For God alone my soul waits in silence. Psalm 27:14.

How we pray is who we are. Prayer is friendship with God. Our prayer is the best measure of the integrity of our Christian life. Jacques Ellul gives us the clue in a powerful chapter he calls ‘The Only Reason for Praying’ in his Prayer and Modern Man. According to the Bible, he says, the only reason to pray is that God commands us to pray.

The biblical prayers are often very direct and frank (e.g. 2 Kings 19:15-19, 2 Samuel 7:18-29). Sometimes there is a sense of the awesome majesty and power of God (Isaiah 6:5, Job 42:1-6). Others are mystical (Ezekiel 1:4-28); many of the Psalms are laments – cries to God ‘from the depths’ to be healed, to be set free, to be saved. Some biblical prayers are very brief – even one word (‘maranatha’, ‘our Lord, come’, which is the oldest Christian prayer – 1 Corinthians 16:22, cf Revelation 22:20). The prayers of the Bible often arise out of crisis and conflict, leading us to faith, hope and confidence in God.

Prayer covers all the events of our lives, so there are many ways to pray. Sometimes we are still, knowing within the depths of our being that he is God. At other times, we have to work hard at prayer: it ‘is not a gentle pastime’, as the new Dutch Roman Catholic catechism puts it.

Lord, teach me to pray, please. Amen……

PRAY AS YOU CAN.

Whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. Matthew 6:6.

The masters of prayer teach us:

* Pray as you can, not as you can’t. There is no ‘instant’ holiness. Prayer is hard work. It is the work of a lifetime – the longest journey is the journey inward – but we begin afresh every morning. You are unique, so your relationship with God will be unique, and therefore your prayer will be unique.

* Find a quiet, regular place and time each day for prayer. If possible guarantee that you will be unhurried and uninterrupted. Your ‘quiet time’ may sometimes be short but a short time with a friend is better than no time at all.

For many it’s difficult to find silence in our noisy world, or solitude in our crowded cities. But you must keep trying. Turn a corner of your house into an ‘oratory’. Pull off the road under some trees. Walk along a deserted beach. Put in a telephone answering machine. Your quest, as Carlo Carretto suggests, is to make your own desert. Remember, if you are too busy to pray, you are too busy.

Help me to understand, Lord, why I pray, why I do not pray, what I pray about, and what I do not pray about, so that I can pray better. Amen.…..

PRAYER – AND DESIRE.

Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. Mark 11:24.

Honesty is of utmost importance when you pray. Your transparency before God will be rewarded, ultimately, with spiritual power and vision.

Ask yourself: “What is my desire?” What do you want? Do you want God to take possession of you? Prayer is, essentially, the soul’s sincere desire… Prayer is an acknowledgement of our willing- ness to be changed, our readiness to be surprised.

Jesus taught two parables about prayer, about a sleepy neighbour and an unjust judge (Luke 11:5-13; 18:1-8). The main point he made was about the importance of earnest desire in prayer. We ought always to pray, and never to faint, or give up. Someone has said that when we faint we fall back on nothing, but when we pray we fall forward on God. And yet even if your desire is only tentative and flickering, our Lord never ‘snuffs out the smouldering wick’ (Matthew 12:20). Write down what you are really after in your life.

Lord, help me to clarify my desires, and I invite you to purge me of any desires which are not honouring to you. Amen……

KNOWING GOD THROUGH LOVE.

Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. Devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with thanksgiving. Philippians 4:6; Colossians 4:2.

Here is more wisdom from the spiritual masters about prayer:

* Prayer is a gift. Like love, it is a gift experienced every day, fresh from one who loves us. Prayer is not a bag of spiritual techniques. Paul says God gives us the Holy Spirit to help us (Romans 8:26-27). The Spirit prays in us, for us, through us, and with us. Prayer is not just what we do, but what God wants to do through us. So prayer is not merely seeking God. Rather, it is allowing him to find us.

* The main aim of prayer: to know God, through love. Knowing God – or anyone else – is much more than knowing about him. In her beautiful book Poustinia Catherine de Hueck Doherty talks about ‘folding the wings of the intellect and opening the door of the heart’ in God’s presence. This is ‘affective knowledge’, a knowing that leads to loving and responds to our being loved.

