A life in letters: Prayer

Prayer seems so central to Christian faith. And yet since childhood, when I used to kneel and speak to heaven and heaven seemed silent, I have found prayer bewildering. In the 1970s I read books on the subject  (such as L. A. T. van Dooren’s Prayer: the Christian’s vital breath and R. A. Torrey’s How to pray) and grasped the theology and mechanics of prayer, and even preached on prayer yet somehow prayer itself remained a perplexing mystery and the books alienated rather than blessed me.

I do understand prayer as a connectedness with someone out there. By this, I don’t mean that I have ever had a sense of the numinous, an awareness of a spiritual presence. It’s simply that at times I’ve been aware of words flowing freely from me, in such a way that the very act of uttering them contains, or produces the confidence that they are heard.

And I understand too the power of thankfulness, as the recognition that I have been given, and have received so many gifts and blessings liberates in return words of thanksgiving and gratitude.

But more often than not my personal, verbal prayers are no more than abrupt ejaculations: ‘Help me God!’ or ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner’ (The Jesus prayer)

My sense – a belief accompanied by a confidence – that someone us there has always been intermittent. Often what I am conscious of is not God’s presence, but the void of God’s absence. To try to pray is a dragging of words out of myself when there is no inner energy driving those words. Often I give up, and focus on something else while not losing the context of Christian faith – perhaps writing, or playing around with ideas, or simply opening my mind and listening – and often through this I receive insights which release creativity and a sense of wholeness. Perhaps, for me, on those days, that is prayer.

But there are other days, when, unpredictably, I have a sense, a knowledge that God is there, and that I can entrust to God the business of the day, in confidence that through God’s presence I will find a solution, a way ahead.

With regard to praying with other people, I have been able to pray with individuals, bringing them and their situation into the presence of God in a way which they have found helpful. But I am aware of the danger of using praying either as a way of holding people at a distance and avoiding truly engaging with them, or as a way of making myself look good in their eyes.

Prayer in small groups I have often found embarrassing. I find myself wanting to stay quiet, and yet the situation demands that you say something. And so I open my mouth and speak, and sometimes words come, and there is structure and eloquence, and though I say the kind of things someone more tuned into God might say with sincerity I can’t claim to be speaking with any integrity. Might I not simply be spinning sentences to create an illusion of spirituality, or simply to ward off the questions to which my silence would give rise.

Prayer in larger groups is easier. Sometimes when I stand up to pray there is a deadness, and I feel there’s nothing to say, but often the words come, and I speak fluently, and ideas and images and connections drop into my mind giving life to my sentences. I don’t usually feel very sincere, but I want to be sincere, and humbly feel in some sense ‘used’ while at the same time combatting pride at the clever insights ‘I’ have given voice to.

I am very bad at praying for other people. One reason for this is a lack of compassion for others. I can in my mind understand people’s needs, but I am not in my heart moved and prompted to action, although I would love to have a melted, gentle, compassionate heart towards those around me.  The second reason is a lack of personal belief that prayer makes a difference. I believe that God is loving and gracious, that we are secure in God. But I am not sure about praying for a specific response.

And when Christians speak about prayer being the power-house of the church, the concept seems alien to me. I feel I am on the outside looking in.

Frankly, I do wish Jesus had been a bit more nuanced. ‘Ask and you shall receive,’ he said. Why didn’t he add that this is not as straightforward as it sounds? We pray, and sometimes there are no answers. We know that we ourselves are changed as we pray, and helped to be more God-focussed and to align our wishes with the Spirit of heaven. But when there are no answers, we wonder if we’ve asked for the wrong stuff, or the right stuff at the wrong time, or the right stuff in the wrong spirit, or whether God has just said ‘No!’ We try everything to get God off the hook. We blame ourselves. Anything rather than facing up to the implications of God’s mysterious silence.

On a number of occasions over the years I have experimented with praying an eminently respectable evangelical prayer.  ‘Father please grant me today an opportunity to show, or speak of your love to someone, and grant the perceptiveness to recognise this opportunity and the courage to seize it.’ And the day would end, with no apparent answers. Was it a wrong prayer? Was it wrong to ask? Or had God come to me incognito as he did to the shoemaker in Tolstoy’s story Where love is there God is also?

The clearest sense I have of ‘answers to prayer’ is where I have sermon or of piece of spiritual writing to prepare, and I don’t have a clear sense either of the theme I should address or approach to it which I should take. ‘Father, you stand outwith time. You know the words which will appear in next week’s paper. You know the words I will say as I stand up in church on Sunday morning. Please show me.’ I have found often  that  prayer to be a gateway to insight and creativity.

I have come, on my clearer-seeing days, to view the whole of life as a prayer. A life lived in the belief that God is there, and with the desire that every word, action, thought, cry of anguish, sense of God’s presence or of God’s absence should say ‘Yes!’ to the Creator, ‘Yes!’ to the risen Jesus, ‘Yes!’ to the present and future coming of the kingdom. Often this is the only kind of prayer I can manage, but I believe it is enough.

The most helpful book on prayer I have ever read is Primary Speech: a psychology of prayer by Ann and Barry Ulanov who lectured at Union Theological Seminary in New York. The book looks at prayer from the perspective of Jungian psychology, and its final chapters describe a connectedness with God which is far beyond my experience. But I find the earlier chapters enormously helpful – the insight, for example, that prayer is ‘primary speech’, that all of us call out wordlessly to God from the very depth of our beings.

I appreciated  most of all the thought that we can come to God as we are, in our totality. I am aware in myself of what Carl Jung would call ‘the shadow side’ – aware of thoughts and feelings of bitterness, hatred, pride, lust, anti-God impulses, lack of concern and compassion. I find myself asking where these things come from? Are they part of me, or alien enemies? Do I need to rid myself of these shadows before I can hope to enter God’s presence.

The Ulanovs encourage me to see these things as part of myself, while not allowing them to define me. I must acknowledge these dark emotions and desires, and listen to what they reveal about my deepest self, and then come to God with this expanded understanding of who I am, and find in coming God’s forgiving and embracing love.

‘Father God I believe you are there. Please hold, help, transform me. Today and always may my life approximate to your dream for me.’