Letter to a pastor with cancer

My dear brother in Christ,

Tonight at church you told us you have cancer. We had gathered as we always do. To make time for God's eternity. To hear and say the great earth-shaking things. We sang the psalms and from our lips the mighty words rolled down like rivers, gushing up from ancient wells. One of us got up to read the parable of the prodigal. Our hearts were broken when he left his father's house, our hearts were glad when he turned his face towards home, our hearts were nearly bursting when his father ran to meet him, and when, to our amazement, he told the other son, We had to celebrate. We listened, we prayed. We brought gifts and silence; we brought our hearts and lives. We invoked the holy name of God. We tasted powers of the age to come.

But it was only after all this that you stood behind the great big open book and told us, quite calmly, that you have cancer. That it is aggressive. That the prognosis is not good. That your family is in shock. That your home is haunted by grief and questions. 

You told us you didn't want the cancer, you wished you didn't have it, but you are looking for the way of Christ in this. You told us this would be your new path of discipleship, a new form of following. You reminded us of the command repeated more than any other in our scriptures: Do not be afraid.

Some were weeping; I heard them. Your wife was crying too. You asked the congregation if you could lay your ministry aside a while to follow Christ down this new path. You asked (as if you needed it) our permission. You told us you would pray for us. You named the name of Jesus (a name you love), a strong name (as you have always loved to call it). 

When you spoke to me you said you wished you were high up at that friend's cabin, up in the Sierra Nevada mountains. You would rest yourself under a tree nine hundred years old, covered by its shade under the sacred silence. You said there is a place up there you love to walk, where if you leave the trail your footprints would be there a hundred years and in all that time no one would ever see them. 

You told me: Soon I will need prayers. Soon I will need that cabin in the mountains, the place my wife loves best. Soon I will need some serious margaritas.

Standing in the gathered congregation, you told us: In all this I hear Christ calling. You told us: I do not want this, but I want to know Christ and to follow where he leads. 

I thought: pastor. 

I thought: friend. 

I thought: O my brother. 

Pastor, brother, friend – I will pray for you. Each Friday I will go hungry, and hollow out my spirit so that the prayers come out clear and right. And just in case God will not hear me, I'll ask my children to pray too (for children cannot pray wrong, they don't know how to do it any way but right). 

You stood behind the Bible and addressed us with the Christ-light burning in your eyes. You raised your hands and voice in blessing and sent us out to follow in Christ's way. We sang the last song. I thought: another week, and then another, and then the Great Joy will be upon us. We will celebrate the Easter feast and sing the songs of death's defeat.

Tonight I saw death's shadow and was not afraid. The light I saw in your eyes was Easter light, my brother, and to the God of Easter morning I will pray. 

Yours, &c.

Prayer for Newtown, Connecticut, December 14

“But wherefore could I not pronounce Amen?” 
—Macbeth

God of liberty, we give you thanks for the many freedoms that we enjoy by your blessing.

For the freedom to express ourselves, we give you thanks! 

For the freedom to satisfy our urges and impulses, we give you thanks!

For freedom of trade, especially the freedom to buy and sell weapons and ammunition at competitive prices, we give you thanks!

For the freedom to bear arms, we give you thanks!

Save us, O God, from those who would threaten our rights;

Save us from legislators who would take away our freedoms;

Save us from those who would constrain the free expression of our feelings;
Save us from those who would compromise our free commerce in guns, weapons, and all instruments of self-protection.

Increase our freedoms more and more:

freedom to do as we please,
freedom to buy and sell,

freedom to possess handguns, semi-automatic assault rifles, automatic machine guns, stockpiles of ammunition, holsters, slings, scopes, and other accessories,

freedom against neighbours,
freedom against strangers,
freedom against children,
freedom against the unborn, 

freedom with our bodies and the bodies of others,
freedom to pursue our own interests,

freedom to gratify ourselves at any cost.
May the firstlings of our hearts be the firstlings of our hands,

and may we bring this freedom, O God, to those who lack it.

Fulfil us, O God!
Gratify our desires!
Validate our feelings!
Let us be free, though the world perish!

We ask it in the name of Jesus, your beloved son,
whose birth and infancy we venerate,
who came among us harmless as any child –

Prayer from the beach

I praise you, God of creation's joy, for this town where I have stayed the last five weekends. I praise you for the beaches and the headlands and the sea. I praise you for the house where we stayed and were happy together. I praise you for the kitchen and the table and the chairs, and I praise you for the trampoline and the swimming pool where the water dragons sunbaked, terrorising my children. I praise you for the chooks and for the eggs they laid for us, and I praise you for the outdoor pizza oven and for the mushrooms that tasted so smoky when we cooked them. 

I praise you for sunrise at the beach (or just-after-sunrise: for we always slept, I praise you, longer than we'd planned). I praise you for the meal of fish and chips that we ate from paper trays while the sun was going down. I praise you for the seagulls that smile indignantly because we will not give them any chips, and I praise you for the pelican that drifts on the water like a fishing trawler and then heaves itself into the air like a 747, fat and majestic, wonderful to see.

I praise you for the girls in summer dresses on the street, for the girls basking nearly naked on the sand, for the young men playing volleyball and running with their shirts off to show the world that they are young and strong, and I praise you for the old men in swimming caps who go down into the water even when it is very cold, and for the old women who walk their dogs and stop to greet one another beside the sea.

