Dear Sebastian,
Thank you very much for your letter enquiring about prayer. This is a rather fulsome topic and it sounds that you, like me, struggle with your prayers. So I hope these few lines might be of some help to you.
If I had to reduce prayer down to one sentence I would say that prayer is conversation with God. That in and of itself is a preposterous thing. Fancy the presumptuousness of conversing with the creator of everything. Who the heck do we think we are?
And yet, it is the Creator of everything that actually longs to have a conversation with us which is even more outlandish, surprising and stupefying.
Within prayer, there is the structured ordered prayer that the church offers us.
These are Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer and they follow a basic pattern. An Opening prayer, psalms, readings, prayers for whatever you think needs praying about (check out the latest news feed if you’re at all stuck) the Lord’s prayer and a concluding prayer. It sounds a lot and terrifying, but it isn’t really. There are nifty apps they have these days which organise everything for you and all you have to do is open one up and read it through.
But it is not just a matter of reading the words whether they be in a book or on a screen. The aim I think is to read them slowly and soak in what you are reading so that it becomes a part of you.
Having said that some readings you will find unhelpful, particularly in the Old Testament where people seemed to spend a lot of time slaughtering each other and turning away from the God who was continuously reaching out to them. Perhaps we need to be reassured that God continues to be very interested in us even if sometimes the world does not seem to be very interested in God.
Likewise, the psalms are often puzzling. They capture the whole gamut of emotions. Psalm 35 is what I call a grumpy Psalm
“May those who seek my life be disgraced and put to shame; may those who plot my ruin be turned back in dismay. May they be like chaff before the wind, with the angel of the Lord driving them away; may their path be dark and slippery, with the angel of the Lord pursuing them.”
Psalm 23, ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’ is a reassuring psalm while Psalm 100 is a champagne psalm
“Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs.
Know that the Lord is God. It is he who made us, and we are his, we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.
Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name.”
It’s important I think to understand a little of the background when you are reading anything from the bible and one of the most helpful things anyone ever said to me about the bible was to think of it as a library. Lots of different books, by lots of different people, written in lots of different styles and for lots of different reasons. Some just to tell a story, some to inspire us, some to teach us and some are just letters.
It will take you a lifetime to BEGIN to understand it but better than that, try to just enjoy it. Over the years different things will reveal themselves that you never noticed before. This is actually good news and exciting. The gems that you dig out from scripture are inexhaustible.
There will be times when you are really not quite sure what you should be saying to God. There may be a lot of hurly-burly going on in your life or there may be nothing much going on. Your vocabulary will seem inadequate and fail you. This is very OK and very normal.
You do have options. I will frequently go back to the Lord's prayer. It’s the prayer The Master taught us for a very good reason. A lot is going on in this very little prayer and the first two words are an important reminder of the relationship God lovingly wants to have with you. ‘Our… Father.
You can also shake your fist at God either metaphorically and/or with a wild, physical gesticulation. Countless people have done it before and I don’t know of anyone who has been struck down… yet. Its honest, it has integrity and God knows that you are sulky long before you ever get around to telling Him. So don’t be shy.
I mentioned that prayer is ‘A conversation with God’. This means that for at least 50% of the time we shouldn’t be saying anything at all. We should be listening and this will mean being silent and this is a very difficult and excruciating thing to do. Being silent in our noisy world when we have so much to say is not easy.
The most helpful thing anyone said to me about this listening bit of prayer is ‘Trust the Silence’. It will catch you and hold you, even though you might feel like you are in free fall a lot of the time, even when you think nothing much is happening. ‘Trust the Silence’.
One last word of encouragement.
In the Old Testament in the book of Numbers in chapter 22, there is a splendid story of a guy called Balaam, an angel and his donkey. I won’t spoil the story but Balaam doesn’t see the angel and yet the donkey does. And if the Donkey can see the angel …