A Year of Prayer!
By now, most of you will have picked up that with Lent, we are entering a year of focus on prayer. Lent simply means ‘spring’ – and spring is a time of new things, of beginning with what is at the root, and ‘springing’ forth in a fresh way. It is fitting that in this our Christian year focussed on prayer, we should begin with Ash Wednesday – a day set aside to particularly remember our mortality. It is the day when we focus on God’s creation of people from the dust of the earth, and remember that we will once again become dust at our death. Any life we have was, is and always will be because God Himself is our life, and He alone breathes the breath of life into us. I find this extremely liberating and peace-giving. There is nothing I can do to achieve that life myself – it is a free gift from my loving creator. SO...prayer is supremely important, because prayer is about becoming one with the heart of God. It is about becoming one with our creator, who alone is able to breathe life into our beings, refreshing and renewing us forever and ever and ever. This living God loves us so much that He wants to be united with us in loving communion forever and ever and ever. I hope this year of prayer will fill you with the desire to be united with Him as much as He wants to be united with you.
A Series on Prayer
To begin our year of prayer, we will be following a Lent series on prayer that will include Wednesday evening sessions in the Lady Chapel. So there will be five sessions: contemplative prayer, the Holy Spirit and prayer, praise and adoration, intercession + petition and prayer through action. But before we begin with today’s topic – contemplative prayer - I want to reiterate what I have already said: prayer is about becoming one with the heart of God! So every kind of prayer that we might want to entitle as a specialty comes under this heading, and must do so. They are all interrelated, and each one flows from one to the other. Splitting prayer into topics may seem to communicate that there were different types of prayer. That is not so. All prayer is about becoming one with the heart of God. For example: Just as it is impossible to say ‘Jesus is Lord!’ except by the Holy Spirit, so it is impossible to pray aright without the Holy Spirit. And praise and adoration is the only way to end real prayer, as the Psalmist has shown us, even if it is not always possible to begin prayer in that way. As we become more and more at one with the heart of God, we will naturally be moved to prayer for others – intercession and petition. And finally, every action, if it is God-initiated, results from being one with the heart of God and itself becomes a form of prayer.
Contemplative Prayer
‘Are you a habitual “waiter?” How much of your life do you spend waiting? What I call “small-scale waiting” is waiting in line at the post office, in a traffic jam, at the airport, or waiting for someone to arrive, to finish work, and so on. “Large-scale waiting” is waiting for the next vacation, for a better job, for the children to grow up, for a truly meaningful relationship, for success, to make money, to be important, to become enlightened. It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.’ [Eckhart Tolle] Contemplative prayer is about living NOW. It is about heightened awareness to what God has put in us and around us. It is being in touch with reality. It is about being free to be the sensual human beings that God has created us to be – because it is about using our senses to be in the here and now, which is the only place and time that God can possibly meet us in.
Are you with us, here and now, or has your mind taken you elsewhere? If so, you are not really living! You are not a ‘contemplator’ – an ‘observer’ of all that God is and does. Let’s use our senses now to focus, both individually and corporately, on our loving God. We aren’t going to talk about contemplative prayer – we are going to practice it! And by using our senses, we will be helped to focus.
Sight
Hear the words of Isaiah (Isaiah 6.1-7, pp.690-1):
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.” At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.
“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the Kind, the Lord Almighty.”
Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With is he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”
What do you see in the picture? To what extent do you think the passage affects what you see?
Sound
And the word of the Lord came to Elijah (I Kings 19.9b-18, p.361):
“What are you doing here, Elijah?”
He replied, “I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, broken down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.”
The Lord said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.”
Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.
Then a voice said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
He replied, “I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, broken down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.”
The Lord said to him, “Go back the way you came, and go to the Desert of Damascus. When you get there, anoint Hazael king over Aram. Also, anoint Jehu son of Nimshi king over Israel, and anoint Elisha son of Shaphat from Abel Meholah to succeed you as prophet. Jehu will put to death any who escape the sword of Hazael, and Elisha will put to death any who escape the sword of Jehu. Yet I reserve seven thousand in Israel – all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal and all whose mouths have not kissed him.”
Like Elijah, when we are discouraged we lie to ourselves and others. Elijah imagined he was alone, but in fact, there were 7000 with him! God’s voice speaks truth, if we allow ourselves to listen.