I praise you for the surfers and the kayakers and the stand-up paddlers, and I praise you for all the boats and for all who love boats and who go out on the water, and I praise you for the man who had built his own houseboat and told me gently with a sunburnt voice, 'You have time for things on the water.'

I praise you for the wide flat rocks where my children roamed at low tide. I praise you for my son who licked the glistening dry salt off the rock and said it tasted good. I praise you for my daughters' glee and horror when they found a crab in the little pool. I praise you for the terrible high rocks where we saw the teenagers playing, lying facedown while the waves swept over them (and I praise you that they were not swept away). 

I praise you for the Aboriginal woman who calls the whales, and for all those hours I stared at the water hoping to see whales spouting, and I praise you for those two unforgettable mornings when I woke from dreaming of whales, filled with gratitude that I had seen them even in my dreams. 

I praise you for the lake where we paddled with my friend while the dog swam alongside, right round that little island. I praise you for the way the silver light shimmered on the branches that hung over the water, and for my friend who said it was his favourite thing to see. I praise you for the way the dog rested his face on his paw on the side when we brought him on board because of his exhaustion, because he had swum so far and so well. I praise you for the fish that I saw jumping near the boat. And I praise you for the fish my children saw when they had waited a long time for it, looking. 

May your praise be always on my lips and in my heart. For life is not long enough to praise you; and were all the oceans ink and all the skies a scroll, it would not be enough to tell of all your goodness in a town like this, on a day like this, when the sun is in the sky and the water shines like glass, a mirror of your glory, God of creation's joy.

Prayer for a grieving priest

Lord Christ, today I saw a priest of your church weeping because of your people. What was this strange, silent grief? Was it because of some failure in your people? Or some inadequacy in the priest himself? Is there something he needs, but still lacks, for his ministry? Was there something I could give him? A book to read, a bit of theology? Or some encouragement and a friendly word? Or was it your own grief, the grief of your priesthood, that had entered his heart and broken it from the inside? When you wept over the lost sheep of Israel, was it because your priesthood was lacking, or because it was so full? 

Christ our shepherd, Christ our pastor, Christ our priest, have mercy on all priests of your church. Have mercy on all who have responded to your call, even when their task is beyond all human ability. Have mercy on all who have to announce your forgiveness, even when sin's burden weighs heavy in their hearts. Have mercy on all who have to bring your healing, though they can command no miracles and work no wonders. Have mercy on all who have to speak in your name, though your Name is an unsearchable mystery. Have mercy on all who have to approach your table, taking your body in their hands, breaking it, giving it away to whoever wants it, a feast for the life of the world – even when they, your priests, are still so hungry and so poor. 

Have mercy, Lord Christ, on all who feed others while they themselves go hungry; who pray for others even though for them the heavens are silent; who go on speaking your Word their whole lives long when they themselves have heard only the faintest whisper; who proclaim good news and pour out the oil of joy while their own hearts grieve – have mercy, and sustain them by the eternal Word of your joy and by the grace of your heavenly priesthood. Amen.

The year without prayer

And then there was the year without prayer. Or was it two years? Three? Or five? I guess I lost count. Anyway, all that time I could not pray. 

Don't ask me why, don't ask me to explain it. It's not that I stopped believing: not exactly. It's just that everything around me was a terrible silence, and any word, a shout or just a whisper, would only make the silence echo louder. It's not that I had stopped loving: not completely. It's just that my heart was cracked inside me, and all the words seemed stillborn, choked by sadness before they ever could get out. It's not that I stopped trying: not quite. It's just that I tried to pray instead of praying. It is the difference between trying to swim and swimming, between trying to remember someone's name and remembering. You might come close, but in the end it makes no difference. In the end it is not a matter of degrees. 

Sometimes my wanting to pray came so close to the actual thing that I could almost feel it. Sometimes I was thrilled by the feeling of almost praying, just as a child in water, limbs thrashing, thrills at the feeling that swimming might really be possible after all, then sinks. 

I said the words, of course, I don't mean that I never said the words. I prayed the Lord's Prayer, I prayed the Gloria, I prayed the Te Deum, I prayed the Psalter, I prayed the Jesus Prayer and the Hail Mary and any other prayer that seemed reliable and serviceable enough, any prayer that seemed to work for other people. But it was like hearing a joke that you do not understand. Everyone else is laughing. You chuckle too, just to be sociable, but it sounds pretty hollow.

St Augustine says that wanting to love God is already love for God. It is a beautiful thought, the thought of a saint filled with tenderness for the difficulties of ordinary believers. I have often clung to that thought, and have hoped that it was true. In my year without prayer I wondered if the desire to pray might also be a prayer. I hoped so. But it didn't seem a very safe bet. 

To pray – not just to want to pray but actually to speak a word, a single word of prayer – that's what I needed. But all the words were false, because my heart was false. The words that I recited, all good straight honest words, got twisted up inside my mouth. Like I was saying them only to avoid God. Like all my praying was really just another way of hiding. 

And yet I wanted – I think I wanted – to be found. To be seen. To be known so well that all my words would be unlocked, with nothing left to hide or to protect, nothing secret, and then groping in the silence I would find that one true word, the good word I was always looking for, and would present it like an offering, a little thing, so small, almost insignificant: my prayer.

