To Listen is the Greater Part of Prayer

How did you learn to pray? My mother taught me. Every night, before bed, we knelt down and said 'thank yous', 'sorrys' and then there was 'please bless...Mummy, Daddy, Nana, Taid, Auntie so and so, Uncle thingumy...' It could go on for quite while.

That's not so different from a lot of adult prayer. Some of us go in for sincere, conscientious lists of people and concerns we are committed to. Others go in for the dutiful, disciplined offering of set forms of prayer that mark out the times of day and the seasons. Still others regale the Almighty with desires, believing that if we have enough faith, these desires will somehow become consonant with God's and will therefore 'come to pass' as the scriptures put it. Most of us include genuine expressions of gratitude and regret as we go along the way but a very big chunk of much prayer is either intercessory or liturgical, the former expressing desire and the latter involving the recitation of the words of scripture or a denominational text. When words fail us we have recourse to 'your will be done'. A particular dislike of mine is the pastoral conversation that is directed into prayer when things get a bit tricky; I'm suspicious that there's an unacknowledged agenda or that it's a device for exerting covert pressure to conform.

Recently re-reading a biography of Jung, I was struck by a passage in which he describes overhearing his father (a minister) praying. 'I saw how hopelessly he was entrapped by the church and its theological thinking' (p.20, Jung: A Biography, Gerhard Wehr, 2001). This gave me pause for thought. So much prayer is constrained either by our own semi-acknowledged desires and horizons or by what church tradition has told us it is acceptable to think, feel and say. Much Christian prayer seems to miss out on the truly radical aspect of relationship with the Divine which is listening - listening to ourselves to discover the truth about our innermost motives and our habitual behaviours, listening for the stirring of that which is of God within us, within others and within the political and natural events around us. This takes time, discipline, repetition and a persistent commitment to an openness of attitude that lays aside dogma and systematisation.

There are many books about this kind of listening (often called contemplation). It's an inward journey, but also a journey shaped by and seen in outward influences. Here are some questions that might prompt us to review how deeply we listen. The more profoundly we listen in everyday life, the more we increase our capacity to listen to God and vice versa. 

• Who have you really listened to today?
• Who has really listened to you and how did you know?
• How often do you find yourself anticipating what's going to be said or thinking about your reply before the speaker finishes?
• When did you last hear something that changed you?
• When did you last stop to listen to something in the natural world?
• What was communicated in the last memo you read?
• How many repetitions does it take you to pick up a short tune?
• Do you often forget or mis-hear simple instructions?
• When did you last hear something truly unexpected?
• Who never listens to you?
• Who do you tend not to listen to?
• When did you last sit in silence for 10 minutes...half an hour...an hour?      

Manchester

We were practising handbells in the village church in Oxton tonight when someone came in to light a candle and say a prayer. It occurred to me that all over Britain, indeed all over the world, people are praying for the people of Manchester and the visitors who were at the Ariana Grande concert last night. In countless homes, churches, mosques, temples, halls, cars, schools, town squares, cathedrals, stadiums people have gathered or stood quietly on their own to remember the people who died. As night falls here in the UK, relatives and hospital staff are keeping their vigil and the police and emergency services are facing another night when they have to carry on with their demanding tasks.

Photo St Magdalene Chapel, Ripon
©Janet Henderson

I know it is small comfort, but I pray that everyone affected by the horrific action of the terrorist last night will be aware that there are people of goodwill everywhere thinking about them tonight, wanting to stand in solidarity, unable to imagine how they feel yet grieving at the awful result of this heartless, callous act.

God, be with all who grieve, 
wait with all who are at their wits' end searching for a loved one, 
watch with all who sit beside a hospital bed not knowing what tomorrow will bring, 
calm all who cannot get the images, questions and 'whys?' out of their minds, 
help the broken hearted feel the warmth of love that holds them despite their pain,
and send us all out to shape a more generous, respectful, caring world 
so that the shadow of this tragedy will not darken into night
but, through our tears and outrage, be turned into a search for the kinds of justice
and understanding that remove the scourge of terrorism from this and every nation.    

