Prayer

PRAYER

Hymns: Teach me my God and King (Singing the Faith 668), Pray without ceasing pray (Singing the Faith 528), Fill Thou my life (Singing the Faith 73),

As I’m sure you can tell form my accent, I grew up in Newcastle. When I was a child, my school took us on a trip to Lindisfarne. We learned about the monks who lived in the monastery and the way that they lived, and I remember very clearly my teacher telling us that they had a motto:

Laborare est Orare, which means “to work is to pray”.

I also remember that he told us that, in Latin, the order of the words isn’t as important as is English, so that it could also be taken to mean “to pray is to work”. What I want us to consider today is the ways in which both of these statements can be true for us today, just as much as for the mediaeval monks.

To work is to pray.

The monks chose to separate themselves from the world in a community of brothers devoted to prayer. Throughout the day and night they regularly came together to worship God; meals were accompanied by readings from the Bible or from the writings of the saints; much time was devoted to painstaking copying of holy books in the days before the printing press. But this would not be possible without much “behind the scenes” work: physical labour was needed to build the monasteries, artistic talent to create statues and wall paintings for the chapel, musical ability to write settings for the psalms and to accompany the singing.

Out church life also depends very much on work as well as prayer: books are handed out, tea and coffee is prepared, the organ is played, services are prepared as well as attended, the church is cleaned and maintained, banners are made and displayed, the church is decorated for harvest, Christmas and Easter, flowers are bought and arranged. All of these have the potential to be labours of love done to the glory of God.

And the mediaeval monks also recognised the importance of more mundane tasks: the brothers must eat, so they tilled the soil, planted crops and tended vegetable gardens, maintained fishponds to provide fish for Fridays, kept cattle and sheep. They also took thought for those outside their own community and provided shelter for travellers in their guest hall, set up hospices for the sick and dying, provided for the poor.

We too have many jobs that we have to perform, which may seem very much “of this world” and to have little to do with prayer or with God. We work to earn money to support ourselves and our families, we try (with varying degrees of success) to keep our houses clean and tidy; we cook meals and dig the garden; we clean the car and mend bicycles; we wash clothes and wash up dishes. To work is to pray – are all these things prayer? George Herbert would appear to think so:

“A servant with this clause makes drudgery divine. Who sweeps a room as for thy laws makes that and the action fine”

God isn’t with us only when we speak to him in words or thoughts – he is there with us in our everyday lives, every moment of the day. And what we do is a way of communicating with Him. Of course, what our actions say to him is not always what we would like Him to hear; but if we keep in mind that all our actions are a form of prayer, perhaps we will find it easier to lead lives that are more in accordance with God’s will for us.

To pray is to work

I can certainly identify with that sentiment. Prayer often seems to me to by quite hard work - both I the sense of being strenuous and in the sense of being difficult.

There are all sorts of barriers to prayer: our public prayers all too easily become stereotyped and routine, empty words mumbled automatically without any mental or emotional input; our private devotions may be squeezed out by the demands of an ever-busier lifestyle, or our minds wander from the point, or we may even fall asleep,

When we do manage to persevere in prayer, we may find that our prayers seem empty and unreal.

Is there anybody there?

Personally, given the choice, I’d plump for work as the easy option compared with prayer any day! But we are not given the choice – we are urged by St Paul to “pray without ceasing”; Jesus’ life was full of action, but also full of prayer – and we are called to follow his example.

Often I feel inclined to leave the praying side of things to those who are more adept at it. After all there are plenty of aspects of our lives that we are perfectly content to hand over to the experts: we entrust our cars to the care of motor mechanics; we leave the education of our children in the hands of schoolteachers; we accept the expert advice of doctors and pharmacists over our own health. We know that we cannot do the job as well as someone who has spent years acquiring the knowledge and practising the skills that are needed. It is better that we pay someone to do well what we would do badly or could not do at all. So why not leave prayer in the hands of the experts too?

But there are some things that it is important that we do for ourselves even if we know that we will do them badly:

· Would any woman be impressed by a lover who sent a more eloquent friend to ask for her hand in marriage on his behalf?

· We may employ professionals to care for and educate our children, but if we don’t want them ultimately to treat us as strangers we would do well to make sure that we also spend time with them ourselves.