But I could not find, have never found, that word. Maybe this search, this groping about for words, this always-wanting, will be enough. Maybe the year without prayer will last until the end of my life, until the last sigh when all at once the true word is pronounced, a word that is something like acceptance, something like thanks, something like surprise, something like pure joy and pure sadness, total discovery and total loss. Maybe that last sigh will carry me safely over into eternity, into the bright abyss of the word of God. Maybe that sigh will blend imperceptibly with the word of God's eternity. Maybe both words will sound the same note after all. Maybe I will hear with new ears, and find that all my life was just that note and nothing more, one sigh, one long unbroken word of prayer. Maybe the note will sound clearest of all in this year, my year without prayer.

Maybe that's when I will come to know that all along my life was hid with Christ in God. Christ who breathes God's word out of eternity into time, and breathes one sigh, the truest prayer, back again into eternity. Christ who became as we are and groped about for just the right word to describe it all, and then, having found it, offered it up to God, a small thing, fragile, almost insignificant: his own life.

Why pray?

Why pray? Here are ten reasons:

1. Our Father who art in heaven
Because without prayer there is only – myself. Between the heaven of prayer and the hell of the self there is no middle way. The more I try to find myself, the more I am lost. To call on God as Father is to discover myself as someone God calls child.

2. hallowed be thy name
Not because prayer will give me what I want, but because it will knead and pummel my wants, stretching them my whole life long, until at the last hour of my life I have learned to want one thing only, the only thing worth having. And so my whole life becomes a secret sigh, an inarticulate utterance of the hidden Name of God. And so even my death will be my prayer, the sigh by which I give myself up into the presence of the holy Name.

3. thy kingdom come
Because my prayer encompasses not my own life only but the entire world of which I am a part. What defines this world is scarcity, injustice, and oppression – in other words, hunger. To pray is to find in my own hunger an echo of the hunger of the world, in my own small cry an echo of the cry for justice that rises like smoke from the scorched earth.

4. thy will be done
Because prayer is the end of willing, the beginning of wisdom. The life of prayer is a slow dying into the will of God, a slow awakening into the freedom to live.

5. on earth as it is in heaven
Not because prayer is a technique of self-improvement or an instrument of spiritual experience, but because it is beyond all human competency, beyond all language and learning and control. Prayer is the speech of heaven. To pray is to live beyond the narrow walls of the self and beyond whatever I can merely control. As sunflowers open to the morning, so the praying life opens towards heaven, standing up straight into the bright burning presence of the Name.

6. give us this day our daily bread
Because every day, morning and night, I hunger. The stuff of my life is hunger, need, and lack. Technology and affluence blind me to this truth, but one day – a single morning – without food is enough to show me the truth of what I am. I live by lack: God lives by fullness. I am only hunger: God is only food.

7. and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors
Because hurt and disappointment and resentment are always knocking at the door of my life. As soon as I drive one away another arrives, eager to come in and set up its home in the little house of my heart. I will die of resentment; I am destroyed by what I am owed. But I learn to forgive when God writes off my debts and makes me free. Now I can live, now I can clear the debts of enemies and friends, and speak the magic word of forgiveness that drives resentments back into the dark.

8. and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil
Because this world is only trial. Yet it is God's world, and all the evils that crowd in upon my life can never hide my voice from the listening God.

9. for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever
Because God is glorious. All my life I was asleep within myself, but when I bowed my head to pray I opened my eyes to the glory of God. Glory should be seen. Just as it is right for a mountain to be seen or a piece of music to be heard or the body of a lover to be loved, so it is right to give God thanks and praise, for God is glorious.

10. Amen
Because the life of God is prayer itself. It is deep calling to deep, the endless giving and receiving of unbounded self-divesting self-communicating joy. My prayer is an eavesdropping on the Prayer that is God. God's speech is grace and truth, God's life is love, God's silence is the annunciation of the Name. The word of my life is a modest, small, yet glad and true, Amen.

A Sydney psalm

Tonight's psalm from Sydney (loosely based on Psalms 148 and 150):

Praise the Lord!
Praise him, all you trees on my street;
Praise him you TV aerials bending in the wind;
Praise him, parked cars glistening with rain;
Praise him, screeching hissing trains;
Praise him, bright clouds reflecting Sydney's lights;
Praise him you possums fighting on the roof;
Praise him, noisy M2 traffic;
Praise him from the streets and from the station,
Praise him high and low.
Let everything that makes noise praise the Lord:
Praise the Lord!

Prayer after a picnic breakfast with my children

Yours are the bright sun and the blue sky to which we turn our faces as we gather on the lawn. Yours is the smell of steaming pancakes and brewed coffee and fresh-mown grass. Yours is the choreography that sets the wasps dancing while the trees and the shrubs applaud.

Felicity has prepared a table for us, and You are the welcome that nearly blinds us as we squint together at the shining plates and glittering knives and forks. You are our fullness as we pile our plates with the pancakes we have made. You are our sweetness as we scoop big handfuls of sliced strawberries from the bowl. You are our overflowing bounty, our More Than Enough, as we squeeze the maple syrup from the bottle, as it oozes and dribbles over everything. You are Anna's generosity when she sees my plate and worries that I will not have enough, when she hands me her own dripping pancake and implores me to receive it. You are the swell of gratitude in Jamie's chest when, overwhelmed by all that breakfast means, he turns and smears my cheek with maple-syrup kisses.