[Taizé Chant taken from the poem by Teresa of Avila 1515-1582]
Maybe Elijah could have done with this chant to focus him on another truth – God alone is enough!
Nada te turbe
Nada te espante;
Quien a Dios tiene nada le falta.
Nada te turbe
Nada te espante:
Sólo dios basta.
Let nothing trouble
Let nothing frighten;
Those who have God shall never go wanting.
Let nothing trouble
Let nothing frighten:
God alone is enough.
Sometimes I sit on the floor facing the chair I use for my prayer time. I imagine Jesus sitting in the chair and I find it helps me to focus and listen to him...I think I started doing this after reading the passage about Mary and Martha. [I make sure I have some back support when doing this!]
Taste
Taste and see that the Lord is good; (Psalm 34.8-10, p.561)
Blessed are those who take refuge in him.
Fear the Lord, you his saints,
For those who fear him lack nothing.
The lions may grow weak and hungry,
But those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.
At St Mellitus we practice an act of corporate contemplation every Sunday, when we together thank God for Jesus (the Eucharistic prayer), and reflect on what it means that God ‘passed over’ our sins because of Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf (as we take and taste the bread and wine). The Jews likewise contemplate God’s goodness through the taste of all the elements of their Passover meal, eaten on the first evening of the Passover – a festival that lasts seven days.
· Charoseth (mix of walnuts, apple, red wine and cinnamon, with a mud-like consistency to remind us of the mud that the Israelites used to make bricks in Egypt)
· A baked egg (a token of grief for the destruction of the Temple, and a symbol of resurrection)
· Parsley or watercress (representing the hyssop used to daub the doorposts with the blood of the lambs so that the Angel of Death would see it and pass over)
· Shankbone of a lamb (to represent the lamb sacrificed at Passover when there was a Temple)
· Horseradish (the bitter herbs, symbolic of the suffering in Egypt)
· Salt water (a reminder of the Red sea and the tears of the Israelites in Egypt)
· Everything is eaten with Matzah (unleavened bread) as a reminder of the rush to get away from Egypt. There wasn’t time for their dough to rise.
In John’s Gospel, Jesus celebrates a Passover meal on Thursday evening, one day earlier than everyone else. Judas Iscariot is able to go out and do his betrayal. The events take place during Thursday night and Friday morning, so that Jesus is himself killed between midday and 3pm – at the same time that the Passover lambs are being slaughtered in the Temple precincts. St Paul writes (I Corinthians 5.6-8, p.1157):
‘Don’t you know that a little bit of yeast works through the whole batch of dough (and makes it rise)? Get rid of the old yeast (of sin), so that you will be a new batch of dough without yeast, as I know you really are. For Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore, let us keep the festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.’
Smell
Paul says (2 Corinthians 2.14-16, p.1159):
But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of him. For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life. And who is equal to such a task?
We cannot see smell, but it triggers many memories that we can see in our mind’s eye. There is a place at Kew Gardens, just outside the Princess of Wales conservatory where the smell always takes me back to orchid hunting with my parents in the rainforest of Central America. [pause so they can think of one themselves] Not long ago, I spent a night in prayer, cradled in God’s arms, sensing His loving presence with me. In the morning, when John brought coffee up to me he said, ‘It smells like incense in this room!’ Aromatherapy with a difference!!
Touch
Hear the words of the Gospel according to St John (20.24-28, p.1089-90):
Now Thomas (called Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!”
But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.”
A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”
Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”
At times it is helpful to touch something to believe it is real. Touch is so intimate and immediate. Love is expressed beautifully with many different kinds of physical closeness. I know that a holding cross can give great strength and comfort to people when they don’t know how to pray, because it is a tangible reminder of Jesus’ presence with us, however we feel. HE is real!
I’d like to finish with part of a poem by Thomas Traherne from my Lent reading for this year in Helen Julian’s book The Road to Emmaus:
For sight inherits beauty; hearing, sounds;
The nostril, sweet perfumes,
All tastes have hidden rooms
Within the tongue; the feeling feeling wounds
With pleasure and delight: but I
Forgot the rest, and was all sight or eye...
Let’s not forget to be like little children, focussing on the immediate through our senses, to find God with us NOW. AMEN.