Pastor Nancy's Reflections

I have been spending some time lately with an old classic guide to daily prayer titled, “A Diary of Private Prayer” by John Baillie, which offers a prayer for morning and a prayer for evening each day.   It was first published over a hundred years ago, but the newer version updates the language. I find it a help when I just don’t feel like praying. Theologian William Barclay once said, “Christians are far more likely to talk about prayer than to do it.”

For many Christians -- good, well-intentioned Christians -- There is often some kind of inner resistance to actually getting down to the business of seriously praying. Those who suffer from that malady, and I am often one, are more than wiling to read books about it; to analyze and plan how they might do more of it; to spend time figuring out the best time - - the best place -- the right prayer guide - - the right Bible passage.

Then, when we have all of that worked out, we remember that we should probably check the email, or think about what to do about dinner, or maybe we should water the plants because of the recent drought!  Before we know it, the time is gone and we feel -- guilty.

But we are in some rather good company. The late Christian Writer Henri Nouwen confessed to being in that company.  Nouwen was a Dutch Roman Catholic who was one of the best writers on the subject of the inner life. In his book “The Genessee Diary” he said that he was always surprised when people wrote to him and assumed that he always lived up to the ideal programs of prayer that he described and encouraged in his books. He said that what he describes in his writings is the ideal that he would strive for, but that he also often struggled with his prayer life. 

So those of us who admit that we have trouble being regular and faithful in our prayer life can take some solace that we are in some pretty good company.

This problem is common enough that lots of smart people throughout history have wrestled with it. Andrew Murray in his classic book “The Spiritual Life” says that prayer “is easy tomorrow but hard today…but alas, you will find it just as hard in the future as now.” When the disciples asked Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11.1), Jesus didn’t talk about prayer, he prayed. “When you pray, say this, 'Our Father who art in heaven…'” He taught them by praying with them.

So maybe we make it too hard on ourselves. Louis Evely says that “Prayer is not so much asking things of God, but receiving what God wants to give you. Not so much being heard by God as hearing God praying in you. Not so much asking God’s forgiveness as opening yourself to God’s forgiveness. Not so much offering yourself to God as welcoming God offering God’s self to you.” In other words, our prayers originate in God and are an instrument with which God shapes us into God’s image.

Prayer, at its heart, needs a time of just being quiet; of listening and waiting for God to show God’s presence. That wouldn’t require words or knowledge or any special time or place. Mother Theresa famously captured this thought when she said that “Prayer enlarges the heart until it is large enough to contain God’s gift of himself.”

Take heart! We all struggle with this quandary, and God is always ready to hear our thoughts, our struggles, our fears, our joys. Any prayer is a good prayer if it opens us to God’s loving presence.

We can always begin with the prayer of the ancient church that is well known to all who have attended a Great Banquet weekend: “Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love.”

Blessings,

Pastor Nancy Becker

Parish Associate