion, but on a response of that part of me which God has created to be the ‘place’ of contact with God. This place of contact with God, the heart, is the place where the living waters of God well up, to feed the world (Bobrinsky, 118).

Bobrinsky (112) notes the connection between the Eucharist and the prayer of the heart, and draws a linkage between the formal liturgical prayer of the church – the Divine Office and the Eucharist – and the prayer of the people of God in their lives. I’m struck by the following statement by Bobrinsky (113, 114), which seems to speak particularly to the director:

Concerns for this world are laid at the feet of the Savior, in His heart of compassion. Without this method, the weight of the sufferings of all those who come to us would destroy, submerge and crush us and render us incapable of carrying these burdens. Only in the love of Christ can we descend and remain in the hell or the desert of human hearts and not despair.

This exhortation reminds the director that she is to pray in a “secret, solitary” way, for the world, and including those who come for direction, so that the burden of their hearts does not become too much, and indeed so that the sufferings become something useful and redemptive.

The director, as a teacher of prayer, is to be a person of prayer in a profound way. God asks me to offer myself to God in prayer, which I understand to be the centre of my life, and the primary orientation of my life (Ward 67). The tension for me is to balance this with the other things to which are necessary and which God offers to me as a means of grace – in this I can perhaps be a teacher for those who come, by giving practical suggestions about what works for me, while discerning to what they may be temperamentally inclined (Thornton 30 ff.) Thornton’s reminder to the director that she needs to discern the ‘preferred style’ of the directee is one that resonates with me, as for a number of years I struggled with practices suggested by a director who was enamoured of them and sought to offer them as ‘the practice’ to all who came to him. Merton (214 ff.) notes that methods and practices are all very well, but they are like a scaffold for the creation of a tall sculpture – when the sculpture is done, the scaffolding needs to be removed. It is not an end in itself, but a means to create the sculpture. I am comfortable, for example, with the Daily Office and with Christian Meditation, but I understand that for some these may not be helpful practices. I am less comfortable with the use of art and more physical means of prayer, but for some these are more helpful practices to remind them of the presence of God (Merton 224), and to bring them into God’s presence. I prefer the ‘dark’, ‘wrestling, ‘barren’ and ‘silence’ in prayer (Merton in Norris 1998, 59), but for some of those who come to me consolation, rest, peace may be what God offers them, and what I as their director am asked to point them towards, at least initially.

Thomas Merton, as usual, provides a lot of food for thought (221 ff.). Particularly of resonance is his reminder that the desire to follow God, to be in relationship with God, and to pray, is of key importance, and is more important than sweet feelings and fleeting emotion. I wish I had read this as a new Christian, when I believed that because I frequently felt little my prayers were in some way not technically correct or appropriate – I was not, I thought, doing it right. When my directees come to me, I am able relate my own difficulties and make suggestions based on my own seeking, as well as provide reassurance that there are often cul de sacs on the way.

Norris’s reminder that charity is the measure of the effectiveness of our prayer lives, not sensation or experience (1998, 58), is a timely one. I am reading Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers: Prayer of Ordinary Radicals (Claiborne and Wilson-Hartgrove) at the moment. This book reminds me that the call to prayer and the call to action are intimately linked. When I pray for peace, God calls me to be a peace maker, and to work for peace. When I pray that the hungry might be fed, God calls me to feed the hungry. Reminding God of these needs is not sufficient, for God has given responsibility for these things to God’s children.

My grandmother died recently, and some books I had lent her were returned to me. One was a copy of Michel Quoist’s Prayers of Life. The following prayer (113, 114) is one I have reflected on as I wrote this reflection:

To be there before you, Lord, that’s all.

To shut the eyes of my body,

To shut the eyes of my soul,

And be still and silent,

To expose myself to you who are there, exposed to me.

To be there before you, the Eternal Presence.

I am willing to feel nothing, Lord,

to see nothing,

to hear nothing.

Empty of all ideas,

of all images,

In the darkness.

Here I am, simply,

To meet with you without obstacles,

In the silence of faith,

Before you, Lord.

But, Lord, I am not alone

I can no longer be alone.

I am a crowd, Lord,

For men live within me.

I have met them.

They have come in,

They have settled down,

They have worried me,

They have tormented me,

They have devoured me.

And I have allowed it, Lord, that they might be nourished and refreshed.

I bring them to you, too, as I come before you.

I expose the, to you in exposing myself to you.

Here I am,

Here they are,

Before you, Lord.

Works cited

Benedict of Nursia. The Rule of Benedict.

Bobrinsky, B. The Compassion of the Father. St Vladimir’s Seminary P: NT, 2003.

Hill, C. “Preface” in The St Paul’s Cathedral Psalter. Canterbury P: Norwich, 1997.

Mary Clare SLG. Learning to Pray. Fairacres Press: Oxford. 1990

Merton, T. New Seeds of Contemplation. New Directions: NY, 1972.

Norris, K. The Cloister Walk. Riverhead Books: NY, 1996.

Norris, K. Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith. Riverhead Books: NY, 1998.

Quoist, M. Prayers of Life. Gill and MacMillan: Dublin, 1954.

Thornton, M. Spiritual Direction. SPCK: London, 1984.

Ware, K. The Inner Kingdom: Volume 1, The Collected Works. St Vladimir’s Seminary P: NY, 2001.

Winward, S.F. The Daily Office. The Joint Liturgical Group. SPCK: London 1969.