At dusk
I went to the place where
looking across the folds of hills
I might see you.
Wanting a vision, expecting none,
suddenly
there was a crease of light
where day meets night --
a mystical plant erupting
between earth and heaven.
"It's too fast," I thought,
and yet, this birth continued
inexorably,
swelling and rounding out until
complete at last and free
it seemed to me
to roll down the hills
to thee.
Intention, solitude, epiphany, communion. For me, words of prayer, unlike words that barrage or barricade, are the conscious tips of hidden depths; imprints marking a path towards the dearest freshness deep down things; thresholds crossed to contemplate the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ: O gladsome Light, O Grace of God the Father's face ... joyful in your appearing.
Prayer can refer to intensely private and idiosyncratic phenomena: discrete textured moments, fingered like the beads of a rosary. But at the same time prayer has a public corporate dimension that circles like a tide around the great wide world; a labyrinth walked by an everflowing stream of pilgrims.
At dusk, en route back to Jerusalem from a day in Gaza, we stopped for prayers and a simple meal with the Community of the Beatitudes in the Church of the Resurrection, a 12th-century crusader church in the Palestinian village of Abu Gosh. It was there that the crusaders used to commemorate the events of Luke 24: the disciples' recognition of the Risen One in the breaking of bread.
As we approached the doorway to enter within the thick walls, a shofar sounded in the distance, announcing the beginning of Sabbath. Immediately, there was the cry of the muezzin's call to prayer from the minaret, and then the church bells pealed for vespers. That braid of public piety, the well-worn, woven fabric of three cultures, has provided a common carpet upon which the faithful may kneel. In a language not my own, the psalms were sung: a timeless bridge of centuries' ceaseless crossings. Afterwards we descended to the crypt and found a Roman cistern, and an ancient spring from earliest days, earliest scriptures: source of life in a desert land. I knelt to fill my earthenware pot, small vessel of circumstance.
Unexpected epiphanies such as these, sustain us and kindle our hearts as we struggle to develop contentment and gratitude, justice and compassion in an environment that may be hostile to the spiritual, and lacking in respect for the integrity of persons and creation. Such visitations are not as infrequent as we might suppose. They are from before time and forever, in forms as diverse as the peoples of the earth. I remember an Anglican group's startled joy when, having gathered by the lake with their aboriginal leader just after dawn, to offer tobacco and traditional prayers, an eagle came and circled above.
Sometimes, we are reluctant to validate our intimations of communion, our visualisations of wholeness, as prayer. Perhaps this is because we think of prayer as being more formulaic in nature, or perhaps because we judge ourselves lacking some degree of competence to approach the sacred.
In her introduction to Every Eye Beholds You, A World Treasury of Prayer, Karen Armstrong writes in relation to such self-judgements:
We tend to equate faith with believing certain things about God or the sacred... Belief, that is adopting the correct ideas about the divine, is seen as the first and essential step of the spiritual journey. But the history of religion makes it clear that to expect to have faith before embarking on the disciplines of the spiritual life is like putting the cart before the horse. In all the great traditions, prophets, sages, and mystics spend very little time telling their disciples what they ought to believe. Faith meant trust... Faith was thus a carefully cultivated conviction that, despite all the tragic and dispiriting evidence to the contrary, our lives did have some ultimate meaning and value. Faith was thus the fruit of spirituality, not something that you had to have at the start of your quest.
I remember that in my pre-ordination interview with Archbishop Douglas Hambidge, I identified my chief concern about priesthood as being my difficulty with praying. The Archbishop wisely advised me to pray with others.
To pray with others, I've discovered since, extends beyond prayer circles. Whether we're at home alone or in church, we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses—the communion of saints: a thousand echoes from the past ... a carnival of faiths and cultures... a crowd that clamours pain and anger ... a throng of future shapes and shadows ... a rainbow host of milling children, God's varied image from all lands.
Some, in Thomas Craughwell's words, find comfort in repeating ancient prayers: their timeless formulas are a bridge between one who recites the prayer today and all those faithful souls throughout the centuries who prayed in the exact same words.
My own comfort continues to be in playing the hymns of the church, old and new, our common praise, on my grandfather's piano. My earliest church memory, as a little girl, is of the congregation singing The Lord's My Shepherd and my responding to the final and in God's house for evermore my dwelling place shall be with a great Amen—Yes! that is what I want!—welling up inside of me.
Our own prayer, whatever its nature, has a place within the prayer of the whole church.
The corporate dimensions of the church's prayer—the divine office and liturgy, the reading of scripture, the singing of the songs of salvation—are not only filled themselves with the grace of presence. The beat of their repetitions, the procession of their seasons resonate in our lives. The rhythms of lament and praise, thanksgiving and supplication, comfort and challenge, expectation and fulfilment, stay with us to shape our personal perceptions and attitudes, our work and encounters, into prayer.
There is a childlike suspension of disbelief that is called for by prayer, a curiosity, a holding ourselves in readiness to be surprised and astounded, as much by the opaque words of prayer or scripture suddenly become transparent, as by the loveliness that blossoms within the predictable daily round. Karen Armstrong's words again ring true for me:
The sheer busyness of our lives often leaves little time for contemplation. The world can become familiar to us. Prayers help us to see what is really there: a mystery that cannot be simplistically defined but that becomes apparent when we learn how to strip away the veil of familiarity that obscures it. Prayers help to hold us in the attitude of wonder, to put ourselves in tune with the fundamental laws of existence. By learning to see the sacred in the world around us, we will approach it with reverence. The world becomes what Muslims call an Èayah' (a sign) of God, not something to be exploited or greedily ransacked for our gain.
The earth, its people and other creatures, its trees and soil, waters, and air, its nations, communities and cultures are like the bush burning yet not being consumed. They call us to attend to the voice of the living God, to lift up our hearts as an offering, and then be willing to go to the place where God sends us, the place that God has shown us.
To notice the ordinary characters and incidents when they present themselves involves a self-emptying willingness to entrust what we see to God and simply pray: What does it mean to be your disciple now?
To enable such a prayer to permeate our life and transfigure our mundane routines, The Rule of the Society of St. John the Evangelist invites us to resist the tendency to restrict prayer to set times ... to aim at eucharistic living that is responsive at all times and in all places to the divine presence ... to seek the gift of attentiveness by which we discern signs of God's presence and action in creation, in other people, and in the fabric of ordinary existence ... to surrender fretfulness and anxiety in order to be available to God in the present moment.
For it is in any given moment that the small, the ordinary may be transfigured and become the icon, kissed by many before us, through which we too are caught up in communion in God.
Living God,
in Christ you make all things new.
Transform the poverty of our nature
by the riches of your grace,
and in the renewal of our lives
make known your glory.
