1 A conversation over coffee

Trepolpen United Church (Church of England, United Reformed and Methodist) is one of those churches where coffee is served in the revamped foyer of the church after morning service. Some of the congregation sit around with their friends, some move from group to group chatting about this and that, and some get straight off home to make sure Sunday lunch is ready. Today’s service is over, nicely within the hour, and Sue is telling her friends Jo and Christine what she has heard this morning on Pause for Thought on Radio Ourshire.

She usually listens to the three minute slot the local radio station puts on each Sunday morning, and often gets something from it, but today was somehow different. She wasn’t sure what she made of it. The speaker was someone she knew. He had been the visiting preacher at their Harvest Festival a year or two before and he often spoke on the radio. He was someone she enjoyed listening to, someone she trusted. But what he had said this morning had made her think - she knew that that was no bad thing - but it had also made her slightly anxious. And she wasn’t quite sure why. So she was telling Jo and Christine about it.

This is what she had heard,

"Good morning everyone, this is John Smith, your farming vicar, with today’s Pause for Thought, two days before the start of the Royal Ourshire Agricultural Show. I go every year and, as usual, people have been saying to me "Pray for good weather for the Show, John."

Sorry folks, can’t do that. It’s just like praying for a safe journey home from the studio. Can’t do that either. The weather for the show’s going to happen like it’s going to happen, no matter what you want, I want or God wants. And whether I get home safely today depends on how I drive and how everybody else on the road drives. What God wants - which is for all of us to be safe on the roads - doesn’t come into it.

I can, of course, pray for patience and consideration in my driving and for the gumption to watch my speed and drive carefully, but any other sort of prayer is just silly. Life’s not like that and neither is religious faith. So if you’re coming to the Show – and I hope you are - bring your mac, just in case. Bye for now."

As Sue tells them what she remembers of the broadcast, Christine listens attentively. She enjoys a good discussion about Christianity, about most things really, and can’t wait for Sue to finish so that she can chip in. Jo is the opposite. She comes to church, enjoys the worship, gets involved in some of the social events that go on and is always ready to help with the tea, the creche or the cleaning. Even the Christian Aid house to house collection if they’re desperate. But she’s not at all sure what Sue is getting at and doesn’t really want to know. This kind of conversation makes her uncomfortable. She is glancing at the clock, waiting for the moment in which it would be polite to say she has to go now.

The moment has come and Jo has gone. Christine, a bright thirty-something who has recently qualified as a lay preacher, is making it quite clear to Sue that she thinks the Farmer Vicar is spot-on. The idea of praying for good weather went out with the Middle Ages, she insists. And the idea of God arranging the weather according to how many prayers he gets for what kind is nonsense! Besides, doesn’t a farmer want rain on one field and sun on the next at the same time? How is God expected to cope with that?

It’s easy to laugh, Sue thinks, but doesn’t say. She can’t put her niggling feelings into words. Something inside her doesn’t want to admit that Christine and the Farming Vicar might be right. It makes God sound so - what’s the right word? - helpless. Yes, helpless. And if God really can’t change things or help with things, then what is faith and worship all about? And why do we pray at all?

Then, coffee cup in hand, Mary arrives. She is the lay preacher who has led the worship that morning. She had seen the little group of young mums in the corner earlier, but had been waylaid by a talkative visitor as she was making her way to join them. Despite that, she has been able to overhear much of their conversation. Christine never was quiet. She also noticed the look of relief on Jo’s face as she slipped away. Escaping from the visitor, she decides to take pity on Sue, for she knows Christine’s lively mind and strong arguments from discussions in the Preachers’ Meeting. Besides, she wants to get involved.

Christine finishes what she was saying to Sue and summarises it for Mary, who is obviously interested. Would that be worth talking about in the House Group? Mary asks. Yes, it would, thinks Sue, who rarely says anything in the House Group but has got a lot from it in the two years she has been attending. Yes, it would, says Christine, always ready to talk about anything, anywhere.

Questions for discussion

1 The Farming Vicar’s radio talk made Sue feel uneasy. What are your immediate reactions to his talk?

2 The Farming Vicar doesn’t believe that prayer makes any difference to the weather. Does prayer or praying, in your experience, make any difference to anything?

 

3 What are the issues about prayer which you hope this book will help you to think through?

2 A stormy House Group

Andrew has done his usual thing. The House Group is holding its monthly meeting tonight in their lounge, so he has prepared the coffee and biscuits, welcomed the dozen or so people who come, put the coats on the spare bed, and withdrawn to the loft to work on his model railway.

Mary, who leads the group most months, has done some homework. She has phoned John Smith, the Farming Vicar, and asked him for a copy of the script of that Radio talk he gave three weeks ago which had made Sue feel uneasy. His response had been even better than she had expected, he had sent her a tape of it.

Mary’s House Group, as they all call it, has an open programme. Usually they decide what to do at the beginning of each meeting, for it’s the sort of group that tries to scratch where people are itching and most of those who come to it are the sort of people who will bring issues to be shared. Occasionally something will have come up at the previous meeting and they will have agreed to work on it at the next. This month, though, they have nothing like that planned and so Mary, after she has welcomed everyone and led them in a short gathering prayer and a longer centring silence, shares her suggestion that they think about the Farming Vicar’s radio talk. No one has any other suggestion to make, so Mary presses the button on the zapper and they hear, "Good morning everyone, this is …." Mary has seen too much go wrong with technology in church, so she has done everything properly. She has checked in advance that the machine is working, that the tape fits and plays properly and that the volume is set right. So there’s no embarrassed pause wondering if it will work and no embarrassing faffing-about trying to sort it out in full view of the group when it doesn’t.

They listen. The tape stops. Mary invites them to be quiet for a moment or two to reflect on what they have heard.

As soon as it’s open for talk, Geoff is in there. That’s exactly what’s wrong with the church, he says, vicars who don’t believe in the power of prayer and then go round telling people they don’t. No wonder the churches are empty. But he believes in the power of prayer. And it works. He prays for journeying mercies every time he takes his car out of the garage. And he prays for a parking space every time he comes into town and God always answers his prayer.

Things become very animated very quickly after that.

Christine jokes that Geoff’s kind are those who pester God as if he’s got nothing better to do than to look after them and meet their needs, however trivial those needs might be. And as for "journeying mercies", she can just about remember her granny praying for those and that was centuries ago, but that might have been because of grandad’s driving …

Geoff comes straight back. He is serious. He believes that God answers prayer and that God is so interested in every part of our lives that nothing is too small or insignificant to bring to him in prayer. Nor is any part of life too trivial for him to care about.

Christine sees that the time for joking is over. So she asks Geoff what he thinks he has got eyes and hands and a brain for? And before he can answer she tells him. They are gifts from God for him to use to find his own parking space when he drives into town. Then she moves on. What is really wrong with Geoff’s point of view, she argues, is that it is fundamentally unfair, even unjust. It paints the wrong picture of God and sends out the wrong signals about him. It makes him partial. Praying people are his favourites and he gives them special deals. He might make his sun shine on the good and the bad alike, and his rain fall on the just and the unjust, but when it comes to parking spaces there’s one law for those who pray and another for the rest. Is that it? As far as she is concerned that is ‘insurance policy prayer’ at its worst. She couldn’t believe in God at all, she says, if she thought there was a shred of truth in what Geoff is saying.

The rest of the group are a bit stunned. Lively discussions are one thing, but this has almost become a violent argument. Some begin to take sides. Others try to defuse things a bit. Someone asks Geoff if it’s really true that he gets a parking space every time. Someone else says that he’s just lucky, that it’s a happy coincidence that someone is always leaving just as he’s arriving. Someone else says that it really is time the Council built a bigger car park anyway. Someone asks Christine about what she thinks it is right to pray for. Someone else says that she must be very brave if she never sends up a little prayer when she’s driving round the ring road in the rush hour. Someone else reminds them all that praying for things or for people is after all only one kind of prayer and that there are others.

Sue says nothing all evening. She doesn’t pray like Geoff does, and thinks that his way of praying does sound rather, well, childish really: but she is also worried by Christine’s response. Surely God is interested in each of us? What about that hymn which says he "delights to meet fresh needs"? And doesn’t Jesus say things like "Ask and you will receive" and "How much more will your Heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him"? She is more confused than ever. She wishes she’d never listened to the radio that Sunday morning and never said anything about it to Christine and Jo at church.

Geoff goes home muttering about Christine and all the other semi-believers who do so much damage to the church. Christine goes home muttering about Geoff and how much harm he and those who are as naïve as he is do to the church.