I love you Lord. May my prayer become a richer lovecommunication between us. Amen.…..

PRAY, EVEN IF YOU DO NOT ENJOY IT.

Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints. Ephesians 6:18.

* There are three kinds of prayer: spoken (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication, intercession), contemplative (‘thinking of God with love’ as Charles de Foucauld expressed it), and meditative, reflecting on Scripture or life’s events in God’s presence. Bonhoeffer advocated half an hour’s silent meditation on Scripture every morning. This was not ‘Bible study’ as such, but the discipline of being ‘under the Word’.

* As our prayer deepens, many of the saints tell us, we find ourselves needing fewer words. Prayer is essentially a simple process – even a child-like one. We come empty-handed to our heavenly Father, humble, and poor. And, over time, we gradually discover that God inhabits more and more the centre of our lives, as Augustine put it, ‘more intimate to us than we are to ourselves’.

Remind me, Lord, of the advice from Julian of Norwich: Pray inwardly, even if you do not enjoy it. It does good even though you think you are doing nothing. For when you are dry, empty, sick, or weak, at such a time your prayer is most pleasing to God, though you find little enough to enjoy in it. Amen……

PRAYER AND JUSTICE.

When you lift your hands in prayer, I will hide my eyes from you. Though you offer countless prayers, I will not listen… Pursue justice and champion the oppressed. Isaiah 1:15-17.

Some more wisdom from great pray-ers:

* Prayer is also living and working. All of our life, our thoughts, our words, our actions, our motives, are lived in the presence of our God. Pere de Caussade talked inspiringly of ‘the sacrament of the present moment’.

* Sometimes, however, our work negates our prayer. Remember how Isaiah expressed the Lord’s message: without a commitment to social justice, prayer is not just a waste of time, it is unaligned with the will of God. Prayer is not an escape from reality. In prayer we ‘love the world’ as God does – the world of people. He or she who is not listening to the heart-cry of another, is not listening to God either – and God is not listening to them.

* So be encouraged! Prayer is hard – but so is everything else in this life that is worthwhile. There is no short cut to true spirituality.

Lord, bless your people who hope for your mercy particularly those who suffer beyond their deserving or their ability to cope. Grant that they may receive the things they ask for, through Christ our Lord. Amen……

PRAYING WITH OTHERS (1)

Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. Matthew 18:19.

Prayer is a corporate, as well as an individual activity. The apostolic Christians prayed together from the start. The Holy Spirit was poured out on a group at prayer (Acts 1:14). They continued to spend a lot of time in prayer together (Acts 2:42). Paul prayed constantly with his co-missioners (Colossians 1:9; 1 Thessalonians 1:2; 2 Thessalonians 1:11) and asked others to join him in disciplined prayer (Romans 15:30). James (5:16) tells us to ‘confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you will be healed.’

‘There is a deep joy in praying together, an added vitality, a plus difficult to define’, writes Stephen Winward (Teach Yourself to Pray, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1976, p.86). ‘It is rather like the difference between eating your meal alone and sharing in a party feast. Eating together is not the same as eating in solitude; the something more is the company, the fellowship. So it is with prayer.’

May your prayer be to you as breath is to life. May your worship be in spirit and in truth. May your confessions be sincere, and you know your sins are forgiven. May your intercessions be answered according according to his will. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen……

PRAYING WITH OTHERS (2)

Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them. Matthew 18:20.

Praying together is one of the richest experiences Christians can have with each other.

Sometimes prayer meetings are large; they are church-wide. These can be powerful occasions, but only where there is a strong sense of community. In Western nations such intimate ‘belongingness’ on a larger scale is quite rare, so there has been a worldwide movement towards smaller prayer-groups.

This is good.

Such ‘growth groups’, ‘prayer cells’ (‘faith development groups’ is a good name too) should do three things: scripture reading, meditation and study; sharing of our personal concerns with one another; then prayer. That is, we listen to God, listen to each other, then speak to God the things have have arisen in the other two encounters. The ‘mix’ of Bible, sharing and prayer will vary from group to group, and from time to time in one group. What is important is that all three occur in all groups all the time.

The Christian who never or rarely prays with others is going to be spiritually impoverished!

So, Lord, whether with my partner, and/or other Christian brothers and sisters, I welcome you to our praying company. Thank you. Amen……