Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

by Rowan Williams

That, in a nutshell, is prayer – letting Jesus pray in you, and beginning that lengthy and often very tough process by which our selfish thoughts and ideals and hopes are gradually aligned with his eternal action;

God knows, of course, what we are going to say and do, but God

has decided that he will work out his purposes through what we decide to say and do.

start our

prayer with praise: tell God why he matters: because you need to know that, even if God doesn’t.

pray at least three times a day.

he stresses the spirit of adoption we have received: we speak to God as daughters and sons, and so we speak to God as a God who has – through his own freedom – decided not to be remote, but immediate.

let Jesus pray in you and take you into the very heart of God the Father.

So our prayer is that we may be made one with the will and the action of Jesus.

you can pray anywhere,

physical stillness and physical solitude matter.

being ready to pray is being at peace with other people.

And in one of his sermons on Leviticus, Origen underlines the fact that generosity to the needy is part of the purification that prayer requires.

You need to step back from the kind of reactive life that just lets your emotions and instincts splurge out in all directions. Be aware; be on guard that your spirit may not be smothered by a welter of thoughts and emotions.

‘sober drunkenness’,

a threefold pattern of learning to pray. You start with the ‘practical’ life: learning ordinary self-awareness, the common sense of the Christian life;

You move on from that to the freedom to see God in the world around you.

the third level, at what Origen rather unpromisingly calls ‘theology’

The intensity and clarity of what you see in the world around you triggers a sort of ‘leap in the dark’ – or rather into the light – and into God. Your vision is clarified; your actions are gradually disciplined; the divine life slowly transforms you; and, to use one of the best expressions that Origen comes up with, we move into a condition where ‘The whole of our life says, Our Father’.

prayer is in significant part about resolving conflict and

rivalry.

you can go and do miracles – like forgiving your neighbours, and giving your property away to the poor, because that is how God exercises power.

I can only say that I have properly received my daily bread (he says) ‘if no one goes hungry or distressed because you are satisfied’.

You could sum up what Gregory says about the Lord’s Prayer simply by saying, ‘Prayer heals relations.’ Prayer is about reconciliation, justice, and how it changes your attitude to other people and the world. Prayer is not a narrowly private activity; it is about your belonging in the body of Christ, and in the family of humanity.

for Gregory, as for Origen, one of the most crucial aspects of prayer is to understand it as a constant growth, a constant movement into an endless mystery.

it is in the depths of darkness – recognizing we shall never master or understand what God is like – that enlightenment comes.

Cassian begins by saying that prayer takes for granted that you have been working on your self-awareness, your emotions, and all the rest of it. Prayer

commitment.

Prayer, he says, is a promise, a pledge: when I pray, I say to God, ‘You’re there for me: I’m going to be here for you.’

intercession

as a mark of the love that rises out of that commitment, and then on to thanksgiving, which is not just thanking God for the good things

absorbing his g...

‘soaking-in’

not something we do, but what we are letting God do in us.

First, and most importantly, prayer is God’s work in us.

Second, there is the deep connection that all these writers see between praying and living justly in the world:

being the kind of mature human being who is not trapped by selfishness, fear of others, anxiety about the future or the desire to succeed at others’ expense.

Third, prayer from our point of view is about fidelity, faithfulness, sticking to it.