Mary has a sleepless night. The evening hadn’t gone right at all. She knows that. It hadn’t been a discussion. It had been an argument. Nobody had listened to anybody else. Nobody had tried to get behind the words and the feelings. Perhaps they had started at the wrong place? The radio talk had been about what it is right or wrong to pray for. Perhaps that’s not the right place to have begun? But that was precisely the question that had been bugging Sue. Someone had said at the end that there is much more to prayer than praying for things, Mary knew that, that intercession is only one kind of prayer, but she also knew that it is an important one and a difficult one. She’d made the suggestion about tonight herself, hadn’t she, because that was the question which bugged her too?

But one thing was clear to Mary. It was that for both Geoff and Christine this issue had touched a nerve. It was not just a question of how to pray or what to pray for. Nor a question of what prayer is and how it works. Was it a deeper question of what God is like and what having faith in him means? It almost looked as if Geoff and Christine believed in two rather different Gods.

She consoled herself with the fact that the evening hadn’t been a total disaster, else they wouldn’t have committed themselves to carrying on the conversation next time would they?

Questions for discussion

1 The words of Jesus in Matthew 7:7 - "Ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you" - strongly suggests that prayer will be answered. What are your views on this question which so bitterly divided Mary’s House Group?

 

2 The words of the hymn which Sue is thinking about are from the last line of the fourth verse of ‘Come all who look to Christ today’ by Richard G Jones (Hymns and Psalms 765). The whole verse reads,

Bring your traditions richest store,

Your hymns and rites and cherished creeds;

Explore our visions, pray for more,

Since God delights to meet fresh needs

What do you think that last line means when you read the rest of the verse, especially the third line?

3 Mary is beginning to think that Geoff and Christine believe in different Gods. Is it starting to look as if how we pray and what we pray for depends on the picture we have of God? What picture of God do you have when you pray?

You don’t have to have a dog to be a member of Mary’s House Group: but it helps. Vincent (King Charles Spaniel, full pedigree) and Sarah (terrier plus collie plus several unidentifiable bits – all in the same dog) often walk their dogs together on the Common.

"Vincent"

"Yes Sarah?"

"Last night made me a bit uncomfortable …"

"Mmm?"

"Well, it’s not easy to talk about is it?"

"What isn’t?"

"Prayer, of course"

"Suppose not"

"How do you pray, then?"

"Two Hail Marys, night and morning"

"Pardon?"

"‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen’. Twice. Night and morning. In bed"

"In bed? Not in a quiet time or anything like that?"

"No. In bed"

"Do you have a quiet time or anything like that?"

"No"

"You don’t have a time when you sit down and think and pray and read the Bible and things like that?"

"No"

"No?"

"No, Sarah. Why? Do you think I should have?"

"Well, Christians do, don’t they? I mean, aren’t we all supposed to pray every day and read the Bible every day? That’s why they sell the Bible Reading notes at church, isn’t it? And the Prayer Handbook?"

"That’s what we were always taught at St Agatha’s, well, the saying your prayers bit anyway; but I don’t know how many folks do or don’t. I suppose old Father Alfred wouldn’t be amused at my quick Hail Mary night and morning."

"But you say it"

"Yes, I say it"

"Oh …"

"Sarah, do you have a problem here? You used the "supposed" word. Are you saying that you think you’re supposed to pray every day and read the Bible every day, but you don’t?"

"Yes. No. I mean Yes, Yes I think I’m supposed to, and No I don’t actually do it. Not every day, anyway"

"And you feel bad about it?"

"Sometimes"

"Sometimes?"

"Sometimes. Especially when I’m with some of the group, like Mary and Liz, and specially Geoff. I think they’d be horrified if they knew about it. You’re not horrified?"

"It takes a lot to horrify this lapsed Catholic"

"But you pray night and morning?"

"Two Hail Mary’s between putting the light off and going to sleep isn’t quite enough to get you canonised, even these days when we get a new saint every other week"

"Don’t you feel bad about it?"

"No"

"Have you never felt bad about it?"

"Yes, I have. Just like I felt bad when I stopped going to Mass every week. But I was a teacher. My job was trying to get young people to think for themselves"

"Oh, that sort of teacher"

"Yes, that sort of teacher. Just like you. I was a teacher, Sarah, trying to get youngsters to think, and eventually I realised that I needed some space to think for myself. Still do. But if we’re into sharing confession time, I go into St Dominic’s Cathedral every time I go into the city, and that’s once a week most weeks. And I sit there, in that holy place, just sit. "Sometimes I sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits"

"Huckleberry Finn"

"Indeed. Just sit, but it’s getting to mean a lot"

"My just-sitting place is over there. The seat by the fir tree"

"Ah …"

"But often I sit and read. Especially prayers, little books of prayers and meditations, Jim Cotter, Iona, I even hum the odd Taize chant."

"Can’t stand them, even though they’re in Latin they’re still ditties"

"Vincent!"

"Sorry"

"Yes, I sit and read, sometimes, not always. I suppose what we’re both doing is "centring," is it? Isn’t that what the women’s magazines call it? Not quite meditating or anything like that, but "Be still and know that I am God", that sort of thing?"

"I suppose it is. What do you do when it rains?"

"Oh, I don’t do it every day or anything like that. But yes, if it rains and I need my space – I suppose I am really talking about a sort of quiet time, aren’t I? – I call into St Ethelbertha’s. It’s one of the few churches around these days which are unlocked, and you’d be surprised how often you see somebody else just sitting. Thank you, Vincent"

"Thank you?"

"Thank you, Vincent, for listening. Thank you for helping me say what I haven’t said before, for helping me look at what I do and not feel guilty about what I don’t do. Thank you"

"Er … No problem. "Pray as you can, not as you can’t", somebody or another said once. Perhaps that’s what we both do? Bye then"

"Bye"

Questions for discussion

1 There is much guilt around prayer, and it may be difficult if not impossible to share in being ‘honesty about praying’ in a group: but Vincent helps Sarah to be honest with herself about it. How honest with yourself are you about your ‘prayer life’?

 

2 Does the idea of prayer as ‘centring’ help?

 

3 Do you have a ‘sitting place’?

Mary, Christine and Ian meet every three months to talk about their preaching. It’s part of their responsibility as lay preachers and they take it seriously. This time Ian’s flu has got in the way but Mary and Christine decide to meet anyway.

Christine asks Mary about how she prays and what she thinks prayer is all about.

Mary replies that she doesn’t have much difficulty about prayer, except for prayers of intercession in public worship which they were trying to sort out anyway; nor, these days, too much difficulty about actually doing it, not since she retired and they had the new central heating put in.

Christine looks puzzled at the last point, so Mary explains. For her, she says, time and place are important in the way she prays. Retirement doesn’t mean that she now has any more time than before, but that she does have a bit more freedom in organising it, so after breakfast every weekday she goes to her special room for twenty minutes or so.

Her special room?

The old box room, Alistair’s tiny bedroom, is now her special room, used only for being quiet. It’s her prayer room and reading room, nothing else. It’s a very precious place, and that is where she prays, sitting in a comfy chair, having lit a candle and put on a CD.

What does she do?

She begins by reading the daily Bible reading from the lectionary in the Methodist Prayer Handbook; slowly, entering into it as deeply as she can, meditatively. If it’s a story she tries to become one of the characters, to imagine herself into the scene. That’s something she learned from a speaker at a conference. That usually leads into deeper and deeper silence, focusing on something of God which has emerged in the reading. It is an alert silence, in which she is aware of herself and of the real life world, and also of God’s presence. She hasn’t really studied contemplative prayer, but she guesses that this is more or less what she is doing. She prefers to think of it as ‘communing’ with God, ‘practising the presence of God.’ Mostly she says very little, though sometimes she will repeat a verse of Scripture, or a line of a hymn, over and over again, as the focus of her meditation. Mostly, she says, she just relaxes with God, listening to the silence of his presence and letting herself, people, places and situations be held in it.

How long has she been doing this?

She admits that she has only been praying like this since retirement and the new heating system, but it’s not too different from what she has always done: made time for God and let him fill that time. She wasn’t always as organised as she is now, but this is how she has tried to pray for many years. This was, in fact, how she became a preacher. Listening for God and to God in this way, she felt a call to preach. She didn’t heard a voice, but she felt a growing conviction that preaching was something God wanted her to do, was calling her into. And that sort of thing happens often, she says. As she listens, she hears.

Christine looks at her quizzically.

