Prayer is not a slot machine…

Divine Mercy Sunday, 19th April 2020.

Recently I received a letter from a friend to whom I had written and had mentioned in passing not to give up on prayer.

His reply arrived yesterday. He wrote:

" So who do we blame for all this? Is God winnowing out the chaff? If so, I do not much like his criteria. As usual, why do so many innocents suffer? Is Nature on the fight back? Cannot say I would blame her as it is as nothing compared to what we have done to her. Is it man's inveterate belief that he can do anything with impunity? You said to me in a letter recently 'don't give up on prayer'. Why? I'm afraid I have never really felt the efficacy of prayer. Perhaps you might say I have never touched God and found a way to communicate. But I think I just feel personally that it is a rather pointless exercise. If He is omnipotent then He knows my prayers, and I am not sure why He needs me to laud Him, or thank Him for my blessings...although perhaps that is the only thing I actually do, generally when I see something beautiful in nature. To pray for specifics never seems to work. To pray for generalities does not either. If it is purely to find peace, then I would prefer a walk in the country". 

So much to unpack there.

Prayer is not a slot machine...a story of love never is.

Thanking for nature is a prayer.

I have not yet written my response and I have no convincing argument for which he asked.

I will ask him to let go of all the accretions, paraphernalia, myriads of supposed answers, meanings, definitions, practises attached to the word and concept of prayer.

I believe each and all of us who pray, pray in our way, in the way which suits us, which we have adopted from our traditions, which is part of a relationship with Creation and its author, we pray as we can.

Years ago, I stayed in a remote small village in France. Each afternoon four elderly black clad ladies made their way to the little used village church and recited 15 decades of the rosary. They recited at a speed that made me breathless. They then added a few traditional prayers to Our Lady and sang the Salve Regina, left and locked the church. To me they did exactly what prayer should be - but it was not necessarily my way. 

I shall quote George Herbert's poem "Prayer":

" Prayer, the Church's banquet, Angel's age,

        God's breath in man returning to his birth,

   The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

        The Christian plummet, sounding heaven and earth;

   Engine against the Almighty, sinner's tower,

         Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

   The six-days' world transposing in an hour,

        A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;

   Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,

        Exalted manna, gladness of the best,

         Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,

   The Milky Way, the bird of Paradise,

        Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,

         The land of spices; something understood."

Prayer is as it is...my friend walking the countryside, an Abbot I knew calling it 'messing about with God', another couple telling me it was the Church's Divine Office and the Psalms.

My thoughts of late have centred on Dag Hammarshjold's long journey inwards and St Augustine's silence.

Or the attentive waiting of the night watchman.

There are the standard prayers of religions.

There are forms of meditation and contemplation. 

There are the myriad ways people turn beyond the immediate and seek help, guidance, strength, peace whatever. 

Only this morning I heard a sermon from Klimormoy in which the priest spoke of the eyes of the body which see the facts and the eyes of the heart.

He gave three examples: 

The trees in spring go green, brown in Autumn and bare in winter, the heart sees the constant beauty. A little girl with freckles and blue eyes, the heart sees a child for whom her parents would die. A village church in need of paint and with only a few worshippers on a Sunday, the heart sees a place of holiness. 

An old hermit said to me 'don't ask how to pray, just pray'.

This is no answer to my friend.

Sadly he would be furious if I said I believed his whole life to be a prayer. 

#prayer #communication #georgeherbert #holiness #conversationswithgod #beauty #nature #sermon #hammarshjold #theheart