What I would like to do is give a snapshot, brief picture of prayer as I see it at different stages in life. And then I will go on and talk about now, prayer in the present moment. I am very aware that the snapshots I have chosen are arbitrary. There are a myriad others that could be chosen and the ones I have chosen will not necessarily be those that another might choose. I am also very well aware that there is probably no one here for whom prayer is unfamiliar territory, that you all have your own experience, your own theologies of prayer. But bear with me. I am sure that some of these stories will resonate with some of you.
I think prayer comes to us naturally as children. We are small, pretty helpless, lacking in experience and totally dependent on others for all our needs. It is only a small step from petitioning parents to petitioning the supreme Parent in Heaven. I am sure that we have all been taught as children, and in turn have taught our children, bedtime prayers. Prayer and bedtime go naturally together. Preparing for sleep is a significant moment of transition at the end of the day. Outside dark night looms, mysterious and terrifying. We are about to enter sleep and neither Mummy nor Daddy will be there. So we pray God our soul to keep. We learn, without being able to articulate it, that God is someone who transcends the limitations of waking and sleeping, darkness and light, inside and outside, upstairs and down. God is present and will keep us safe. All will be well. We can let go and go to sleep.
This is childlike prayer but it is not childish. It is in fact quite sophisticated and not at all easy to achieve as we get older. There is a temptation to think that this kind of prayer belongs only to the innocent and sheltered world of childhood. But Julian of Norwich reiterated her famous phrase ‘all will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well,’ in her Thirteenth Revelation in the context of sin and the pain it brings to humanity. She was no stranger to the terrors of the Black Death, to the horrors of the Peasants Revolt and the subsequent executions presided over personally by the bishop, or the execution of the Lollards within yards of her cell. And yet she could say, ‘All will be well.’ How could she do that? How can anyone today equate the reality of a Baghdad market place after a car bomb, or the suffering of Darfur, with God’s love? There is a gulf, a chasm, a bottomless abyss that runs between the immediacy of these experiences and faith in God. For the young child tucked up in bed this gulf does not yet exist, but it will appear, eventually, inevitably. I’ll come back to this point later.
The strategies of family life have an impact on the way we pray. I promise I’ll be good if … and then comes the plea. As parents we can often be susceptible to this sort of plea but there is a general consensus among theologians and those who write about prayer that this sort of prayer is unworthy of God. This in spite of the fact that it has had a long history. Abraham bargained with God, as did Moses to name but two notable figures from our religious past. God is usually understood to be a sort of transcendental parental figure, generally benevolent but intolerant of breaches in the rules. This kind of bargaining prayer is entirely natural and it remains a deep-rooted psychological instinct right throughout our lives. Even people with no religious faith at all instinctively turn to prayer like this when faced with desperate need. Freud dismissed this attitude as a childish hangover into adulthood, something that the rational adult should have grown out of. I would not be so dismissive. I think it indicates something important about us as persons. It is more than a memory of instinctive childhood dependence. It is a tacit acknowledgement that there is another dimension to our existence, a spiritual dimension. One of the great things about childhood is that you have not yet learnt, or been taught, a distorted view of reality. Everything is new, for the first time and consequently, full of wonder. Maurice Zundel, an extraordinary French priest I came across recently, has this to say about wonder.
Only one experience can teach us. It is the easiest to grasp, the most common, also, that with the least intellectual baggage and that is the experience of wonder. We owe so much to wonder, which is quite intuitive. It makes us come out of ourselves. It detaches us from this biological me, this possessive me, this me which is the sum of all the people, relationships, events and decisions which make me what I am now. Wonder can do this because it turns our whole being towards another reality, a reality quite other yet so precious, so close, so intimate, so interior that it fills us, fulfills us, completes us. [www.adeauville.com—index.php]
Wordsworth was wrong when he said that
trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home
But he was right when he said
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Children are naturally religious because they inhabit a world where everything is new, full of wonder and where much is mysterious. For them this physical world we inhabit is translucent and through it shines a deep and beautiful mystery. Edward Robinson in his book The Original Visi
on gives many examples. One lady describes her childhood experience like this
My first remembered experience of the numinous occurred when I was barely three. I recall walking down a little cul-de-sac lane behind our house in Shropshire. The sun was shining and as I walked along the dusty lane, I became acutely aware of the things around me. I noticed a group of dandelions on my left at the foot of a stone wall. Most of them were in full bloom, their golden heads irradiated by the sun, and suddenly I was overcome by an extraordinary feeling of wonder and joy. It was if I was part of the flowers, and stones, and dusty earth. I could feel the dandelions pulsating in the sunlight, and experience a timeless unity with all life. It is quite impossible to express this in words or to recall its intensity. All I know now is that I knew something profound and eternal then. [OV 49]
‘Then’ and ‘now’, unfortunately this early experience of the mystery at the heart of everything soon runs up against the conventions and received wisdom of our everyday world. One boy, aged 6, described how he felt a presence within him, and the words, ‘I am with you, every step you go.’ When he told his mother, wondering whether this was the Holy Spirit, she dismissed the idea, telling him that the Holy Spirit looks like a ball of fire. [SC 102] Another lady recalls
I remember sitting in my mother’s lap at the age of 5, while she affectionally explained that the idea of a God was a very nice and poetic way of explaining things, but just like a fairy tale. I felt embarrassed at what seemed abysmal blindness and ignorance and felt sorry for her. [OV 69]
Another lady said –
My mother did her best to give me an idea of God … I never spoke about my own ideas to her, out of a sense of shame, feeling that I knew who and how God was and that she did not yet have that understanding. [OV 70]
Adolescence
I think a sense of spiritual awareness is innate in us. We know – not always explicitly perhaps, not in a sense that we can articulate or easily describe – but there is a sort of subliminal awareness of a spiritual dimension, particularly in childhood. But, adolescence brings major changes. For some, a very small minority, it can be a time of intense religious fervour. But for the majority hormones kick in and a whole new world, undreamt of earlier, opens up. The attention is deflected away from the existential mystery towards the mysteries of the opposite sex and religious sensibilities soon run up against the rational materialism of the educational system and the conventional spirituality of society. It is not fashionable for adolescents to pray, or to be active in church. As often as not young people are inoculated against conventional religion by the hypocrisy and double standards of church-going people. If this is what it is to be religious, they say, I want nothing to do with it. Self and self-consciousness loom large on the horizon. When existential questions force themselves on the attention – as in the case of the death of a relative or friend, or a blatant case of injustice – the response is more likely to be anger than awe or wonder. How could God do, or allow, such a thing? If God is the kind and loving father that people say he is, then why does he allow such things to happen? Powerful emotions come into play which overwhelm the much more subtle and gentle awareness we may have had as younger children and so spiritual awareness, existential wonder and awe go underground for a time, to resurface later – perhaps.