A Talk on Prayer to the Open Forum – St Steven’s, Pinelands, SA

 

Talk to the Open Forum – St Steven’s, Pinelands, SA - 2019

Dear Jesus, help me to spread your fragrance everywhere I go. Flood my soul with your spirit and love. Penetrate and possess my whole being so utterly that all my life may only be a radiance of yours. Shine through me and be so in me that every soul I come in contact with may feel your presence in my soul. Let them look up and see no longer me but only Jesus. Stay with me and then I shall begin to shine as you shine, so to shine as to be a light to others. Amen.

This is the prayer of St Mother Theresa of Calcutta. It is claimed that she used it every day in her private prayers. This beautiful prayer expresses, I think, a deep desire that sits within each and every one of us who feel called to serve Christ in some kind of ministry: that Christ may shine through us, through our very being, to those we serve. But there is a deception in many of us that believes it will come by simply doing more activity: more events, more services, more administration, more work. If we have families, then we can sometimes feel an added pressure, as we try and hold all of this whilst also attending to those we love and have a duty to care for. But we are not justified by our work, we are justified by our faith. And our faith, our ministry, our very being, is entirely dependent upon prayer; upon that deepening of relationship that places us closer to the God who we would have known to the world.

I am not intending to encourage an attitude that would see us shirk our responsibilities. There is a large part of our calling that requires us to get stuck in, ministering in our communities, working hard for our congregations and caring for our families.

But the reality for many priests and ministers in varying contexts - whether they be parish ministry, secular ministry, teaching ministry or senior leadership - busyness threatens our stillness and our prayer life. The ravenous demands of the world pressing in upon us make it more and more tempting for us to crave its approval. And as we become ever more entrenched in the deafening drumbeat of the world, so we are in danger of moving further away from the still small voice that calls us home.

Ultimately, however, we model our ministry upon Jesus, the pioneer of our faith. And as we look to scripture, we find plenty of pointers of how we can come to a healthier balance.

Jesus taught his disciples how to pray and not only gave them a prayer to say when other words fail - what we call the Lord’s Prayer - but also how to go about prayer.

Jesus tells his disciples to be persistent in prayer. He tells two parables, the first being the parable of the friend at midnight in Luke 11:5-13 and the second is the persistent widow in Luke 18:1-11. Jesus tells his disciples to ask and to seek and to knock when you pray; to be persistent. He says whatever you ask for, it will be given to you – which is a very provocative statement.

A 5 year old boy called Johnny, said to his dad; “I’d like to have a baby brother. I’ll do whatever I can to help”. His dad, paused for a moment and then replied, " I'll tell you what, Johnny, if you pray every day for two months for a baby brother, I guarantee that God will give you one!"
Johnny responded eagerly to his dad's challenge and went to his bedroom early that night to start praying for a baby brother. He prayed every night for a whole month, but after that time, he began to become despondent. Johnny quit praying.

After another month, Johnny's mother went to the hospital. When she came back home, Johnny's parents called him into the bedroom. He cautiously walked into the room, expecting a lecture about prayer. But there was a little bundle lying right next to his mother. His dad pulled back the blanket and there was - not one baby brother, but two!! His mother had twins!
His dad looked down at him and said, "Now aren't you glad you prayed?"
Johnny hesitated and then said, "Yes Dad, but aren't you glad I quit when I did?"

I wonder, if it is in the struggles over persistence where the cracks sometimes begin to show in our prayer lives? Such persistence is difficult to keep up. Sometimes we can feel like we aren’t getting anywhere. There are so many distractions and it is so easy to begin feeling despondent. Of course, we must first be sure that we really desire what we ask for. We must want it more than anything else in the world. It is no good us just asking for a shopping list of momentary wants: ‘dear Jesus, today I would like a Ferrari sports car’. I’m sorry if this sounds a little flippant (I don’t mean it to), but we will all have equivalent things on our ministerial shopping lists. The point is that we must keep our prayers in line with our calling. If we can keep them relevant and real, then persistence is the key. We are in a spiritual battle and our prayers are our only weapon. We must never give up until the fight is done.

Knowing that we have support in our prayers can help. A community around us who pray with us and for us. Even here though, there is a balance to be struck.

Jesus tells his disciples in Matthew 6:5 not to copy the Pharisees who go into the public view and use long statements and complex words, designed to impress anyone who might be listening, in order to show off. Instead have integrity before God, find a quiet place and just pray simply, letting the simple concerns of your heart be offered up to him. Don’t make a show of it!