Relationships can’t be maintained entirely through an intermediary, we need to have some sort of direct contact – not necessarily face to face, but we need to be prepared to make an effort, whether it be to arrange a visit, to write a letter or to pick up the telephone.

It’s the same with God – we can please Him by our actions (just as a parent is pleased to see their child in the school play or to receive a good report from the teacher) but we also need the direct approach.

At this point, I’d like to be able to give you a handy guide to How to pray – some really practical advice on how it may best be done. But I’m afraid that I don’t feel qualified to do so. Instead, here are a few, rather disjointed thoughts on a few approaches that Christians have used over the centuries, and still use, to make it a bit easier.

In the Free Churches, we tend to think that the “best” prayer is the spontaneous extempore sort. We tend to look down on prayers that have been written down in a book as less “real”, “just words”. Prayer should be from the heart. Some Local Preachers don’t believe in preparing the prayers in advance when they are taking a service, because they want to pray “as the Spirit moves them”.

But the Methodist Church (particularly its Wesleyan branch) has always also recognised the value of written prayer and in recent years the Methodist Service book has grown, providing us with an increasing resource of liturgy to draw on for our public worship. A retrograde step, some would say. Reducing worship from an outpouring of love towards an intimate God to a meaningless ritual full of standard words and phrases repeated without thought.

But we have ritual in many other aspects of our lives – we have standards formulae for greeting one another (varying depending on our degree of intimacy and the situation in which we meet); we give presents and cards to mark special occasions; we prepare special meals or go out to eat together. Ritual can help to keep a relationship going when simply relying on our spontaneous behaviour would cause them to break down:

· treating our work colleagues with ritual politeness is likely to promote a better atmosphere in the office than allowing ourselves to express our emotions unrestrained;

· sending Christmas cards reminds of absent friends and helps us not to forget them.

When our son, Stephen, introduced us to the girlfriend he’d met in Oxford we were very pleased to see her in her Salvation Army uniform. (She’d just got back from playing in the band when we first met.) Sylvia said to me, “he could have done a lot worse than a Sally Army girl.” But we weren’t quite so sure when she took out her rosary and started telling us about hail Mary’s and the Sorrowful Mysteries and all that. We weren’t very comfortable with the Roman Catholic tradition of personal prayer using a string of beads to “count” the prayers. And we didn’t understand how one person could do that at the same time as going to the citadel every Sunday and playing hymns to shoppers in the Westgate Centre.

To protestant minds, counting prayers using a string of beads can seem to imply a rather legalistic approach to prayer, as if we could pay for our sins by delivering a certain “weight” of prayer to off-set them. We also worry about the repetitive nature of the prayers – God surely only needs telling once!

But we often use repetition in our relationships with other people. When a husband tells his wife that he loves her – is it really because he thinks that she might not know?! Rather it is a way of reinforcing the relationship – and it has an effect not just on the hearer, but on the speaker too.

Repetition is not necessary for God, but it can be beneficial for us. It can be a way of helping when, in St Paul’s words, “we do not know how we ought to pray”. The beads of the rosary keep hands occupied; the repeated words sink into the subconscious minds and change it. God doesn’t need us to repeat our words ten times – but perhaps we need to say them ten times before we really mean them!

Another thing that Our Bernie taught us was the value of visual aids to prayer. The first time we went to visit her father in Liverpool we were surprised to see the Madonna and Child icon that he had on the wall over the dining table and the crucifix over the fireplace in the living room. Our church in Newcastle was one of those rather austere ones with Bible verses, rather than pictures, on the walls and plain frosted glass in the windows.

I must have said something about this when their parish priest came round later to talk about the wedding, because he explained about how an icon wasn’t just a picture; it was a way of conveying truths that were too deep to be put into words. He showed me how the Christ child in the picture of Mary and Jesus was the size of a baby, but with the appearance of a much older child – or perhaps an ageless human being – and that he was holding a scroll, symbolising teaching, in one hand and giving a blessing with the other. And he told us that he often meditated in front of one of the icons in his church because it helped him to stop his mind wandering.

Prayer takes many forms and there is no one size that fits all. Prayer can be in words, in thoughts, in ritual or in actions. Perhaps our motto ought to be “Laborare et orare” – To work AND to pray. Or, in the words of St Augustine of Hippo:

Pray as though everything depended on God.

Work as though everything depended on you.