O grain of the earth and fruit of the strawberry bush! O pancake of joy and syrup of thanksgiving! To You we lift our hearts, and our mouths are full of Your goodness. To You we raise our shining forks and smiling sticky faces, for today heaven and earth are dripping with Your glory. Light of our light, festivity of our feasting, joy of our breakfast picnic: the night's long fast is over, and we give You thanks and praise.

Peter Steele: praying

Another text on prayer. This is "Praying", by the Australian poet-priest Peter Steele – from his collection, White Knight with Beebox (2008):

Sometimes it feels like Jimmy Durante calling

goodnight to Mrs Calabash, whoever

she was or whether. Sometimes it's the tenth

hour in the trans-Pacific plane,

all glamour gone and connections still to make.

and it's been known to turn dirty,

as if a cutter, back from the peat-hag, found

his ass's pannier loaded with nothing.

But whistling in the dark, as the poet said,

is good practice for whistling, so

one goes on doing it and cognate things,

knowing a little and holding out

for a touch of what shows in the eyes of the old

hands at the business, their voices surrendered,

a better than Boeing winging their hopes, the laden

flesh beginning to take fire.

Prayer: a little anthology

For a lecture tonight on prayer, I cobbled together a selection of passages on different aspects of prayer (this was a last-minute idea, so I haven't yet managed to track down some of the references). Here it is: a miniature anthology, taken from some of my favourite writers on prayer.

Two rules

Two rules for praying: ‘First: pray as you can, and don’t try to pray as you can’t. And second: the less you pray, the worse it goes.’

—John Chapman, Spiritual Letters, 25.

The essence of prayer

‘Hunger is the stuff of prayer.’

—John Climacus

Spiritual methods 

Concerning the influence of scientific method on monasticism: ‘The idea was that if you set up the right conditions, a kind of laboratory for prayer, and if you carried out the experiment according to instructions, you would get the desired result…. This concept has by now evolved into the simple pharmacology of contemplation: you take the right pill and you turn on. Hence the idea of discipline was corrupted into a kind of methodology, and … instead of really praying and meditating, people became obsessed with their “method” and observed themselves at prayer…. This transformation of a discipline in a broad, human measure and in a theological climate of love and grace into a methodology of will and concentration has been fatal to Catholic contemplation.’

—Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action, 120.

Spiritual skill

We encounter God ‘as those who are inept, inexperienced, unskilled, and immature…. The invocation “Our Father”, and all the Christian life and ethos implicit in this invocation, can never at any stage or in any form be anything but the work of beginners…. Spiritual life begins at the very point where spiritual skill ends.’

—Karl Barth, The Christian Life, 79.

Confidence in prayer

‘Sit in the presence of the Lord every moment of your life, as you think of him and remember him in your heart. Otherwise, when you only see him after a period of time, you will lack freedom of converse with him, out of shame; for great freedom of converse is born out of constant association with him.’

—Isaac the Syrian, On Ascetical Life.

God’s willingness

‘Prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance. It is laying hold of God’s willingness.’

—Julian of Norwich

Doing God’s will

‘Remember that the proper result of contemplative prayer is simplicity in the whole life; so that a contemplative is always doing the same thing all day and all night. He is praying, or having breakfast, or talking, or working, or amusing himself; but he is principally conscious that he is doing God’s Will; the different external activities seem to him a sort of varied outcome of one continuous internal intention (as if in a long walk: one goes up hill and down, in rain or sun or wind, but the act of walking remains the same all the time, the same movement of the legs, but sometimes easy, sometimes hard, sometimes pleasant, sometimes unpleasant).’

—John Chapman, Spiritual Letters, 38.

The whole person

‘A person is far more than the conscious mind; besides the brain and reasoning faculties there are the emotions and affections, the aesthetic sensitivity, together with the deep instinctive layers of the personality. All these have a function to perform in prayer, for the whole person is called to share in the total act of worship. Like a drop of ink that falls on blotting paper, the act of prayer should spread steadily outwards from the conscious and reasoning centre of the brain, until it embraces every part of ourselves.’

—Kallistos Ware, The Power of the Name, 20.

Prayer and forgiveness

‘The one who stores up injuries and resentments and yet fancies that he prays might as well draw water from a well and pour it into a container that is full of holes.’

—Evagrius Ponticus, Chapters on Prayer, §22.

Prayer and virtue

‘As a queen entering a town is attended by all kinds of riches, so prayer, entering a soul, brings every virtue in its train.’

—John Chrysostom

Infinitesimal changes

‘The Our Father contains all possible petitions; we cannot conceive of any prayer not already contained in it. It is to prayer what Christ is to humanity. It is impossible to say it once through, giving the fullest possible attention to each word, without a change, infinitesimal perhaps but real, taking place in the soul.’

—Simone Weil, Waiting for God, 151.

What is 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,

Reverséd 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 dressed,

The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the souls blood,

The land of spices, something understood.