A little boy was kneeling beside his bed praying. His mother and grandmother knelt with him.  "Dear God” he said softly, “please bless Mummy and Daddy and all the family and please give me a good night's sleep."
Then he looked up and shouted, "And don't forget to give me a bicycle for my birthday!!"
"There is no need to shout like that," said his mother. "God isn't deaf."
"No," said the boy, "but Grandma is."

For those of us who are called to lead God’s people, there is a danger of us turning our prayer meetings into a public exhibition; we want our parishioners to see we are good priests, to have confidence in our abilities and we need all the good will we can get if our ministry is to flourish. If we are not careful, we find ourselves craving the public recognition and the massaging of the ego this brings. Before we know it, we are only ever praying for the benefit of the public, and our private prayer-life and personal relationship with God is taking a nosedive.

Public prayer is important, of course it is. The problem is that we can rarely be truly honest to God when we know others are observing us and we fear they are assessing our every word. We need to find a way of removing all of the emotions that get in the way. None-the -less, the common-life we live with others can be a real source of support for us, if it is ordered well and we must also find space to meet God in private stillness when we can offer to God our real selves; the real and entire person that we rarely allow others to see.

We will have dry spells. There may well be many of us in this room who feel we are slipping into a dry season, or indeed that we have been there for some time. If those fallow patches aren’t to turn what was once green pastureland into an arid desert, we need a robust shape to our prayer lives to see us through. Having a daily pattern of public and private prayer, which includes the daily office and times for stillness, will be a real weapon against some of this. And sometimes, just the persistence of going through the motions can help us through the difficult spells until we step out the other side.  

There are many other places where we glimpse little teachings on prayer in the Gospels, but by far the greatest weight of material lays in Jesus’ prayerful example. If we wish to model our lives on that of our sacred Lord, then we should look firstly to his example. There are numerous occasions when Jesus simply goes off into a quiet or deserted place to pray, often alone, but not always. Sometimes a select few of the apostles join him. Nonetheless, it seems that after every major encounter, every big teaching event and during every significant challenge, Jesus finds the time and the space to be with God and pray, often silently. Jesus is at one with the Father and draws his essence from him. So reacquainting himself regularly with the Father through prayer enables him to revive himself – only then can he go again and minister to his community.

As a royal priesthood, we draw our very being from Christ. In like manner, we need to spend quality time reacquainting ourselves with him through prayer. When my kids ask me if we have wi-fi, I tell them that we Christians have had wireless communication for two thousand years. The trouble is, we need to learn how to use it again.

All of this leads us towards structure. A structured prayer-life will be a robust prayer-life. The experiences of life and the ministry will take us to moments when we feel sheer exhilaration and times when we feel we’re in deep peril. The one thing that will keep us grounded is good routine, a balance between work, prayer, rest and study, together with solid support networks in our common-life.  We need time to get away from it all on occasions and we need things in place which enable us to see the wood from the trees. An annual retreat of 4 or 5 days, might well be the most valuable thing you can do for your ministry each year. A quiet day once a month could provide that little bit of regular space you need for God to show the way the next big issue needs to be addressed. Setting time aside every week to do just a little bit of study will produce fruits beyond measure. Saying the daily Office and daily reading of Scripture will implant you into the cycles and prayer-life of the universal church. 20 minutes of silent prayer each day will deepen your relationship with God and inform your ministry with fresh insight. Making sure you get proper time on recreation, to relax and to be with your family and those close to you will give you renewed energy at other times.

Of course, none of this is new. In his rule, St Benedict formulated a structure and pattern that provides space for all of this, and his rule of life endures time. It is no surprise that a real curiosity seems to be growing around monasticism, as people begin searching for structure amidst a chaotic world.

Personally, I have found that life in the parish would be unmanageable if it were not for the structure, support and balance that following a solid rule of life brings. And being a member of a dispersed monastic order, like the Society of the Resurrection brings commitment and responsibility, that is strangely freeing. It gives a structure to, what can be, a rather unstructured working day. It places a responsibility upon me to keep up with my prayers, my study, and my relationships to others, not just for myself, but also for the building up of the common-life in the rest of the community. And above all, it drives me to keep seeking God during all of the seasons of life and challenges me during those moments when I would otherwise choose the easy road.

Of course, I often fail in living up to the ideal. In fact, I haven’t yet been to a chapter where most of those present hasn’t lamented their failure at keeping the rule. But that’s not the point. The point is that each time we fail, the rule encourages us to start again – it provides the structure we need to keep things going, especially when life is getting in the way.