Why
pray?
Prayer feeds the soul. As
blood is to the body, prayer is to the soul (Mother Teresa)
In the C14 Julian of Norwich
taught that prayer makes God behold us in love and makes us partners in God’s
good deeds.
In the C16 St Teresa of
I believe that divine
relationship is central in a prayerful life, demanding as much time as we would
give to developing and sustaining an intimate human relationship.
So what is prayer?
The group of young people
confirmed earlier this month at St Mary’s would tell you that prayer can be in
the form of praise and thanksgiving, yearning, pleading, seeking, supplication
or listening. It can be in words, in
thoughts, in feelings, in emptiness, in surrender, in movement. It can take the form of action in our work. Prayer is consciously and attentively giving
and receiving love and grace, it guides us to live actively by divine
inspiration, is an anchor of connectedness with all that matters, it reminds us
how much help we need and it unites us with our brothers and sisters throughout
the world.
Each one of us here this
morning will have some sort of life of prayer, it may be disciplined or ad hoc,
we may sometimes feel that it is a void with nothing at the other end, there
may be times when we abandon it or have no time for it – I have been through
all of these and many more. This morning
I’d like to share with you three elements that may help provide further
insights into your prayer life in the future.
Hidegard of Bingen identified
the will and the intellect and
The will:- prayer
is not something that just happens to us if we are in the right mood but a
positive action on our part towards the God we cannot see. There will be those amongst you this morning
who may disagree but I would like you to think about it. Taking part in any relationship is generally
a conscious act of choice so too with prayer as we enter into an intimate
friendship with God requires one’s will: the will to want it, the will to give
time to it, the will to learn from it and about it and the will to concentrate
at the deepest level. The French philosopher Simone Weil wrote, prayer is the orientation of all attention
of which the soul is capable towards God.
The will to put yourself in a
position, to place yourself before the Divine, to sit, kneel, lie whatever, is
an act of prayer removing yourself from the chaos and distractions of life, get
there and the words follow.
The intellect:- our
minds are crammed with knowledge derived from our reading , relationships,
study, life experience, much of it stacked away like the dusty archives in a
museum or library, only infrequently brought into the light and dusted
down. Fortunately the gifts of the mind,
predominantly reason, observation and judgement can be used to discern the
imprint of the divine and the needs and aspirations of the soul including
acquiring the knowledge of God’s world and purpose beyond our own. Intellectual prayer recognises the
distinction between facts and truth and we can use human reason and logical
discernment to situate our lives within creation and within history. We are surrounded by many books that give us
advice on spiritual systems and teachings to live by but I would suggest that what
we need to do is to retreat into ourselves, reflect and think so that the
learning that we have acquired may be incorporated into our deeper selves,
within our spiritual core and then into our daily lives.
The heart:- a C13
German mystic writing about the power of prayer in relation to the heart said that:
It makes an embittered hear
mellow
a sad heart joyful
a foolish heart wise
a timid heart bold, a weak heart strong
a blind heart clear seeing
a cold heart ardent.
It draws God who is great
into a heart which is small.
It drives the hungry soul up
to the fullness of God.
Praying from and with our
hearts provides a vital link with the love of God and the divine in our
lives. When we love God, when we pray
and listen we open ourselves to the experience of prayer.
Heart centred prayer means we
can ask God for help, without bargaining.
We can ask in humility from a position of trust and love and wait for
God’s intervention.
Praying from the heart also
demands listening to God. God speaks to us through creation; through the sunset,
the wild flowers in the hedgerows, mountains and seas, through dried up leaves
and beautiful butterflies. We need to
contemplate, people are contemplative by nature, we need to find the time and
place to listen to God.
Contemplative or listening
prayer, where we give away all expectations, all concerns for the past and
future and just practice being in the here and now with the God, provides an
experience of infinity, of peace. As the
divine connection is made through our hearts we can then recognise, listening
prayer, contemplation, as the highest form of love. Angela of Foligno C13
wrote, in this type of prayer the soul
understands more of God that would seem naturally possible, suggesting that
it can lead to mystical experiences, which encompass a feeling of being beyond
self, of being in union with all things.
Prayer is not a quick five minutes
when we have time to spare or when our resources have dried up. Prayer is something that we have to work at
every day if we are to achieve that relationship with God that brings peace,
spiritual growth and union with all things.
Heaven
is reached, the blessed say,
by
prayer and by no other way.
One
may kneel down and make a plea
with words from book and breviary,
or
one may enter in and find
a
home-made message in the mind.
But
true prayer travels further still,
to
seek God’s presence and God’s will.
From Prayer, by Jessica Powers.