—George Herbert, ‘Prayer’ (I)

Prayer is God

‘For beginners prayer is like a joyous flame bursting out of the heart; and for the perfect it is like a sweet-scented light acting within it. Or again, prayer is the Gospel of the Apostles, an action of faith, or rather it is direct faith, it is the foundation of hope, love brought to life, angel-like movement, power of the bodiless spirits, their work and their joy, the Gospel of God, informing of the heart, hope of salvation, sign of purification, symbol of sanctity, knowledge of God, manifesting of baptism, or purification in the bath of eternal life, betrothal with the Holy Spirit, the rejoicing of Jesus, gladness of the soul, mercy of God, sign of reconciliation, the seal of Christ, a ray of mental sun, the dawn of hearts, the affirmation of Christianity, token of reconciliation with God, grace of God, wisdom of God, or rather the beginning of self-wisdom, a manifestation of God, the doing of monks, the way of life of the silent, the cause of silence, the sign of angelic life. But why say so much? Prayer is God, making active all in all, for single is the action of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, all-doing through Jesus Christ.’

—Gregory of Sinai, in Philokalia: On Prayer of the Heart, 62.

Desperate prayer

‘When I write that my own situation [during my illness] in those months of pain and decision can be described as prayer, I do not only recall that during that time I sometimes read the Psalms and they became my psalms, or that, as I have also mentioned, I occasionally cried “Jesus” and that name was my prayer, but I mean that I also at times would shout “Fuck!” and that was no obscenity, but a most earnest prayerful utterance.’

—William Stringfellow, A Second Birthday, 108-9.

Charismatic prayer

‘… that area where the experience of charismatics and of contemplatives so significantly converges: in that profound, though often fleeting or obscure, sense of entering in prayer into a “conversation” already in play, a reciprocal divine conversation.’

—Sarah Coakley, Church of England Doctrine Commission Report on ‘Charismatic Experience’

The prayer of silence

‘Sometimes out of prayer contemplation is born; this cuts prayer off from the lips…. For the movements of the tongue and of the heart during prayer act as the keys; what comes after these is the actual entry into the treasury: from this point onward mouth and tongue become still, as do the heart…. Requests too cease here, for the master of the house has come.’

—Isaac the Syrian, from Daily Readings with St Isaac of Syria, 42.

Special feelings

‘What you must seek in prayer is to establish in the heart a quiet but warm and constant feeling towards God, not expecting ecstasy or any extraordinary state. But when God does send such special feelings in prayer, you must be grateful for them and not imagine that they are due to yourself, nor regret their disappearance as if it were a great loss; but always descend from these heights to humility and quietness of feeling towards the Lord.’

—Theophan the Recluse, in The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology, 131.

The greatest profit 

‘Ordinarily that which is of the greatest profit – namely, to be ever losing oneself and becoming as nothing – is considered the worst thing possible, and that which is of least worth, which is for the soul to find consolation and sweetness, is considered best.’

 —St John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, 2.18.

The effects of prayer 

‘I should prefer a bare and dry prayer, to an explosion followed by a short intoxication; because the second seems to be self-made, and therefore less pure. But I don’t dogmatise. What matters is the result. The after effects of good prayer are more definite than the prayer itself; I mean a determination to follow God’s Will, and to care for nothing else.’

—John Chapman, Spiritual Letters, 61-62.

What the world needs

‘That is what the world needs above all else: not people who “say prayers” with greater or lesser regularity, but people who are prayers.’

—Kallistos Ware, The Power of the Name, 19.

Prayer FAIL

Speaking of automobiles...



Fail submitted by Aaron Ghiloni

On prayer: fourteen theses

I’ve been staying all weekend at a Catholic monastery, which prompted some theses on prayer:

1. What is prayer? It is the eyes of the world looking back at God (Pavel Florensky).

2. Can theology penetrate into the mystery of prayer? Yes: theology burrows into prayer as the ant makes its tiny tunnels in the earth’s immense dark turning orb.

3. Once when I was sleeping, the sound of rain on the roof became, in my dream, the hammer of war drums beating in a jungle: a real sound, vibrating in my ears, echoed in the chamber of my dreams. In the same way, the vibration of eternity echoes in the chamber of our world when people pray.

4. Prayer is restlessness and silence and sadness. It is jubilation and a cup running over and the sound of all the gum trees clapping hands.

5. ‘We do not know how to pray’ (Rom 8:26). The whole uniqueness of Jesus of Nazareth lies in this: that he knows how to pray, because he knows to whom he is speaking. His greatest miracle was not healing or walking on water or driving out devils, but teaching his followers to say, ‘Our Father’ (Luke 11).

6. Why do we close our eyes when praying? Prayer is not a turning inwards, not a withdrawal into the silent recesses of the self. Prayer is open-eyed attention. It is waiting all day on the shore for the glimpse of a rare bird. ‘You must wear your eyes out, as others their knees’ (R. S. Thomas).

7. Nothing could be further from the truth than the notion of prayer as a spontaneous inner glow or an uncontrollable gush of sentiment. Prayer is discipline, order, hardship, habit, obedience: whatever it is that makes up a life, that is what prayer requires.

