On Prayer

Two texts for us to stimulate our thinking today. The first comes from our reading from the Acts of the Apostles: ‘All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer’(Acts 1.14). The second is of more uncertain origin: ‘O Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz’. 

At the heart of our gospel reading today is the Prayer of Jesus in John 17. It forms the prelude to the story of the passion of Christ. The scriptures teach us that when Jesus ascends into the heaven, he intercedes for us at the right hand of the Father. Inevitably, this provokes some reflection about the nature of prayer, and so it is perhaps no accident that we have this high-priestly prayer as our gospel reading today.

Since 2016, successive Archbishops of Canterbury have invited churches throughout the country to participate in a time of prayer and intercession in the days between Ascension Day and the Feast of Pentecost. There are nine days, providing opportunities for people to pray ‘Thy Kingdom Come’. And this year, Pope Leo XIV has endorsed this venture so that this is now a global prayer campaign. The aim is to encourage participants to deepen their relationship with God, to pray for God’s spirit to work in the lives of those they know, and to come to realise that every aspect of their life is the stuff of prayer.

Now you may interpret my quotation from a song of Janis Joplin as a rather subversive attempt to send up this great venture and rain on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s parade. But that is not my purpose at all. 

I pray every day – it is part of the fabric of my life. But when we invite others to pray, it may be worth spending some time reflecting on what this means. Why do we pray? What is our purpose? What difference does it make?

Some people find prayer difficult. In one of his sermons, the great Oxford theologian Austin Farrer suggested that ‘In talking of prayer, we want above all to be realistic’ and for Farrer, that meant that the essence of prayer lay in confronting the will of God. He said: ‘even if you thought that nothing came through from the other side, even if you thought that you had to make all the running yourself; you would still be doing something perfectly real and absolutely necessary, in bringing yourself face to face with the will of God. And sometimes, perhaps, if you are in doubt or despair about prayer, because you start with high hopes and cannot realize them, it might be a help to cut your losses, and be content with simply facing the will of God. It is no trifling thing, surely, to look God’s will in the face, and square your will with it, so far as you can. If you had never heard that prayer could be more than this, wouldn’t you want to do this, and to do it every day?’ (Farrer, ‘You want to pray?’, p105).

And yet, herein lies a danger. Confronted with the will of God, seeking to align our will with God’s will, we sometimes end up playing out a curious little drama as if we were on a stage. We seek to bring to light what is most noble and valiant in our hearts, cultivating the desire for world peace, a life of devoted service or heroic sacrifice, food for the hungry, release for prisoners, something really high-minded. But then we realise that God is not fooled….

One of the books that I read on my recent sabbatical is the Spiritual Letters of Abbot Chapman, who was a Benedictine monk. His letters are full of wisdom and advice about the life of prayer, and the challenge and even bewilderment of seeking God’s will, and in all of this he manages to avoid self-consciously pious language, and ‘to tell it like it is’. 

Because sometimes we are not sufficiently real when we pray. We are not sufficiently honest in our prayers. We can usually tell when we are not being sufficiently real because we become distracted. All sorts of petty concerns and anxieties seem to crowd out what it is that we are attempting to say ….. Hence the provocation of the singer, Janis Joplin, and the poet, Michael McClure: Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz.

Of course the overt consumerism characteristic of the song is meant to sound ridiculous, even absurd. But the irony is that our distractions sometimes are. And those distractions may in fact reveal precisely the things that we are most concerned about. There is a story about a former Rector of a church not so far from here, who prayed for a new car week after week, until the congregation got so fed up they actually bought him one. 

These distractions may bring to light our deepest longings and desires. We may be dismayed by just how crude and childish those longings and desires may be. But perhaps rather than wrestling with distraction, we should allow those things to percolate to the surface. By confronting our distractions, we can then begin to discover the things that we care about passionately. The medieval mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing speaks of a God to whom desire is eloquent: if God knows us intimately, to desire something is already to have shared it with God, to have prayed.

So Austin Farrer is onto something when he emphasises the importance of being real. If we are to grow in our relationship with God, there can be no room for pretence. It’s no good trying to present the worthy and respectable side of ourselves in prayer, and it is no good pretending that you are full of high-minded aspirations, particularly if you’re not. One day you might be, but for now, it may be more helpful to start from where we are, to pray not as we ought but as we are, to acknowledge those distractions, to use them as a means of discovering our passions, our needs and our desires. Because here we begin to discover our own fragility, our vulnerability, our real need.   

And this is important – because it is often the starting point for each of us to discover who we are. That is one of the profound mysteries at the heart of the life of prayer. As you grow in prayer, you come to a greater awareness not only of the reality of God but also of who you are. You begin to discover the depths of your own soul. 

The novelist, Douglas Coupland, once wrote of a secret that he has discovered and is almost too embarrassed to share with his readers: ‘Here is my secret: I tell it to you with an openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God – that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I am no longer capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love’.

‘My secret is that I need God’. Coupland is surprised to finally acknowledge his need of God’s grace. And yet, note that each of the needs he describes - a capacity for kindness, giving, loving – these needs are largely made up of concerns for, and attachments to other people. The paradox is that in prayer, as we open our hearts to the gift of the Spirit, we learn not only to be attentive to the desires which lie deep in our hearts. We learn also to be attentive to others, even to pray for others, to intercede for others. This prayer becomes an expression of our love.

And this is where prayer has the capacity to transform us and those we pray for. This is where prayer becomes for each of us a moment of grace – for in prayer, even in the face of all our distractions, when we open our hearts to the gift of the Holy Spirit and when we are attentive to the will of God, we discover that attentiveness is the rarest and purest form of generosity.