Mary explains that a key Bible verse for her is John 4:24, ‘God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth’. For her God is the Spirit which breathes through all creation, which animates all creatures, which is the giver and sustainer of all life. God is the Spirit which inspires music, art, poetry and every search for truth. God is the Spirit which disturbs all those people who seek for meaning and purpose in their lives. God is, she has come more recently to believe, the Spirit behind all religions.

Christine wants to pursue that but Mary hurries on.

God is Spirit - active, alive and working, she says, and prayer is being open to him. Look at how the Bible speaks of God, she says, all those busy and active words like creating, calling, equipping, sending, speaking, revealing. God does all that and people hear and see, they respond. That’s how the Bible story unfolds. Like the old hymn says, ‘spirit to spirit thou dost speak’. God is real, the reality behind or within everything we see, and prayer is tuning in to that divine reality.

Christine has not heard Mary talk quite like this before.

Mary then quotes the verse of Tennyson about God being ‘closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet’. She confesses that she doesn’t know where ideas come from or where great music or new visions come from, but that she believes that they came from somewhere. They are ‘inspired’, she explains. She knows that the scientists are debating about how brains work and how minds relate to brains, but for her it is God the spirit which Mozart tuned into and where visions and great ideas come from. She has, she says, no problem at all in believing that God affects human beings, that he ‘works’, that he ‘does things’, that ‘Spirit’ can speak to ‘spirit’. And to prove that point she shares with Christine that experience she has had more than once of simply knowing that she must go and see someone, and finding when she got there that something had happened and she was needed to be there. If that’s not God working, speaking, inspiring, she said, she didn’t know what it was. How it works she didn’t know. That it does happen, she is convinced.

And Geoff’s car parking space …, queries Christine.

That’s different, Mary answers, different.

Questions for discussion

1 Prayer has often been seen as a ‘discipline’, but Mary does not see it like that. What do you think of her idea of prayer as ‘creating space and letting God fill it’?

2 What do you think about Mary’s way of praying?

3 Does Mary’s picture of God ring bells with you? What are its strengths and weaknesses?

5 June

June came to the next meeting of the House Group after a gap of several months. Her recent tragic bereavement is on everyone’s mind. They had prayed, individually, in church and in the house group, for her daughter’s recovery from cancer. June and her husband, Adrian, are loyal and faithful members of the church and everyone had been deeply concerned for them and for Julie, who many of them had known since she was little. Julie, her family, June and Adrian had been surrounded by love, care and prayer. Friends from the church had taken Julie to several different Healing Services. Some had helped. Some had hindered. But there had been no remission of the cancer. The minister had visited regularly, as had others from the church, and she had prayed and laid hands on Julie. But all to no avail. Julie had died, leaving behind a husband and two small daughters.

June knew what the group had been talking about in its last few sessions, for Mary had told her. But once they start on the subject again, June amazes them. She tells them that she had been embarrassed by many of the prayers she had heard prayed for Julie, and angry with some of them. Julie’s cancer had been diagnosed as inoperable, and though she believed in both the mystery of life and faith and the marvels of God’s love, she did not believe that God could do anything about her daughter’s inoperable cancer. She spoke quietly, but she was determined to say what she thought needed to be said. When she had finished, there was a deep silence: not an embarrassed one or an awkward one, but a grateful one. June had spoken out of her pain with an honesty, integrity and simplicity which wasn’t commonly heard or easily said; and they were respectful of what she had given to them.

Geoff wondered at first if this explained why Julie had not been healed. Because no-one had believed she could be healed, she wasn’t healed. That was the sort of thing he had heard speakers say at some Healing Services, and it was what he would have said himself at one time. Now he didn’t really think so. It just didn’t ring true when you knew Adrian and June – Julie too – for they really were faithful, sincere and believing Christians. He couldn’t understand why Julie had been struck down with cancer, or why so many prayers for healing had had no effect: but he wasn’t any longer prepared to blame anyone for not having enough faith. This had been one of those times when God’s answer to prayer had been ‘No’.

The group let June talk about Julie and her illness for some time. She spoke about her initial shock, disbelief and anger. How she had shouted at God that it wasn’t fair. She talked about the way she had clutched at straws when the oncologist had talked about drugs and treatments, or when she had heard cancer survivors talking on Women’s Hour. She talked about bitterness and resentment giving way to resignation, resignation being replaced by grudging acceptance, then by peace and trust – sometimes all on the same day. She shared how she had been frightened and confused and how these moments came and went. She talked about her feelings of utter helplessness, of having to stand by, unable to do anything for Julie. She had done all sorts for John and the grandchildren, of course, and there would be much to go on doing there, but that was somehow different. Now it was all over, and life had to begin again, she said to them, though inside she didn’t really know how it could or would.

So she went on to talk about what people had said when they heard of Julie’s illness and what she had thought about it. Almost the first question that she and nearly everybody else had asked was ‘Why?’ – Why should this happen to Julie? Why should this happen to anybody? Why is there suffering at all? And she had listened to the answers and decided that none of them were right. No one said this to her face, of course, but she knew that some people believed that suffering was the result of a person’s sin. You got what you deserved. If you were bad you suffered; if you were good you prospered. She knew that there was some truth in this, hadn’t Grandad died of a heart attack at 53 when he was grossly overweight after a lifetime of puddings, cakes and sweets with no exercise at all? And wasn’t he a heavy smoker too? Yes, lifestyle choice does come in there somewhere, June recognised that. But that’s about as far as it goes, she had thought, as she listed all the rogues and rascals she had known who had died peacefully in great old age and all the good and nice people who had died tragically or young. No, that was no answer.

Nor could she accept that God sent, or allowed, suffering to test us or to make us better people. She had seen some people learn and grow through suffering; but in her long nursing career she had seen far more lives broken and faith lost by suffering. If God allowed suffering to increase the total sum of human happiness and teach the human race lessons of care and compassion, then he’d got his calculations quite wrong, had been Adrian’s reaction to that. Others blamed evil, the Devil, cosmic powers bent on destroying God’s creation and opposing his work. She had found that explanation tempting but the minister had said that there was only one supreme God and that it was a heresy to think of two great competing powers of Good and Evil. Adrian had suggested that ministers were not always right.

She was in no doubt that human beings did cause quite a bit of suffering for their fellow human beings, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not; and how much ‘environmental factors’ might have contributed to Julie’s cancer was something they had reflected on quite a bit.

The more she had puzzled over these things, however, the more she had come to think that asking ‘Why?’ was not a very useful thing to do. Did there have to be a reason for Julie’s illness? Why not think of it as ‘just one of those things’, just as much a random accident as one of those road accidents where nobody is to blame at all? Bad things happen to people sometimes because they just happen to be the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just like that. ‘Happenstance’ was a lovely old word that seemed to do nicely. There was no reason for Julie’s illness at all, she had concluded in the end, it was one of those awful facts of life. The better question to ask, she had come to think, was ‘Where is God to be found in such chances and changes of life?’

At this point Mary decided to ask June what she had meant when she said that she had been embarrassed and angry at some of the prayers for Julie she had heard. June’s first point surprised her. It was not one she had been expecting. June reminded Mary, as a preacher, of two common verses and responses used in the prayers of intercession in Sunday services. The first was "Lord in your mercy / Hear our prayer" and the second was "The Lord hears our prayer / Thanks be to God". June’s objection to the first one was that it sounded as if God needed to be persuaded to listen; that it suggested that he was at best a bit inattentive and at worst capricious. The prayer sounded like begging God to listen to us, twisting his arm to help us by reminding him of his care and love – his ‘mercy’. Her God was simply not like that, June insisted. Her objection to the second was that it did the very opposite. It took it for granted that God would do what we asked, and that all would be well. That was just not being real, she said.

Mary asked what June would prefer to say instead. What she looked for, June said, was a way of praying in public which allowed people to voice their concerns in ways which did not suggest that God was indifferent to their concerns or suggest that a solution was immediately on the way. God did not need to be asked or reminded to love Julie, she said, his love was holding her all through her illness. And it didn’t help us or the congregation to be told that all would be well when we all knew it couldn’t be. Mary thought that as a preacher she ought to think much more carefully about those little phrases she used so easily and so often.

