June 2003
Praying made Simple
June 2003
Praying made Simple
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As you
walk along a crowded street or sit in a crowded airport concourse have you
ever found yourself wondering what all those people milling around you are
thinking about? Everyone's thinking about something all the time.
They may be planning, scheming, worrying, day dreaming, fantasizing,
anticipating or doing just as you're doing: wondering what you are
thinking. There's no moment of our lives, including our sleeping time, when our minds aren't active. So when in the midst of all this mental activity can we say we're praying and when we aren't? When we first arrived in Bahrain nearly eight months ago daily life was regularly punctuated by the Muslim call to prayer. It still is but I don't notice it as much now. I've become accustomed to it. I've switched off to it. It reminds me of 40 year ago as a student being trained by the Society of the Sacred Mission at Kelham, and the bell went at regular intervals of the day to call us to pray, eat or study. response to the bell was mandatory - or else. Life has changed over those years. Bringing up a family, the irregular calls on one's time in a parish pastoral ministry means those regular calls to pray have all but disappeared, and the yearning for that monastic order and discipline of life leave their marks of guilt. It also means one has to rethink the life of prayer. As a priest I'm often asked about prayer. How do I pray? Why have I stopped praying? What's prayer? Why doesn't it seem to work for me? Why doesn't God answer my prayer? Many of us rely on forms of prayer taught to us as children. Many still carry the rhythm of the prayers of the Book of Common Prayer heard in communion services or mattins years ago. As we've grown up those familiar structures have disappeared, and we find ourselves lying like a spiritual jelly on the floor of life. I believe that just as every single person is mentally active at each and every moment of life so we've that yearning to pray, and we can turn that constant mental activity into prayer. even those who say they don't believe in God still feel the yearning to pray. For Buddhists, prayer is that element connecting with one greater than our small self. For others, it is the recitation of prescribed prayer that keep them in touch with God. Prayer is perhaps the simplest of human activities and one in which every person needs to engage to be fully human. But we make it so difficult when all we need is to turn all our mental activity towards the gaze of almighty God - not with profound words but by the general orientation of our whole lives.
Sometimes words are unnecessary. Sometimes the simplest words or
gestures are all that's required. For Christians, just the name of
Jesus is sometimes all we need to be in the presence of the God who's
become as one of us and knows what it is to be human. |
Prayer is the soul's sincere desire,
uttered or unexpressed,
The motion of a hidden fire
That trembles in the breast.
Prayer is the burden of a sigh,
the falling of a tear,
The upward glancing of an eye
When none but God is near
Prayer is the simplest form of speech
That infant lips can try;
Prayer the sublimest strains that reach
The majesty on high.
- James Montgomery (1777-1854)