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Grosvenor Essay No. 12 Prayer and Spirituality ISBN 978 0 901741 08 0 ©Doctrine Committee of the Scottish Episcopal Church Comments or questions on this Essay should be directed to The General Synod Office 21 Grosvenor Crescent Edinburgh EH12 5EE Tel: 0131 225 6357 Email: [email protected] Scottish Charity No SC015962 Also available in this series: Grosvenor Essay No. 1 – Sketches towards a theology of science. Published 2004. ISBN 0 905573 64 1 Grosvenor Essay No. 2 – Theology and the power of the image. Published 2005. ISBN 0 905573 66 8 Grosvenor Essay No. 3 – The inter-faith encounter. Published 2006. ISBN 0 905573 71 4 Grosvenor Essay No. 4 – The shape of our church. Published 2007. ISBN 0 905573 78 1 Grosvenor Essay No. 5 – On salvation. Published 2008. ISBN 0 905573 83 8 Grosvenor Essay No. 6 – Thinking the Nicene Creed: New Life in Christ. Published 2010. ISBN 0 905573 87 0 Grosvenor Essay No. 7 – Thinking the Nicene Creed: Incarnation. Published 2011. ISBN 0 905573 89 7 Grosvenor Essay No. 8 – Marriage and Human Intimacy. Published 2012. ISBN 0 905573 92 7 Grosvenor Essay No. 9 – The Art of Dying Well. Published 2013. ISBN 0 905573 93 5 Grosvenor Essay No. 10 – The Church and Scottish Identity. Published 2014. ISBN 0 905573 95 1 Grosvenor Essay No. 11 – Towards an Integration of Science and Christianity. Published 2015. ISBN 978 0 905573 99 1 Contents Preface 1 The Scottish Christian Heritage 10 The Anglican Heritage 23 Spirituality, Vocation and Formation 27 Prayer and Social Action 30 Hand in Hand: Public Worship and Personal Prayer 35 Intercession: Some History and Practice 45 Making sense of intercession? 49 The Plural Context of Contemporary Spirituality 54 Mindfulness – putting it in its place 60 Christian Meditation Practices 69 Religious Experience and Mysticism 74 Some questions for reflection 81 Suggested reading 82 References 83 Preface Wasting time in prayer We might find it hard to make time for prayer, especially where there are lots of other things to be getting on with and prayer is not seeming very useful. Indeed, the Dominican Herbert McCabe says: prayer is a complete waste of time. However, it does not follow that we should not pray. It follows that it is good to waste time. If you know Antoine Saint-Exupery’s book The Little Prince, about the boy who left his planet because he felt oppressed by caring for an audacious rose, you will probably remember something of the prince’s encounter with the fox. The fox asks the little prince, or the little boy, to tame him, and the prince does not know what ‘tame’ means. The fox explains that to tame somebody is to create ties with them, and that once you have tamed them they become special to you; not just another fox, or just another little boy, or just another rose among 500 000 roses, but one that has a place in your heart. He adds that until you have wasted time with somebody, you will not have tamed them. To waste time with somebody, or in some activity, is to be with them for their own sake for pure love or enjoyment. Wasting time is, for example, enjoying a bike ride not because it leads somewhere, and not because it gets you fit, and not even because it is a break from something else, though all of those are true, but enjoying the ride purely for what it is: the love of being on the bike. And, paradoxically, when we enjoy it purely for the love of being on the bike, rather than for some useful purpose, all those other goods follow more fully: we become more fit, and we also get somewhere – perhaps back home - and we truly get a break from our tasks because we have not carried with us on our ride the onerous duty of ‘taking a proper break’! Instead, we have managed to forget ourselves. We know when we have not thrown ourselves fully into an activity because we are still thinking of what is useful about it: for example reading with children because we want to improve their vocabulary, versus reading with children because it is lovely to do that. We know the difference between being with people because it is useful, say because it’s our job, which is fair enough, or because we are ‘using them’, which is not fair enough. Often we think we ‘should’ do things 1 that are ‘useful’, and we might only justify to ourselves our time in prayer if we think it is useful. We might give ourselves useful reasons for praying: ‘it will make me feel calmer, clear my head, order my priorities’; ‘we ought to pray for those in need, to pray for the church and for the world’; ‘it feels like I’m doing something if I’m praying for the things and the people that I’m anxious about’, and so on. But we don’t fall in love with what is useful. We might be grateful for useful things, because of their utility, but they are just a means to some other end. We fall in love with the things with which we have made ties. The fox says to the little prince: it is the time that you have wasted with your little rose that makes your rose so special to you. And he adds: we become responsible forever for what we have tamed. He also says: it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. Jesus wasted time with us: we are not useful to him. It is pure love, simply for our sake, that he came and spent time, spent himself, on us, and has made himself responsible for us. We are being tamed by him, if we are open to his taming. And if we are open, as the ties grow, it is in our hearts that we know God. We cannot of course tame God, the relationship runs the other way, but if we pray, we are in effect inviting that taming. We welcome God, by the Holy Spirit, into our hearts, and the more that we do so not for the sake of usefulness, but simply for the love of God, the more God’s affections become our affections, and the more we can see with the heart. Making a home, and minding our language There is beautiful language within the Christian tradition which describes Christ as our guest (e.g. St Teresa of Avila), and our most courteous Lord (The Cloud of Unknowing), waiting to be welcomed into our homes if we make ourselves hospitable to him. The way in which we understand prayer in this Essay is as the movement of God’s Spirit through us as we make a home for Christ within us. Prayer is, we might say, God talking to God and including us in this communing. When Jesus taught his disciples how to pray, through what we have come to call the Lord’s Prayer, he gave us words which we give back to God. Paul suggests in several of his letters that prayer, either in words or in groans too deep for words, comes from God since it is the Spirit of Christ who prays through us: For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession 2 for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Now He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God (Romans 8:26- 7); God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying out, ‘Abba, Father!’ (Galatians 4.6); For through Him we both have access by one Spirit to the Father (Ephesians 2.18). We are conscious of the perils of Sonship and Fatherhood language if it fosters a view of God as male. It would indeed be poor theology to imagine God as constrained by gender. Those rare parts of Christian tradition which speak of God also as mother and use imagery of birth to describe our spiritual flourishing (especially Clement of Alexandria, Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart), help us to break out of constraints of language and thought, and help to free our conceptions of God from the limits of our imagination. Christian narrative, liturgy and art show Jesus’ body as doing what female bodies do: bleeding, providing or constituting food, and giving birth to new life. And as theologian Kathryn Tanner points out, the activity of ‘generation’ seen as proper to the Father in Christian theology in reality seems much more in keeping with what only women can do: give birth.1 At the same time, we have chosen not to unpick the Father-Son language in New Testament depictions of prayer, partly because whilst the maleness of the imagery is not what is important about this language, the sense of relationship is. The relations between the persons of the Trinity is central to the theology of prayer that is expressed in Spirit, Son and Father language, and which we adopt in this Essay. It is inherent to those relations that only the ‘Son’ can show the ‘Father’; and without the ‘Son’, the ‘Father’ is not God, but an idol.2 Notions of ‘losing oneself’, ‘dying to oneself’ or ‘emptying oneself’ to make room for Christ, are often used to describe the dynamic of prayer and Christian contemplation.
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