June’s second point was about prayers that Julie would be healed when the diagnosis was that her illness was terminal. She felt that these prayers were unrealistic and that they made unfair demands on God. If healing didn’t happen, and in Julie’s case it hadn’t happened, it was inevitable that people would start pointing the finger of blame and that it would be pointed in one of two directions. There would be those who pointed it at Julie for not having enough faith, or something like that. And there would be those who pointed it at God for not answering prayer or for not delivering on his promises. June thought that was plain unfair. It was one thing to blame God for something he could do something about, she said, but it wasn’t fair to blame him for something he could do nothing about and for her inoperable cancer came in that category. You can’t ask God to do the impossible, she said, though many people prayed for Julie as if you could and as if he did it every day! That sort of prayer creates unrealistic expectations, she said, and leads to nothing but disappointment and disillusionment when nothing actually happens.

Finally, at Mary’s prompting again, June had talked a bit about the kind of prayers which really had helped her and Julie. She started by saying how helpful it was to know that they were all being remembered, week by week, in the prayers in church; and how good that felt, being ‘remembered’. Then she said how helpful it had been to be told the same thing in the cards which came, though they often said little more than ‘Thinking of you’. It was strange, she noted, how so many people in the church found it much easier to say that than to say that they were praying for you. And when people did pray for them, she said, it was the prayers which thanked God for being there and holding them all which helped the most; prayers which asked for nothing except that they might all know, whatever happened, that they were held in an eternal love; prayers which almost helped them to feel that underneath and roundabout were the everlasting arms. That made them all smile a bit, for that was one of their minister’s favourite phrases, and they had all played the ‘How will she get it in this time?’ game in her services.

Mary had never been to a Methodist Class Meeting like they had had in chapels in her granny’s day – or so they said. But she felt that they had been in a Class Meeting tonight. That June had been giving her testimony, telling her story, sharing her faith. That God had been with them in a special way. That in listening to June’s struggles, the group had been learning something important.

There was no way to end the evening except in silence.

Questions for discussion

1 June doesn’t agree with Geoff’s theology that God is in control and God knows best. How would you sum up her understanding of things?

 

2 Prayers for the sick feature very often in Intercessions in church. Is it right to pray for the sick to be healed?

 

3 The Americans have a saying – please excuse the bad language – that ‘Shit happens’. We say things like, ‘It’s just one of those things’ and June uses the old word, ‘Happenstance’. What are the implications for theology and for prayer if life really is like this?

Andrew is playing with his trains again and Mary has opened the House Group with prayer. She had had a brainwave the previous weekend. For weeks the papers had been full of reports about the wettest autumn for years. Night after night the News on the telly had shown pictures of Worcester and York under many feet of water, railway lines washed away and disruption everywhere. Her own niece and nephew, who had only recently bought one of those little starter homes on a new estate, had come home from work a fortnight previously to find a foot of water in their lounge. Somebody bribed the planners to allow a housing estate to be built on a flood-plain, was Andrew’s first reaction to the news. They should have known better than buy it in the first place, was his second. Mary worried about Andrew sometimes. He had never been very hot in the compassion department, but he was getting more like Victor Meldrew every year. Last week’s Methodist Recorder had been full of the same sort of pictures, with stories of chapels and churches flooded out too. But it was the story of one group of good Methodist folk from somewhere or another, it didn’t really matter where, who had organised a prayer meeting for the rain to stop which had caught her attention. That and the fact that the Recorder reported it in a way which suggested that others might follow this good example. Her brainwave was to use this actual, real-life, current and pressing situation to explore the meaning of her chosen Bible passages for today. The fact that it tied in with what the Farming Vicar had been talking about on the radio was a bonus, and the clincher had come at the United Communion Service at St Ethelbertha’s that Sunday night. They had used a set of intercessions from the new prayer book, Common Worship, and they had actually prayed "for good weather and abundant harvests for all to share". She wasn’t sure she could believe what they were supposed to be saying, and Christine’s cough and splutter from two rows behind her had echoed round the church.

The House Group began with the Lord’s Prayer. Floods, they concluded, didn’t have much connection with the first of the four requests it made to God, "thy kingdom come and thy will be done". Yes, they agreed, when God’s will was universally done and the world walked in his ways, which they took to be the sort of new world that the prayer was asking for, there wouldn’t be the kind of floods they have in Bangladesh because the trees in the Himalayas are being cut down. But they didn’t quite see that the flooding of the Severn or the Ouse came into the same category.

"Daily bread", yes, they understood how people who had been flooded out could cry out for help to cope. The question was, what sort of help God could be expected to provide, and how he might go about it. They had no doubt at all that people needed help in circumstances like that, and that, thank God, it was usually provided from many sources and in many ways. But was that an answer to prayer? was the question Christine pressed, and they weren’t sure if it was or wasn’t. So why did you say ‘Thank God’, was Christine’s riposte.

They didn’t stay long on the third request, the one asking for forgiveness. That didn’t apply here, they agreed, unless you took Andrew’s line about developers and planners. But did they know they needed forgiveness? And if they didn’t, could they be forgiven anyway? They shelved that one.

That left, "lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil" and what did that mean? Did it mean that the flooding was the work of the Devil? Was it asking God to stop the flooding? Could he, even if he wanted to? Or was it a request for help to stay calm and not get angry if you were flooded out? Or a plea that God would help you so that you weren’t overwhelmed by despair? Or a not very subtle reminder that exaggerating your insurance claim was a morally dangerous thing to do? This was all good brainstorming stuff, they agreed, but it seemed to raise more questions than answers, even though most of the group said they were very interesting questions.

Mary then introduced another Bible verse, which had long puzzled her. What about that famous saying of Jesus in Matthew 7:7-8 from the Sermon on the Mount?, she asked them, the one which goes, "Ask and it will be given you; seek and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who seeks will find, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened"?

At that Geoff gets in first. Look at that promise, he says, and listen to the one who makes it. Our Lord himself is speaking on behalf of our Heavenly Father, our amazingly generous Heavenly Father, just wants to do for us immeasurably more than we can ask or think, just as Paul testifies in Ephesians 3:20 and Jesus says many more times. Look what that verse says, he goes on, anything we ask in the name of Jesus we will receive.

So, that means that if we ask for the rain to stop and the floods to go down they will? queries Christine. Come on, she demands, we are supposed to be focused on the floods, so if we ask for the rain to stop will we get what we ask for? She doesn’t give Geoff time to answer. Jesus also said that with only a mustard seed speck of faith we can command a mountain to be thrown into the sea and it will be done for us, didn’t he? So why don’t you do that then, have compassion on all the victims of these awful floods and make things better for them?

It doesn’t mean that, Mary tries to say in her most conciliatory manner. These are just very powerful and vivid expressions, figures of speech. They aren’t to be taken literally like that. Geoff isn’t sure that Mary is right, but he’s glad of the break from Christine’s attack. "Hyperbole", says Vincent. "You what?" three of the group say at once. "Hyperbole, a figure of speech, the deliberate use of exaggeration to make a point – I could eat a horse, that kind of thing", replied Vincent. Yes, says Mary, recovering her wits, a regular feature of Jewish teaching and storytelling if I remember right. Camels and eyes of needles, taking the plank out of your own eye, that kind of thing. Right? she asks, looking at Vincent. Right, he nods.

What does it mean to ask for something in the name of Jesus? asks Sarah, breaking the awkward silence. Because that’s what we do at the end of most of our prayers isn’t it? We end our prayers with "in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord" or something along those lines every time, don’t we? "For the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord" is another one, isn’t it? Is that the same? It is Mary’s turn to answer again, it seems. Yes, we do. And yes, it is. It means, one, that we are Christians who name the name of Jesus and are named with the name of Christ, so our prayers like everything else in our lives are dedicated to his service. It means, two, that we want our prayers to be checked out to see if they are worthy things for followers of Jesus to be offering or to be asking for. It’s another way of saying what Jesus himself said to the Father in his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, "not my will but yours", not what I want but what you want, that kind of thing. It means, three, that we are offering our feeble and inadequate little prayers as part of something much bigger and better, the prayers of the whole Church and of all the saints, and even the ongoing prayers of Jesus himself; like Vincent reminded us last week. Three points. She’d preached on that one before!

But Geoff and Christine aren’t happy. Geoff is prepared to admit to himself that he can’t pray for God to stop the flooding, but he doesn’t want to throw the baby out with the floodwater which is what he thinks Mary is doing. Christine thinks Mary is not going far enough. Why can’t you just admit that God can’t do anything about the floods at all? she wants to ask but she decides not to press it any more. Instead she asks what, if anything, Mary the preacher can pray about the flooding?