8. Prayer and obedience are one. The monastery – that momentous institutionalisation of prayer – is founded on this truth. In order to pray, I bind myself to a rule, bend my will to another, submit to a grievous curtailment of the self. The vow of celibacy in many religious orders signifies this curtailment. There is some part of what it means to be human that is crushed in prayer. For the person bound to prayer, it would not be right to represent life as fruition, satisfaction, fulfilment.

9. At the same time, there is no greater freedom than the freedom to pray. Does God command us to pray? Yes – just as you might give water to a thirsty man, and command him to drink. God gives us permission to speak to God: that is the whole liberty of the gospel.

10. ‘There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in’ (Leonard Cohen). The life that prays is an ontological fissure, a crack in being. In prayer, shards of light break through, and the creatures that dwell in darkness rub their dazzled eyes.

11. What is it that really sustains the church’s life and witness? Our sacramental hierarchy? Our teachers and clerics? Our projects and resources? Our thick books of doctrine and law? Or is the whole church perhaps upheld by one old woman who shuts herself away all day to cry to God with sighs too deep for words?

12. God is colour-blind. All that is powerful and wise and impressive, all those things blur together as a single colour – God can hardly make out the difference between them. Only the small, secret things are clear and distinct to God’s poor eyesight. The secrecy of prayer makes us visible to God: ‘your Father sees what is done in secret’ (Matt 6:6).

13. We often complain about unanswered prayer. But if sometimes God doesn’t listen, or doesn’t hear, or doesn’t answer, we ought to be relieved. The Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind – and Job was lucky to survive the ordeal. Nothing is more terrifying than the prospect of an answered prayer. ‘For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return’ (Annie Dillard).

14. Sometimes I think prayer is all that matters. Sometimes I hardly dare to pray.

George Herbert: prayer, language, silence

At the Sarah Coakley symposium next week, I'll be giving a paper on "Prayer as Theological Method". It's partly on the relation between prayer and theology in Augustine's De Trinitate, and partly on the way poetry exemplifies this relation between prayer and theological language. Here's an excerpt from the section on prayer.

George Herbert’s much-loved sonnet, ‘Prayer’ (I), portrays this tendency of language to be overwhelmed by the divine plenitude:

Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;

Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner’s towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-daies world transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices; something understood.

The whole poem comes rushing out as a single breathless exhilarating sentence, piling image upon image in a kind of rhapsodic abandon. The images are startling, contradictory, incapable of conceptual reduction. Prayer is as gentle as breath or the fragrance of spices, yet it is also a violent ‘engine against th’ Almightie’, a battering ram with which the Christian lays siege against God. It is as soothing as ‘a kinde of tune’, yet it’s a tune that strikes ‘fear’ into the heart of all creation. It is exotic, strange, inexplicable – the Milky Way, the bird of paradise, the land of spices – yet also as homely and familiar as dressing in one’s Sunday best. Yes, prayer is heaven, but it is ‘heaven in ordinarie’. It maps out the contours of the inner self – ‘the soul in paraphrase’, ‘the souls bloud’ – but also reaches ‘beyond the stars’. It’s like a ship’s sounding line, not dropped into the sea but cast up into the sky, a ‘plummet sounding heav’n’. Similarly, it is ‘reversed thunder’: Jove’s thunder is turned back on himself, a bolt shooting up from earth to heaven.

These dizzying spatial images stretch the imagination beyond its furthest limits. The stage on which prayer takes place is infinitely vast. Yet juxtaposed with this immensity is the image of prayer as ‘the soul in paraphrase’, a tiny abridgement of all the depths and complexities of a human story. Indeed prayer is an hour-long abridgement of the whole ‘six daies world’ – an image that at once evokes the huge dimensions of prayer and its minute scale. It is a gigantic mystery that sounds the most profound depths, yet so small you can fit it in your pocket: like a whale drawn on the back of a matchbox.

In the final stanza, all the senses are engaged. Prayer is soft and supple to touch; it tastes like manna; it is the vision of a star-filled sky; it smells like the land of spices; it sounds like the distant peal of bells (either earth’s bells heard in heaven, or heavenly bells heard on earth: Herbert is tantalisingly ambiguous). This explosion of sensual imagery doesn’t serve conceptual clarity. What would church bells sound like if they echoed from another galaxy? What does an exotic country smell like, a country you’ve never visited? Come to think of it, what exactly does heavenly manna taste like? If these images teach us something about prayer, it is primarily by destabilising our understanding, driving us to the brink of an unspeakable mystery.

And so the whole great cascade of imagery is finally resolved in just two words, ‘something understood’. I say resolved, since traditionally the sonnet introduces a resolution after the volta, or turn: the sestet in the Italian sonnet, or the final couplet in the Shakespearian sonnet. In Herbert’s poem one anticipates a resolution, but it never seems to arrive – until it suddenly interrupts the final line in a way that is startling, abrupt, unexpected. Just as prayer abridges all history into an hour, so the whole poem is condensed into these closing words. What is prayer? It is ‘something understood’. These are the only words in the poem that are not wrapped up in some imagery: here there is neither concept nor imagery, only a quiet understanding.

The real purpose of all the conflicting images was simply to clear this space – not, in fact, a space for understanding (as though the poem were trying to ‘explain’ prayer), but a space for prayer itself. As talk-about-prayer passes over into praying, something is understood that language can never capture. In fourteen lines we have plumbed heaven and earth, feasted and made war, spanned all the farthest reaches of time and space. But now – as so often in Herbert – we find ourselves kneeling alone in the dusky light of a little country church, listening softly to that profound yet homely silence. Here at last, where understanding ceases, prayer is understood.