Our Father at the Cinema

The banning of a Church of England advert for prayer consisting of the recitation of the Lord's Prayer has undoubtedly resulted in hundreds of thousands of people watching the ad and hearing the prayer! It has also stung the Church of England and, indeed, many people who count themselves Christians and can't see what all the fuss is about, or who regard the ban as an attack on freedom of speech and religious belief. Even the Prime Minister commented that he thought it all ridiculous, perhaps reflecting a sense of shock that, in a nation that has until recently regarded itself as Christian, this could happen.

"The Lord's Prayer may be committed to memory quickly
 but it is slowly learned by heart.' F.D. Maurice
photo www.footstepscm.wordpress.com

Digital Cinema Media, who imposed the ban, state that their decision is based on anxieties that the ad 'risked upsetting or offending audiences'. More importantly, I think, they also state that showing it would run contrary to their policy of not screening ads that 'in the reasonable opinion of DCM constitute political or religious advertising.' They hold that 'a clear neutral stance remains the fairest policy for all and allows DCM to treat all political and religious beliefs equally.' This is a very coherent position. The Church of England's legal department have stated that this decision may give rise to legal proceedings though it's difficult to see on what grounds they would succeed since the Equality Act 2010 makes it clear (Section 13) that discrimination depends on a person or company treating A differently from B - it's not discrimination to treat all entities equally well/badly (sometimes called the 'bastard to everyone' defence!) So the debate is centring on 'giving offence' and the fact that there is no 'right not to be offended' in British law. 

I've recently been to see Spectre, Suffragette and MacBeth and I wonder how I might have reacted had any or all of them been preceded by the screening of ads with an uncontextualized and unexplained recitation of, say, the Tephilla and Shema (Jewish prayers) or verses about alms-giving from the Koran or a demo of the principal positions in Tai Chi. I imagine I would have watched politely and even been quite interested but I would have been puzzled about the relevance and purpose of showing them. And I might wonder whether, next time, there would be Pagan, Buddhist, Humanist or Sikh ads and where this was all leading.

Odd, this move to advertise the possibility of prayer. We are told by various surveys that between 65% and 80% of the population prays. We know that a lot of people use the Lord's Prayer; as the churches have hastened to point out in defence of the ad, billions of people around the world use it every day. We know that, as well as people of faith, some people who regard themselves as agnostic or of 'no religious belief' pray at times of extremity. We know that prayer is profoundly and intrinsically bound up in the way we live and that to separate it from this whole-life context runs the risk of emptying it of much of its power. We have the example of Jesus who appears to have taught the Lord's Prayer to His followers, at their request, and then trusted the example of their prayers, lives and words to spread it. And we have the example of the relative ineffectiveness of teaching the Lord's Prayer to generations children at school by staff who do not share the faith, as has happened over the last 40 years.  So what is the ad setting out to achieve and what can we learn from the reaction to the ban?

If the idea was to communicate that everyone has the option to pray, it was unnecessary. In my experience people know that. If it was to remind people of the existence of the church or the words of the central Christian prayer, there are probably better ways to do it. If it was to invite people into a relationship with God and with other people who pray using the #justpray hashtag as I suspect it was, then OK, but let's recognise this for what it is, namely, an evangelistic enterprise using competitive, consumerist tactics to influence people's spiritual practice and choices. I'm not convinced that this is where the church best puts its effort and money.

Strangely it is in it's own miscalculation that the Church of England has succeeded. Due to the DCM ban, thousands of people have sat quietly in their own homes and places of prayer and meditation and considered the relevance, power and challenge of these ancient words. The prayer Jesus taught His followers is based on even older prayers from Judaism. Who knows what the fruits will be? Who says spiritual benefits are not born of mistakes? There's something about redemption here. But there ought to be something, too, about honesty. We live in a religiously diverse society where faith or belief systems that assume, as of right, to have a voice that is denied others are dangerous. Jesus lived at the cross-roads of the main trade routes of His time where several of the world's religions were in evidence. He seems to have trusted to the fruits of a life of genuine prayer over-flowing into action to persuade people to try prayer out for themselves. 'Jesus was praying in a certain place and after He had finished, one of the disciples said to Him, Lord, teach us to pray.' (Luke 11.1) Attempting to join the maelstrom of consumerist advertising, though well meant, is not necessarily the same thing and is not quite where we should put our faith or our hope for the future of Christianity.