And Mary admits that she has problems here. She has few problems with the rest of the prayers in worship, she tells them, but the prayers of intercession, the prayers for other people and for the world in its pains and needs, do bother her. She has become increasingly uncomfortable with the intercessory prayers she hears in worship, almost to the point of not knowing what to say when she has to lead them. They all seem to be asking God for things - ‘shopping list prayers’ Andrew calls them. Should we be doing that, Mary wonders, treating God like a slot-machine dispensing answers to all our problems? And what happens when he doesn’t deliver the goods? That’s a recipe for anguish, as Mary knows from her own experience. And the worship books don’t help here either. When she says, ‘The Lord hears our prayer’ and the congregation replies, ‘Thanks be to God’, she wonders if it’s true and what difference it makes anyway? When she says, ‘Lord, in your mercy’ and they respond with ‘Hear our prayer’, it sounds to her as if we are trying to appeal to God’s better nature and persuade him to do something he’d rather not do. And as for, ‘Lord, hear us’ followed by ‘Lord, graciously hear us’ then that just seems like the worst kind of grovelling. So, she says, she would use guided silence for her prayers for those caught up in the floods, holding these people and situations before God and asking God to bless them.

"Is that it?" thinks Geoff.

"What does that mean?" thinks Christine.

Questions for discussion

1 How would you pray if you had been flooded out? What would you pray for those who were being flooded out?

2 The Gospels contain a number of sayings along the lines of ‘ask and you will receive’ eg Mark 11:24 (paralleled in Matthew 21:22) and John 14:13-14, 15:7, 15:16 and 16:23-24. What do you make of them?

3 There are a few references to praying for others in worship in the New Testament, eg Philippians 1:9, Colossians 1:3 and 4:3, 1 Thessalonians 5:25 and 1 Timothy 2:1-3. What do you make of these?

4 Mary is unhappy with two of the most common verses and responses used in the prayers. Do you think she has a point? If so, could you suggest a verse and response for prayers of intercession with which Mary might be happier?

 

7 Leaning on a gate

Mary is taking the dog for his midday walk and meets John strolling down the lane. It’s one of those bright autumn afternoons when the mellowing colours are at their richest and there’s still a bit of warmth left in the sun. And it’s not raining. They lean on a field gate. John talks. Mary listens.

"Felt a bit sorry for you last week, Mary, got a bit flustered didn’t you. Mind you, I’m not surprised. Go deep sometimes, them two, and they don’t listen to each other either. When old Granny Jenkins was trying to tell us something as kids, and we’d got our answers all ready before she’d finished, she’d look at us and ask us if we was listening or was we just waiting to speak? That’s Geoff and Christine if you ask me, always just waiting to speak. So don’t let them get to you, as they say.

I thought it was a good night, getting down to a big question like that isn’t easy. Especially when there’s such different answers. You remember Uncle Will and Uncle Jack don’t you? Preachers, both of them. Bachelor brothers, worked the same farm, and worked it well. Over there it was, where Manor Estate now is. Good farmers, never a cross word on what to do and when and how to do it. Not, though, when it came to religion. I remember they had two favourite texts. Uncle Jack’s came from the Old Testament, "Elijah’s ravens, Will", he used to say, "it’s Elijah’s ravens". I remember after one particularly lively argument, Sam Mills, one of the lads who worked for them, painted two of them on the bonnet of Uncle Jack’s tractor. Took months to wear off, it did. Would have got him the sack if he hadn’t been so good with the pigs. Elijah’s ravens? You don’t know that one? And you a preacher too. Elijah the prophet was hiding in the wilderness, can’t remember why, and God sends these ravens to feed him. The old Bible, of course. I know none of you young folk (that made Mary smile) use it any more. Pity. "Elijah’s ravens, God provides, Will", "God provides", Uncle Jack would say. Uncle Will’s text was another saying of Granny Jenkins, a wise old thing she was, that’s where the uncles got it from. She used to say all kinds of things but Uncle Will’s favourite was, "It ain’t no good o’ wishing and sitting down to wait; though God provides the fishing, you’ve got to dig the bait". So he’d counter Uncle Jack’s "Elijah’s ravens" with "You’ve got to dig the bait, brother, dig the bait". They could go on about that for hours, them two. Couldn’t help thinking of them when Geoff and Christine were going on.

Were you there the other week, when we had Harry Williams at chapel? Always like to hear a farmer in the pulpit. Do you remember what he said they had done out at Little Woodron, them and the Church? I can just about remember them doing that here, when this was still a village, before the town spread out. No? That Rogation-tide service, going round the parish in the spring blessing the crops. Hadn’t heard of that for years, but Harry said a lot of places were reviving it. Thought of that when you were talking about God blessing things.

So I got my hymnbook out. No. The new one. I know I didn’t like it at first, but I like it now. What I don’t like is when we have that screen up and, well, they all sound the same to me and the words never fit the music. Don’t start me on that. Looked up the Harvest hymns in the hymnbook. I thought they’d support Geoff a bit, praying for good weather and all that sort of thing. But they don’t, you know. That lovely old Manx Fisherman’s hymn we haven’t sung for years, that one talks about God ruling the raging of the sea. ‘We Plough the Fields and Scatter’ talks about God sending the snow in winter, the warmth to swell the grain, the breezes and the sunshine and soft refreshing rain: but them are the only two I can find that support old Uncle Jack’s line. Most of them say how wonderful this world is, and praise the Maker for it, of course they do, but after that they seem to take Uncle Will’s line. Even ‘We plough the Fields and Scatter’, because if we didn’t do that there wouldn’t be any seeds or plants for God’s warmth and rain to feed and water, would there? Like Granny Jenkins used to say,

"It ain’t no good o’ wishing and sitting down to wait;

though God provides the fishing, you’ve got to dig the bait".

That’s the line the Harvest hymns take.

I’m not quite sure where that leaves us about praying for things and people, though, Mary. God loves us and wants only the best for us. That’s the place to start, isn’t it? So is prayer a way of helping that along? Of helping to make that happen for people? Obviously it works sometimes by reminding us of things we must do. If you pray for the starving in Africa it reminds me in the pew to put my name on the House to House Collection list in Christian Aid Week. Right? Right. But maybe there is more to it than that, like you said? Maybe, prayer is us sort of adding our bit to God’s to help things on in ways we don’t understand? Our thoughts, our goodwill, our compassion, that kind of thing? Don’t know. Just wondering.

We’d better get on. Dog’s had his rest and he’s ready for off again."

Questions for discussion

1 Uncle Jack and Uncle Will are discussing the idea of ‘providence’. What, if anything, does that word mean to you?

2 The uncles agree that God ‘provides’. They differ in saying how. How would you say that ‘God provides …’?

3 In what ways is ‘Helping God’s love along’ a helpful way of thinking about prayer?

 

A few days later Vincent is on the Common again with his dog. Geoff doesn’t have a dog, but he is having one of his periodic and usually short-lived attempts at taking up jogging. When he saw Vincent he was glad of the excuse to stop. The conversation comes round to prayer.

"You don’t have any problems with prayer, then, Geoff?"

"I didn’t say that. I don’t pray as often as I think I should, or even as often as I want to. I have dry times when God doesn’t feel very close when it’s hard to pray. And I sometimes get angry at God with the answers I get when I’m praying for people"

"But you do believe that God answers prayer?"

"Yes. Always. Like somebody said, ‘More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of’"

"Tennyson"

"Oh, thanks. What about ‘Thou art coming to a king, large petitions with thee bring’?"

"Don’t know that one, Vincent"

"Old Methodist hymn, Geoff"

"Well I wouldn’t know that then, would I?"

"Suppose not. What about "He is ever more ready to hear than we are to pray"

"Bible? No. It’s a collect, I think, but not sure which. Doesn’t matter, but you do believe that God answers prayer?"

"Yes. Always. But only when prayer is offered ‘in the name of Jesus’"

"Yes, we talked about that didn’t we? What do you think it means to say that?"

"It means that there are all kinds of things that we can’t ask God for in prayer. We can’t ask him to let us win the Lottery. We can’t ask him to spoil the film when we’ve been flashed by a speed camera. We can’t ask him to make us win that contract we’ve tendered for, to give you an example from my own line of business. We can’t ask for those things because we can’t ask for them in the name of Jesus, because Jesus wouldn’t ask for them. Our prayers have to be for the sort of thing we could ask if Jesus was standing beside us listening to what we said, which I believe he is, actually. If you’d be ashamed or embarrassed to ask for something in the presence of Jesus, then that’s the sort of thing you shouldn’t be praying for anyway, and which God won’t answer if you do"

"Okay. It’s the proper sort of thing to pray for, honest, loving, unselfish and all that. Does God answer every time?"