Certainly, then, there is something akin to an apophatic moment. The moment of silent understanding, however, occurs not in opposition to the clumsy limitation of language, but within it. It is Herbert’s first thirteen-and-a-half lines that create the experience of the poem’s close. It’s not as though there were first of all a sheer wordless experience of prayer, which is subsequently described in words. Rather the poetic language itself creates the conditions for an experience of silence. Wordless prayer is a possibility within language. Contemplative silence is the calm eye at the centre of the roiling storm of language.

To put it another way, Herbert’s poem is not about the poverty of human language, but about the inexhaustible riches of prayer. Prayer is too much – too much for language, too much even for poetry. More than anywhere else in Herbert’s poetry, we catch a glimpse here of language straining against its own possibilities – not as one struggles against a straitjacket, but as a horse champs at the bit before a race, straining because there is too much to say. Silence is not the phenomenon that ensues when language reaches its limit, much less some primordial pre-linguistic abyss from which language subsequently emerges. In the company of a close friend, I sometimes find myself reduced to silence. Not because the relationship is wordless (nothing is more verbose than friendship), but because in friendship one can never say enough; the real goal of friendship is to talk your way into silence. This is just what Herbert portrays in so many of his poetic conversations with God. One can never say enough to God. And so, in its fullness, language ripens into silence. Language is outrun by its own resources, it spills over into the baffled joy of contemplation.

Nate Kerr: praying with the victims in Haiti

Over in The Other Journal, Nate Kerr offers a poignant theological reflection on the Haiti disaster: "With Sighs Too Deep for Words: On Praying with the Victims in Haiti". He writes:

What I am suggesting is that if we are going to go on speaking of God, as distinguished from merely speaking about God, in the wake of the events of January 12, we shall have to relearn the language of prayer. We shall have to learn a peculiarly wordless kind of language, a language that speaks to God by way of an outgoing action that is open to and waits vulnerably upon the free coming of God. To relearn such a language, we shall have to be humble enough to forget for just this moment at least that we are homo sapiens, to admit that we as human beings were created to be vulnerable and open before God, to admit “that you and I are homo precarius.” And that will require that our lives be given over to those who are in the most precarious and vulnerable position of all.

Be sure to head over and read the whole thing.

William Stringfellow on prayer and profanity

“The event of prayer, certain acts called prayer, the very word ‘prayer’ have gathered such ridiculous associations. That is not only the case with the obscene performances, which pass as public prayer, at inaugurations, in locker rooms, before Rotary luncheons, and in many churchly sanctuaries, but also the practice of private prayer is attended by gross profanity, the most primitive superstitions, and sentimentality which is truly asinine…. When I write that my own situation [during my illness] in those months of pain and decision can be described as prayer, I do not only recall that during that time I sometimes read the Psalms and they became my psalms, or that, as I have also mentioned, I occasionally cried ‘Jesus’ and that name was my prayer, but I mean that I also at times would shout ‘Fuck!’ and that was no obscenity, but a most earnest prayerful utterance” (A Second Birthday, pp. 99, 108-9).

Two small books: Dr Barth and Dr Seuss

Robert L. Short, The Parables of Dr. Seuss (WJKP, 2008), 95 pp.; Karl Barth, Fifty Prayers (WJKP, 2008), 63 pp. (review copies courtesy of WJKP)

Here’s a couple of nice little books (Thing One and Thing Two), both just released from WJKP. In our first book, Robert Short offers an entertaining reading of Dr Seuss’s stories as Christian “parables.” I adore Dr Seuss – I’m always begging my kids to let me read more Dr Seuss, instead of those bland and banal Disney books that clutter their shelves. So I enjoyed this book’s playful engagement with Dr Seuss’s stories.

Admittedly, Robert Short’s analysis is not a very nuanced one; and it’s a shame he neglects both Dr Seuss’s sharp political edge and his extraordinary aesthetics (first and foremost, these books are great because they’re works of true poetry).

Ultimately, Dr Seuss’s writing can’t be turned into neat theological “parables” (although many of them are certainly political parables). So I can’t help cringing a little when Short tells me that Christ = the Cat, or that Christ’s body and blood = green eggs and ham, or indeed that Sam-I-am represents the name of God! (I’ll let you in on a secret: he’s called “Sam-I-am” because it rhymes with “eggs-and-ham”…) But all this can be taken in good fun, and Short is clearly enjoying himself with bucketloads of playful exaggeration.

In any case, there are some nice insights along the way – for example, in the chapter on I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, Short remarks: “The difference is that Christian faith has an infinitely greater appreciation of trouble than the world does” (p. 51). An excellent point!

And Short is right to observe that Dr Seuss’s stories possess a “profundity-in-simplicity” which allows them to make a real impact. These stories, he remarks, are deceptive in their simplicity. “Charming, childlike little tales suddenly become meaningful…. They sneak up on us. They become Trojan horses or sugar-coated medicine. They are the wise Cat in the otherwise empty hat” (p. 66).

