This is not so much an Update as a response to something of what has gone before. One of my friends to whom I send my updates has told me that whenever he’s reading one and hits the word ‘God’ or ‘prayer’ he skims, skips?, that paragraph and moves on to the next. I wonder if it’s just an excuse for not reading because lately he must’ve left out an awful lot of paragraphs. But really it’s because he’s not a believer – well not a religious believer. He certainly has some very strongly held political views. And he himself has told me he doesn’t think avoiding the God paragraphs is particularly commendable on his part.
But he has a point, and it did remind me of when I was at Westcott House, the Theological College in Cambridge where I studied in the 60s, saying, in exasperation, to one of my fellow students, ‘Well, do you believe in God or not?’ To which he replied, ‘Simon, it depends what you mean by belief, it depends what you mean by God.’ It was a very 60s response but it was the 60s and actually he was absolutely right, and it doesn’t only apply to God it certainly applies to prayer. We sometimes need to define our terms. What do I mean by God? What do I mean by prayer? What on earth do I think I’m doing when I’m praying?
So all in all, without getting too boring about it, it’s clearly helpful to some to try to explain what I mean – sometimes. I am very much a child of the 60s or not so much a child as a person of the 60s – I first came to London I’m 1962 and went to Westcott in 1965. The terms for God like ‘The Other’ or ‘The More’ or Paul Tillich’s the, ‘Ground of Being’, appeal to me as they take me beyond the material into there being something, someone more. And then of course, for me, in the person of Jesus Christ I am given a definition, I am given a reality that I can actually cope with and an encounter that means something both personal and general. Insomuch as I can cope with anyone or anything, really. And I grew up in a Christian household. The name Jesus, the assumption that there is a God was simply there, familiar and accepted.
So what about prayer. The Vicar, Fr Paul Ensor, in his ‘Quote of the Day’ on Wednesday 6th May, on the website of St Agnes Kennington, the church I go to, wrote:
Mahatma Gandhi today. Gandhi came from a prayer tradition quite different from the Christian one, and yet his words speak powerfully about the Christian experience of prayer. In prayer we give expression to the longing, the acknowledge of, the need to heal our spirits, to seek wholeness in a fragmented world. The soul does not speak English or Hebrew or Aramaic. It speaks yearning.
‘Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one’s weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.’
As we sing or chant or mumble or meditate on the words of our own tradition;
as we let the longing of our souls flow, remember that the heart behind the wordsmatters more than the words themselves.
There is the big stuff of prayer. Prayer which includes meditation and contemplation and cries for help and yearning and longing and thanking and endless asking. But I’m really just going to try to explain what I think I’m up to on my daily walk, a tiny tiny part of prayer – along with getting exercise and avoiding joggers and runners. Because that’s what I’ve included in my updates.
On the one hand I have the friend who skims the paragraphs with prayer and on the other, a friend who feels she can’t pray and walk at the same time because she can’t concentrate enough – on the praying that is. I couldn’t agree more about the need to concentrate on walking. For me that’s chiefly avoiding irregular paving stones and, here we go again, runners and joggers.
First and foremost, for me, praying is not about doing it well or badly or concentrating or not but is just about doing it. And I’m honestly not sure what the ‘it’ is I’m doing. I know that I’m calling to mind people and situations, concerns, issues, anything really. I know that I have God in my mind. And I’m sort of placing these people or situations before God – ‘offering them up’, quite consciously, in my mind and allowing ‘it’ to happen.
I try not to tell God what to do. My bossy streak sometimes finds that difficult because sometimes the answer is so obvious – to me. But That’s not what it’s about. I know I can’t change God’s mind – I’m not God. I don’t think God operates by a sort of majority vote so the more people that are praying for something the more likely it is God will make it happen.
I pray out of obedience because I believe that is what I am required to do. I think praying is for my spiritual well being what breathing is for my physical well being – and we all know about the importance of breathing at the moment. Praying, for me, makes loving possible.
So what do I do. Sometimes, when walking, it is repeating a phrase. Sometimes a whole prayer. I’m so grateful I was brought up with the Book of Common Prayer as so much of it simply floats into my mind – like the General Thanksgiving. Sometimes I just offer to God the whole walk and anything within that walk which I think, or see, or that happens. No effort is required at all and I still think it’s prayer and I can watch out for runners.
But after all this I go back in my mind to Westcott House where we were required to spend half an hour every morning, in the chapel, in silence. And I didn’t know what we were meant to be doing. And I would go to the Principal, Peter Walker, and say plaintively, ‘but Peter, what am I meant to be doing?’ And he would say, ‘Just be there.’ Yet again it’s a matter of being not doing. We’re human beings not human doings.
It’s a bit like the prayer of Jacob Astley, First Baron Astley of Reading, his battle-prayer at the Battle of Edgehill, ‘O Lord, Thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not thou forget me”. He followed on with, ‘March on boys!’
I’m not busy. I’m not suggesting anyone, boys or girls, should ‘March on.’ Having said that, brisk walking is very good for the health.
The activity of praying is common to all religions and I think it is fairly basic to human nature. I’m not sure whether or not this is helpful but it’s something I broadcast on Radio New Zealand after the London bombings.
YOU CAN PRAY July 2005
It was on a BBC TV programme – Any Questions I think. It’s on Thursday evenings in the UK and is usually hosted by one of the Dimbleby’s. It’s certainly one of the more intellectual programmes in terms of who it’s aimed at and there’s a live audience, fairly switched on politically and intellectually too I guess. And the audience put up the questions to a panel. I’m sure the whole thing is arranged and vetted before it goes on air and certainly they make sure that the panel members cover a different range of views.
The subject was one of the natural disasters we faced during 2005. I think it was the famine in Dafur and the panel were being asked about different ways of dealing with the disaster and I think there were comparisons being made with the Tsunami and how people reacted to that. And then one of the audience asked the question ‘But what can we do?’ and the questioner continued ‘I sometimes feel so helpless in the face of these distant disasters. What can I do?’
Various members of the panel tried to answer the question and I felt they rather floundered around. One of the panellists was the Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament Simon Hughes. He tried to answer and finished with, ‘And of course you can pray.’
The audience laughed.
Anyway.
Last July, on the 7th of July we had the bombings on the London Underground and the London Transport bus. Londoners and visitors, well everyone really were amazing and the reports were of people reacting at their best to what a few did acting at their worst.
And there were live interviews with people as they came out of the underground. One person said that people were really scared – of course they were – and people were crying and people were praying.
Another woman told of holding the hand of someone who had been very badly injured and was dying. The woman did her best to calm and comfort her and, she said, ‘I just held her hand and said the Lord’s Prayer, quietly, and then I said it again.’
Of course on Television’s Question time the audience’s laughter as a reaction to Simon Hughes ‘We can pray’ was because it was just that, a television show.
At the London Underground bombings it was reality, and people prayed.