"Yes"

"Yes?"

"Yes: but the answer isn’t always ‘Yes’. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s ‘No’. Sometimes it’s ‘Wait’. Sometimes it’s ‘Yes’ but in ways you never imagined. Sometimes it’s ‘Yes’ but in ways you can’t actually see at the time or for a long time after. And sometimes what looks like a ‘No’ turns out to be a ‘Yes’. But there is always an answer. Because that’s what Jesus promises us, ‘Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it’"

"Even when you ask for a car parking space, Geoff?"

"Yes, even then, because God loves his children and delights to meet their needs, and finding a car parking space is a real need"

"But it’s a bit on the trivial side, isn’t it?"

"Maybe, maybe not"

"It’s certainly a bit on the selfish, just-for-me side, though, isn’t it, like a smaller version of wanting to win the lottery?"

"No it isn’t. It is personal. It is small scale, I’ll grant you both of those: but it’s a real, genuine need. And God wants to meet those sort of needs for us, even in the details"

"So there’s no such thing as ‘unanswered prayer’?"

"Not if it’s a proper prayer in the first place, no. Though we don’t always like the answers. But God knows best. And he is in control. Believe me. Better go on. Bye now"

"Bye"

Questions for discussion

1 What do you think of Geoff’s picture of God? What are its strengths and weaknesses?

2 Geoff insists that ‘Yes’, ‘No’ or ‘Wait’ are God’s answers to prayer. What do you think?

3 Praying for a car parking space is obviously an emotive issue. What do you think about it?

Sue had not enjoyed the last few House Groups, but she had found the way June shared herself with them all so moving. She had come home that night much richer, she felt, than she had gone out. She also felt that some light was beginning to dawn on this whole business of prayer, and so she was glad when the minister rang the next week to say that it was time for her pastoral visit and when could they arrange it? Now they were sitting with a cup of coffee each, up to date with each other’s news, a couple of church jobs sorted out, and the minister in the picture about everything that had happened since the Farming Vicar’s broadcast had set this whole chain of events in motion. Sue wasn’t quite sure where to go next.

"So, have I got this right," asked Clare to help her along a bit, "you were taken aback by that broadcast in which the Farming Vicar seemed to suggest that God couldn’t really change things or help with things?" Sue nodded. "But when June talked about what had happened to them, and how she felt that God had been with them through all their sufferings, that rang bells for you?" Sue nodded again. "You felt that although God hadn’t been able to do anything to save Julie, nevertheless he had been there in it all with them and there for them to help them through that awful crisis?" Sue nodded. "So, what sort of God do you believe in, Sue?" asked Clare, as she sat back waiting for an answer.

Sue stuttered a bit over that question. Eventually she came out with, "I believe in a loving God, a God who cares for everything and everybody; a good God who made the world and who loves all that he has made". It was Clare’s turn to nod. "I believe that because of Jesus, who was ‘God with us’, who came to share our life and show us God’s love". Clare nodded again.

"And what pictures of this loving God do you have in your mind when you pray or think about him?" was Clare’s next question.

Sue stuttered again. "Father", she said, "must be one. King is another, though that makes him aloof and distant sometimes. Friend, especially when I think about Jesus. Things like that". Clare nodded. "But sometimes I don’t have any pictures at all, I think that God is just there, like air, or like water must be for fish".

"The one in whom we live and move and have our being", Clare added, then remembered that she shouldn’t interrupt. Fortunately Sue didn’t look blank, "Yes, that’s it, something like that", she smiled, "but ..."

"But …?" prompted Clare.

"But, what about all that stuff about God doing things, saving people, appearing to Moses, dividing the Red Sea, making the Israelites a great nation and punishing their enemies, calling people to be prophets, making Mary pregnant, saving people, bringing Jesus back from the dead, giving the Holy Spirit, doing all those kinds of things, like we say in the Communion Service?"

"You mean ‘the mighty acts of God’".

"Do I? I don’t know."

"You mean, ‘a God who acts,’ who does things, who intervenes to do good in his world?"

"I suppose I do, and it’s that God that the Farming Vicar didn’t seem to believe in, and I’m just not sure. Haven’t we gone round in a circle again?"

There was an uncomfortable silence which seemed to Sue to last quite a long time. "Do you believe in that sort of God, Clare?"

Although Clare believed in honesty of preaching, this felt a bit too much like being put on the spot, but an honest question needed an honest answer. "No", she said, "I don’t. I believe in a "one in whom we live and move and have our being" sort of God; whose love is the energy of life itself; whose power and love sustains all life." That’s the sort of God I believe in. A God who works in and through nature, and in and through people".

Sue was quiet. Then she said, "That’s June’s sort of God, isn’t it? And that’s why you keep going on about that Bible verse about, ‘The Eternal God is our dwelling place, and underneath and round about are the everlasting arms’, isn’t it?"

"I suppose it is", said a slightly surprised Clare, who had to go on to see about a funeral.

But they didn’t part until they had agreed another time for Clare to call back.

Questions for discussion

1 What is your favourite picture of God?

2 ‘The God who acts’ used to be a popular way of describing the Christian God but it has now slipped from favour. Is such a picture credible?

3 ‘The one in whom we live and move and have our being’. Is this a helpful way of speaking about God?

In Sue’s kitchen, a week later, over more coffee Sue asked Clare directly, "How do you pray to your God?"

"Much of the time," Clare replied, "I’m happy to use the same kind of images of God that you said you used. When I pray I will call God ‘Father’, sometimes even ‘Mother’ but not very often in public with that one, or ‘Lord God’, or at times, ‘Lord God our Heavenly Father.’ I don’t often address God as ‘Heavenly King,’ though, and I’m very cagey about ‘Almighty God’".

Sue chipped in that she remembered a bit of the sermon on that one.

Clare continued, "I like to use a variety of different words when I address God, though I admit to falling back on one or two basic ones when my imagination dries up. So I suppose my standard ones are ‘Eternal God’, ‘God of Grace and God of Glory’ and ‘God of Life and Light and Love’. Actually, I’ve found the Collects in the new Methodist Worship Book very helpful, for they use a lot of new and imaginative ways of addressing God. And when you compare them with the Collects in the new Anglican Common Worship book you see how good they really are, the Anglican collects are still stuck in the old ‘Almighty God’ rut. I said that to Father Tony, and he agreed!"

After finishing a mouthful of biscuit, Clare got back to the point, "But it’s more than just changing the way you address God, though that’s important. It’s also what you think you are really doing. If you think of God as a person – Father, Lord, King – that kind of picture, then prayer is like talking to someone. If that someone is a good listener you can tell them anything and everything. If that someone knows you and loves you, they listen and respond. If you need something from that someone, you ask, and how you ask depends on who they are and what you want: they might want to give it to you, they might not. Asking a Traffic Warden not to give you a ticket is a bit different from asking you for another cup of coffee. Yes please. Thanks. So if you think of God in terms of those pictures – Father, Lord, King and so on – prayer is about talking to God, often with a heavy asking component; asking for forgiveness, or asking for help for yourself or for others. Then that takes you into all those difficult areas of making requests which are, apparently, not answered. I don’t find this way of thinking about God or of praying very helpful myself, but it is the way most people still think of prayer, I think, and how they still think of God. After all, it’s the way they have been taught to think of God and to pray to him."

"So if I don’t do it like that, how do I do it? One of my favourite ways of thinking about God is as ‘the one in whom we live and move and have our being’, as I think I said to you last week. That’s a way of thinking about God which comes from some ancient Greek philosopher or another, Paul quotes it with approval when he’s preaching to the Greeks in Athens. (It’s Acts 17:28 but Clare can’t remember chapters and verses). It’s a bit like what you said about air to us and water to fish. I think of God as the love which is the energy of life itself, the power and love which sustains all life. I think you noticed that one of my favourite Bible verses is that one from the Old Testament which says, ‘The Eternal God is our dwelling place, and underneath and round about are the everlasting arms’ (Deuteronomy 33:27). That’s saying the same thing really, though it’s a bit of a shock to discover in the new translations that they don’t translate it like that any more. Won’t stop me using it though".

Clare really ought to watch her biscuit intake, thought Sue.

"So, praying to a God like this is different from having a conversation with a person or asking someone for something. Must be. So there’s a lot of silence sometimes. Or poetry, or pictures, or music. It’s a sort of meditation, I suppose, which takes you out of yourself and into something bigger. It’s like tuning in to a symphony on the radio, losing yourself in it, but becoming very, very aware of things. ‘Focusing’ is another word for it, becoming absorbed in something, caught up in it."