On a somewhat more serious note, our second book brings together fifty of Karl Barth’s prayers, written for before and after his sermons. In the foreword (these prayers were originally published in German in 1962), Barth explains his growing discomfort with the traditional liturgical prayers, since they remained too disconnected from the language and content of his sermons. “For a while,” he says, “I sought help by replacing the petitions of the order of liturgy not with extemporaneous prayers (I have never dared to risk such a thing), but with freely bringing together biblical passages from the Psalms.” Only in his later years did he begin to write his own prayers as part of his sermon preparation. The resulting prayers are stirring, colloquial, often profound, and always blissfully concise – as Barth remarks in the foreword, “the spice for all parts of all spiritual and theological sayings should consist in brevity!”

Barth decided to publish these prayers in the hope that they would be used both in assembled worship and privately. The book thus arranges the fifty prayers according to the liturgical year, with some additional thematic sections (e.g. prayers for funerals). The prayers will certainly be of interest to researchers and students of Barth – but if we are to use the book as it was intended, our proper response should be to pray these prayers, to call upon God in weakness and humility and gratitude and joy. Here are a few short excerpts:

“Lord, our God, you know who we are: People with good and bad consciences; satisfied and dissatisfied, sure and unsure people; Christians out of convictions and Christians out of habit; believers, half-believers, and unbelievers. You know where we come from…. But now we all stand before you…” (p. 1).

“Lord our God, you wanted to live not only in heaven, but also with us, here on earth; not only to be high and great, but also to be small and lowly, as we are; not only to rule, but also to serve us; not only to be God in eternity, but also be born as a person, to live, and to die” (p. 11).

“None of us is a great Christian; rather, we are all very small Christians. But your grace is sufficient for us. Awaken us to the small joy and thankfulness that we are capable of, the timid faith that we bring, the incomplete obedience that we cannot refuse – to the hope in the greatness, wholeness, and completeness that you have prepared for us in the death of our Lord, Jesus Christ, and that you have promised us in his resurrection from the dead” (pp. 29-30).

GIVEAWAY: Anyway, I’ve got a copy of The Parables of Dr Seuss to give away. So if you’d like a copy, just name one thing that Barth and Dr Seuss have in common. The most interesting or imaginative comment wins the book.

Deliver us from evil

When my five-year-old daughter was saying the Lord’s Prayer tonight, she made a delightful (and utterly profound) verbal slip: “Save us from the time of trial, and deliver us from email…”

Because I'm afraid

A prayer by Kim Fabricius

It’s because I’m afraid, Lord.

I’m afraid of you:
afraid of your presence,
afraid of your absence,
afraid of what you expose and what you demand.

I’m afraid of me:
afraid of what I know,
afraid of what I don’t know,
afraid of what I might discover.

I’m afraid of others:
afraid they’ll get too close,
afraid they’ll let me down,
afraid they’ll challenge and change me.

It’s because I’m afraid, Lord,
that I hide from you,
lie to myself,
and shut out others.

Lord, love my fears away,
so that I may trust and serve you,
accept myself without deceit,
and reach out to embrace others:
Amen.

A prayer in a broken world

by Kim Fabricius

It’s a world of confusion, Lord:
we are muddled in our thinking;
we are mixed in our emotions;
we are inconsistent in our actions.

It’s a world of lies, Lord:
we deceive ourselves about our motives and intentions;
we mislead others with double-speak and spin;
we exploit you as an agent of social control and repression.

It’s a world of greed, Lord:
we worship the idol of the market;
we honour the false prophets of profit;
we reduce people to punters and nations to debt.

It’s a world of violence, Lord:
we deploy the technology of terror to protect our own interests;
we invest our children in the business of bloodshed;
we justify war as first strike, last resort, or final solution.

It’s a world of vengeance, Lord:
we allow the wounds of history to fester;
we refuse the healing of memories;
we betray the living out of mistaken loyalty to the dead.

O Lord,
in this world of confusion, make us a people of clarity;
in this world of lies, make us a people of integrity;
in this world of greed, make us a people of generosity;
in this world of violence, make us a people of peace;
in this world of vengeance, make us a people of mercy:
in the name of Christ: Amen.

A prayer for the virtues

by Thomas Aquinas

O Almighty and all-knowing God,
without beginning or end,
who art the giver, preserver, and rewarder of all virtue:

Grant me to stand firm on the solid foundation of faith,
be protected by the invincible shield of hope,
and be adorned by the nuptial garment of charity;

Grant me by justice to obey thee,
by prudence to resist the crafts of the Devil,
by temperance to hold to moderation,
by fortitude to bear adversity with patience;

Grant that the goods that I have I may share liberally
with those who have not,
and the good that I do not have I may seek with humility
from those who have;

Grant that I may truly recognise the guilt of the evil I have done,
and bear with equanimity the punishments I have deserved;
that I may never lust after the goods of my neighbour,
but always give thanks to thee for all thy good gifts...

Plant in me, O Lord, all thy virtues,
that in divine matters I might be devout,
in human affairs wise,
and in the proper needs of the flesh onerous to no one...

And grant that I may never rush to do things hastily,
nor balk to do things demanding,
so that I neither yearn for things too soon,
nor desert things before they are finished.
Amen.

See also John Hughes’ recent discussion of this prayer.