Sue nodded. She could understand this sort of prayer. She used it herself sometimes.

"So praying for other people when you believe in this kind of God", continued Clare, "means holding people or places or situations in your mind in the conscious presence of God, offering your concern for them or anxiety about them, adding the energy of your love to the energy of God’s love. That kind of thing. It also means that by entering imaginatively into someone else’s situation, you yourself are changed. Often, too often, I finish praying like that knowing there is something I must do. And that’s not easy. Did I say last week that the God I believe in is a God who works in and through nature, and in and through people? Thought I did. And that’s how he does it, by changing me and you, and by drawing our loving concern into his life-giving energy of love which sustains all things".

Sue didn’t look entirely convinced.

"Okay then, here are two old ways of putting this and a new one. Have you heard of Theresa of Avila, sixteenth century, Spanish nun and mystic? Well, she said this,

‘Christ has no body now on earth but yours;

no hands but yours, no feet but yours.

Yours are the eyes through which must look out

Christ’s compassion on the world.

Yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good.

Yours are the hands with which He is to bless men now.’

Take out the word ‘Christ’ and put in the word ‘God’ and you’re getting there. Then do the same with the old Sunday School ditty,

‘Christ has no hands but our hands to do his work today,

He has no lives but our lives to win men for his way;

He has no lips but our lips to tell men how he died,

He has no feet but our feet to lead them to his side.’

The new one is this lovely song from Nicaragua,

‘Sent by the Lord am I,

my hands are ready now

to make the earth the place

in which the kingdom comes.

The angels cannot change

a world of hurt and pain

into a world of love,

of justice and of peace.

The task is mine to do,

to set it really free.

Oh, help me to obey,

help me to do your will.’

Does that help? Then there’s this saying, which oversimplifies all kinds of things, but there’s something in it: ‘Prayer doesn’t change things. Prayer changes people, and people change things’. That’s how it seems to me".

Questions for discussion

1 If you were to compose the first prayer for use in church next Sunday morning, how would you address God in it?

2 God as a Person or as the Energy which drives the universe. Are these alternatives? Do we have to choose?

3 Do you think the saying of St Theresa of Avila, the Sunday School chorus and the worship song from Nicaragua have anything helpful to say about prayers of intercession?

Later that week there was a lively discussion at the monthly Minister’s Fellowship in the town. Clare started it by telling the seven ministers there about her conversation with Sue – though she mentioned no names of course – and the discussions which had been going on in her church.

She had told them how pleased she was that her folk were talking about something other than the vandalism and money-raising. They were envious. They asked what had started it. ‘Interesting’, they said. They asked about the House Group. ‘Impressive’, they said. They asked what Clare herself had said. ‘Impossible’, one of them said. That started a time of thoughtful sharing.

Clare spent the next ten minutes defending herself. Believing that God was the ‘one in whom we live and move and have our being’ was not heretical, she pointed out – though none of them had suggested it was - throwing in a reference to God as the ‘Ground of our Being’ from some modern theologian or another whose name she couldn’t remember. She did remember Paul’s marvellous description of God at the end of Romans 11 as ‘Source, Guide and Goal of all that is’ but then had to counter those whose Bibles were a bit more up to date than the New English. She was tempted to quote ‘Being’s source begins to be’ from one of her favourite unsung Christmas hymns and the first verse of ‘Being of beings, God of love’ but thought that Wesley’s hymns would be lost on her ecumenical friends. Her Old Testament verse was very well received. Thinking of God like this did not reduce him to some sort of impersonal force, she concluded, just as thinking of God as a person didn’t mean making him into an old man with a white beard in the sky.

She was not alone in thinking in this way. Several colleagues shared their similar views. On the specific question of prayers of intercession, the other Methodist there chipped in with what he described as the most helpful thing he’d ever read about prayers of intercession. It came, he said, from a book from the Sixties which was a bit of a classic, that our prayers of intercession were the way we offered our love, concern and energy to God to help him do his work. God needs our prayers and invites them, he said, as a way of helping him. Clare thought that was a picture of God that made sense.

There were those there who saw nothing wrong with thinking of God in very traditional personal terms as Father, Lord and King; and who saw absolutely nothing wrong and everything right with thinking of God as ‘Almighty’. ‘If God is not almighty, then he’s not God’, one colleague had insisted. We pray to him because he tells us to, they said. We ask him for things even though our needs are known before we ask, because that way we recognise and admit our need of God and don’t fall into the habit of taking things for granted which they all said was so very easy to do. It’s a way of acknowledging our dependence on God and of showing our gratitude, they said.

Their response to the riddle of ‘unanswered’ prayer was similar to Geoff’s. Prayer is always answered. The answer might be ‘Yes’, ‘No’ or ‘Wait’, but there was an answer because God was in control and he was working his purposes out, despite all the forces of evil and death which were working hard to stop him and prevent his purposes being achieved. At this stage in the process, one said, we can’t see enough to recognise how all his answers to our prayer fit into that process: but they do. It’s sometimes very hard to believe that, but that’s the way it is. God is God. One day when that process is completed we will be able to look back and see God’s hand in everything and thank him for it, they said.

One minister had sat silent through all of this, listening to both points of view but saying nothing. Eventually the others asked him what he thought, where he stood on all of this. He said that he didn’t find either of their ways of looking at things very helpful, even though both of them had centuries of serious thought and experience behind them. Both of them believed that God was ‘real’; that God was either a real ‘person’ or a real force behind or underneath or within the universe, and he couldn’t go with that.

They pressed him about what he could go with, about what, if anything, he did believe. They didn’t call him an atheist who ought to look for another job, though a glance between two of them suggested that’s what they might have been thinking, for this was a minister they knew and respected, whose leading of worship was rich and real, whose care for people and commitment to justice and peace was practical and who they knew to be a person of prayer. So they listened as he explained that for him the word ‘God’ didn’t refer to a heavenly being or a life-giving power. It didn’t refer to any ‘thing’ at all. That sort of God didn’t exist, he said. Instead, he said, he used the word ‘God’ as a way of making sense of life, of creating meaning when so much around us is meaningless. For him ‘faith’ was making a decision to live by certain values – those seen clearest of all in Jesus – and to live against the grain of those who said that the only meaning in life was that of getting, having and keeping. It was to live ‘as if’, as if the Bible story world was the true one, as if love was at the heart of things, as if the world was created rather than just happening to be here and to live as if humanity mattered, as if all that was worth living, and dying, for. That’s what I mean when I say ‘I believe in God’, he said. ‘The word ‘God’ is shorthand for all of that’, he said.

When they asked him about prayer, he answered that for him prayer was meditation and music and poetry and quiet and reading the paper and getting angry at the way things so often are, and laughter and tears. Above all, he said, quoting Paul from Philippians 4:8, prayer was about filling your thoughts with those things which are true, noble, just, pure, loveable, attractive, excellent and admirable; and by so doing being personally uplifted and encouraged to live in ways that make more of them in a world which is desperately short of them.

They didn’t come to any agreed conclusion that morning.

But they prayed together at the end as they always did; reflecting on the amazing grace and gleaming and resounding glory of God, acknowledging failure and need, receiving encouragement and renewal, thinking of and upholding each other and others in their need and going out in peace to love and serve God and his world in the name of Jesus.

Questions for discussion

1 Do you find this old translation of Deuteronomy 33:27 – ‘The Eternal God is our dwelling place, and underneath and round about are the everlasting arms’ - as helpful as Clare does?

2 Does God need our prayers, either as a way of helping him or in any other way?

3 What do you make of the anonymous minister with the unusual views?

12 What is prayer?

Sue’s question over coffee started a chain of discussions, conversations and reflections on prayer among the folk associated with Trepolpen United Church. In their conversations we heard a wide variety of understandings of what prayer is and how it ‘works’ or doesn’t ‘work’. In this part of the book we look at the issues they have raised in a rather more systematic way.

There is no religion, ancient or modern, in which prayer – public or private, corporate or individual - does not feature. So in the total of 1121 prayers found in The Oxford Book of Prayer there are 271 from other places than the Bible and other traditions of faith than Christianity. The one tradition of faith not found between that book’s covers is that of New Age spirituality, perhaps because that really arrived on the scene only after it was published. The call to prayer sounding from the mosque, the Buddhist prayer wheel, the incense sticks and crystals of New Age spirituality and the mantras chanted by the monks of Hare Krishna are all now familiar features of religion in Britain. No doubt prayer means different things to the different people who practise it in the many different religions found in the UK today, but prayer is a common experience they all share. It is a universal religious phenomenon.

Not only that, but if the questionnaires and surveys are to be believed, many more of the nominally Christian population of the UK pray than ever demonstrate any allegiance to the Christian faith by actually going to church. What all these people do and why they do it would make a fascinating topic for research, but it is worth noting that they claim to do it.

For the rest of this book, however, we will confine our thinking about at prayer to Christian prayer. Even here there is a vast range of styles of prayer to be found in Christianity in Britain today. To simplify our glance at them we will divide ‘prayer’ into two types: ‘public’ (or corporate) prayer and ‘private’ (or individual) prayer.

A good example of one style of ‘public’ prayer is that found in the daily services of Morning or Evening Prayer which are said in our Cathedrals and which can still occasionally be found in an odd Parish Church here or there. Here a service of prayers and Bible readings is ‘said’ or, occasionally on Sundays and special days, ‘sung’ from a Prayer Book. The predominant voice is that of the priest who reads the set prayers. The congregation joins in the Lord’s Prayer, says the responses to sentence prayers led by the priest and adds its old Hebrew ‘Amen’ (‘Yes’, ‘Agreed’, ‘So be it’) at the end of the priest’s words. In the prayers of this service the standard four elements of public prayer are all present: adoration or praise, confession, thanksgiving, intercession, blessing and dedication. It is this service, refocused on a sermon and with the addition of congregational hymns, which forms the usual Sunday Service of most Methodist and United Reformed churches today.

A very different but equally good example of ‘public’ prayer is the prayer offered in times of ‘worship’ and ‘ministry’ in churches which have been influenced by the charismatic movement. There will be a worship leader taking responsibility for these different times of prayer, but the prayers themselves will be offered, unscripted and unplanned, from all parts of the building by many different individuals. They will usually, but not always, be short; especially in the ‘ministry’ prayer time when the prayers may be no more than the naming of a person or a situation. But the church will not be quiet, there will be a hum or buzz of noise, for many who are not praying out loud for all the congregation to hear will not be praying silently but in a quiet yet audible voice. Others will be adding their own vocal ‘Amen’ or ‘Yes, Lord’ or other expressions by which they identify with the prayers being said. In those churches which practice ‘speaking in tongues’ not all the prayers will be in English. In those churches with a music group there may well be, especially in the ‘worship’ prayer time, background singing or instrumental music.

Different again are services of prayer like the Vigil or the Taize service. A Taize service will feature much quiet singing of Taize chants as well as Bible readings and silence; the mix in each service will vary. Through the repetition of the chants, some of which are in Latin, the singers expect to move through the singing and the words into the silence of God’s peaceful presence beyond them. The building will usually be darkened, probably with a single candle as a focus, and the congregation will often be seated on the floor in a circle. Vigils come in many forms, but usually they have a focusing issue about which people have come together to pray. The prayers may be spoken or silent, but an increasingly common feature is the lighting of candles. Members of the congregation are invited to express their prayer and concern by lighting a candle and placing it on or near the focus point of the vigil. Variations include placing a stone or card or shell, whatever it is that they have been given on entering the building, on the focus point. Here prayer is expressed in action and gesture, often without words.

The classic book referred to in the discussion at the Ministers’ Fellowship is J. Neville Ward’s The Use of Praying (Epworth Press 1967, reprinted frequently and still in print). In it Ward repeatedly makes the point that it is in the Eucharist that we see most clearly what prayer in the Christian tradition really is, that it begins and ends in thanking and offering. For him the Eucharist is in fact Christian prayer in its fullness. It is ‘the central and representative act of Christian prayer’ (p20), and in each of his chapters devoted to the different elements of prayer he draws attention to how each particular form of prayer is represented in the Eucharist. Although not all Christians would share Ward’s devotion to the Eucharist or even be comfortable using the word, we can nevertheless include that sacrament here as one more example of public prayer, both in the way that it features the essential elements of prayer and in the way that the total experience of the service is an experience of prayer.

Ward also insists that corporate prayer is primary for the Christian and that private prayer is secondary. That does not mean, he adds, that private prayer is ‘expendable.’ It is, however, much more difficult to describe because it is so varied. Perhaps the model of private prayer which many still think is expected of them is that of a private version of Morning or Evening Prayer in which the Bible is read and prayers are said in a ‘Quiet Time’. The two orders of Prayer in the Morning and Prayer in the Evening provided in Common Worship and in The Methodist Worship Book, or the prayers for each day of the month in the annual Methodist Prayer Handbook are useful resources for those who are able to pray in this way. Mary comes very near to doing it this way in her quiet place and time, but it’s quite clear that many can’t and don’t pray in this way. Vincent, for example, only manages a quick Hail Mary before he goes to sleep but will ‘just sit’ in the cathedral every time he’s in town. Sarah, who feels bad about what she doesn’t do, has her favourite bench on the Common. How do other people actually pray? Some talk to God over the washing up, others as they walk the dog or mow the lawn. Some do yoga or meditation. Some use ‘arrow prayers’, brief moments of focused concern. Some burn incense sticks and put on a CD. Some buy books of prayers, read poetry or meditate on hymns. Some join in the daily prayers on the radio or put on a tape in the car on the way to work. Some do none of these, but commit to doing something practical as their way of ‘thanking and offering’.

There are, it seems, a great many ways in which Christian people in Britain ‘practise the presence of God’, and I offer you that phrase as a good description or definition of prayer. It is based on the title of a collection of the prayers of Brother Lawrence, a Frenchman who was born around 1611, entered the Carmelite monastery in Paris in 1649 as a lay brother and worked in the monastery kitchen until his death in 1691. For another definition of prayer I suggest this,

‘Prayer is the communication and communion, spoken and unspoken, that takes place between ourselves and God (in whatever terms we think of the Power behind the universe)’

Further Reading

A Catechism for the use of the people called Methodists, (Methodist Publishing House, 1986, updated in 2000).

70 questions asked and answered.

R. E. Clements, The Prayers of the Bible (SCM Press, 1985).

After an introductory chapter on ‘Prayer in the Bible’, this older book looks at 25 prayers in the Bible, excluding the Psalter and Lamentations, and comments on each one.

Robert Davidson, The Courage to Doubt (SCM Press, 1983)

A classic book which explores those Old Testament passages which question God, doubt his loving-kindness and demand a faith big enough to look at life as it is.

C. S. Rodd, Thinking Things Through 4: Why Evil and Suffering? (Epworth Press, 2000)

Using the format of this series this book engages with the most pressing of all pastoral questions.

C. S. Rodd, Thinking Things Through 9: Is there a God? (Epworth Press, 2002).

Using the format of this series this book raises the crucial questions and discusses the various responses to them traditionally and currently made.

Marjorie J. Thompson, Soul Feast (Westminster John Knox Press, 1995)

This book is ‘an invitation to the Christian spiritual life’ which introduces the reader to spiritual reading, prayer, fasting, self-examination, spiritual direction and, unusually, hospitality. It is a ‘how to’ book which does not neglect the ‘why?’ questions.

Michael E. W. Thompson, The Old Testament and Prayer (Epworth Press, 1996)

This book ends with a chapter on ‘Old Testament Prayer’ after looking at all the ways in which prayer is offered in the Old Testament, including, crucially, careful consideration of prayer in the Book of Psalms.

Ed Gordon S. Wakefield, A Dictionary of Christian Spirituality (SCM Press, 1983)

SCM Press did us all a great favour by producing its ‘Dictionaries’ in the 1980’s and 1980’s. This one still remains an important resource.

J. Neville Ward, The Use of Praying (Epworth Press, 1967)

This book is a classic on prayer. Written by a Methodist minister, now dead, this book gives practical guidance to those who would grow in the life of prayer as well as offering a searching critique of the whole enterprise.

Edited by Fraser Watts, Perspectives on Prayer (SPCK, 2001)

This book is the text of a series of lectures by various distinguished Cambridge Christians on ‘Prayer and …’ and contains fascinating perspectives on Prayer and the Bible, Society, Science, Psychology, Poetry, Music , Sexuality and the Body.

Maurice Wiles, God’s Action in the World (SCM Press, 1986)

In this book of the Bampton Lectures for 1986, dealing with the huge question at the heart of any discussion about prayer, especially prayers of intercession, Professor Wiles asks: Does God act in the world? Does he affect what happens to us in the varied experiences of daily life? If so, in what ways and by what means?

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