How to Pray: A practical handbook

A WORD OF INTRODUCTION

Surveys consistently show that we pray more than we like to admit. It seems in many ways that we’re more aware of our spiritual nature than ever, but we go searching for the right clothes to wear for this part of our lives in many strange boutiques! An article in a lifestyle magazine encouraged its readers to be spiritual because it lowers stress and blood pressure, boosts your immune system, fights depression, makes you more efficient and it’s ‘never been so sexy’. The article suggested trying Buddhism, yoga, feng shui, crystals, aromatherapy, shiatsu and shamanism. But the only mention Christianity got was because the singer Madonna was supposed to have given it up!

My belief, however, is that not only is there life yet in the old dog of Christianity, but there’s also a deep and compelling instinct to pray which other fashionable forms of spirituality can’t meet. Years ago St Augustine caught the truth precisely. One of his prayers starts: ‘Almighty God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you …’ If that’s true, if our lives cannot be fulfilled outside a relationship with the beauty and mystery we call God, then prayer becomes not a religious bolt-on to a ‘pretty-good’ life, but an essential ingredient of being fully human.

The Revd Habakkuk Wilkins was the

victim of a bizarre meditation accident.

Many people are plagued with the fear of an unlived life – a scattered existence of secondary things. We recognize the danger that while we’re becoming amazingly proficient in new technologies, the human heart is in danger of shrinking, or at the very least that we’re not coping well with the huge waves of cultural change which are pouring over us. But we also don’t want the depressing moralism and obsession with structures which seems to be all that’s left of some conventional religion. And we know that we need something pretty big and substantial to meet our need. As one writer put it: ‘You can’t rely on candy floss to fix malnutrition.’

So maybe it is the living God we need after all. Maybe it’s the breathtaking, alpine beauty of the Creator. Maybe we need to respond to the tug of that slow, steady undertow of longing that we sense sometimes when we slow down enough. Maybe prayer is the hidden wiring of human life that connects us to the world wide web of the Spirit. Maybe prayer is exhilarating and stretching and healing, and open to humour and anger and joy beyond imagining.

Maybe. And that’s what this book is all about.

PART ONE:

WATCH THIS SPACE

I HOW TO MAKE THE FIRST MOVES

It happens to most of us at some time or other. A faint stirring somewhere that there may be more to this life than meets the eye? The thought just flits across our air-space – ‘I wonder … is there something else?’ Perhaps something really brilliant or really tragic happens, and we’re not sure what to do with it. Perhaps we meet someone who really impresses us and we discover that person is a Christian. Or we go into a cathedral and something gently tugs at our subconscious. Maybe it even gets as far as a sense of reaching out from inside ourselves for something. But what? That elusive ‘something else’.

Or maybe it even gets as far as a sense of gratitude, a sense of something given. ‘Thank God for that,’ we say, before we realize what we’ve said. Because God for many of us is still very much an open question. So it’s really rather embarrassing to feel gratitude when we’re not sure who to thank. But we fall crazily in love with a person or a place or simply with life itself, and we reach instinctively for someone to thank.

All of these are common human experiences, but we usually don’t notice them and they get buried under an avalanche of new experiences surging along behind. These stirrings, however, may be profoundly significant. This tentative ‘reaching out’ may be like a fragile plant pushing its way through concrete, but it may be the first playful sign of a huge spiritual adventure.

One writer talked about ‘signals of transcendence’ which litter our everyday experience. And indeed there are things going on all the time, like longing, laughter, falling in love, playing with a child, natural beauty (‘breathtaking’), moments in music (‘heart-stopping’) – all of which take us outside ourselves for a moment. There’s something else going on here. I wonder … ?

So the first move in the spiritual adventure that I’m here calling ‘prayer’ is to recognize these moments when something stirs within us and to savour them. Not to let them be flooded and forgotten, but to notice them and hold them, tenderly, just for a while. And for the time being – that’s enough! Just recognize those moments for what they are, or might be. Signals of something else. A hint of something good. A glimpse in the night. A scent on the wind. An invitation.

There’s nothing pushy or invasive about these stirrings. They’re gentle, quiet, courteous even. But then maybe that’s God’s way. After all, Christians say he crept in through the back door of human history in that child in a dirty stable in an occupied land. Nothing aggressive or demanding there. Just an invitation to live life to the full.

I wonder?

A different approach

Another way we get alerted to the possibility of ‘something else’ is when we’re in trouble. It may be illness or an accident either to us or someone we care about. It may be a serious job interview or a fear of flying. Or it may simply be that there are no atheists in the exam room! But for whatever reason, we may find ourselves, almost against our wishes, appealing to God, fate or the Great Pattern in the Sky. Many a bargain is struck in the recesses of the heart when things look black, only to be discarded with embarrassment when the good times return. But it may still be a reminder that none of us is self-sufficient; we all face situations when we know we could do with someone big on our side. We may dismiss it as childish later on, but we can’t deny the power of the instinct to reach out beyond ourselves. And reaching out beyond ourselves is the first move in prayer.

KEY QUESTION

When has something stopped you, stirred you, made you ask a deeper question? And how would you describe that experience – good? odd? disturbing? reassuring? Or what?

TRY THIS

Try to notice these ‘something else’ moments when they occur during this week. Hold them gently, there and then, if you can. And remember them, put them in your pocket, and bring them out in a quieter moment to think more about them and what they might mean for you.

Try to pay a bit more attention to what’s going on inside you rather than to outer events and activities. Listen to your moods and feelings and don’t just brush them aside if they’re different or strange. Listen to those moods. Our inner life is as full and rich as our outer life; it’s just that we usually don’t notice.

QUOTES

At the back of our brains there is a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life is to dig for this sunrise of wonder.

G. K. Chesterton

Although I’m an agnostic, I sometimes pray, but I don’t ask for anything, except sometimes the ability to get through something. Usually – this sounds unbearably pious – I give thanks.

John Diamond, a journalist who was living with cancer

STORY

At Dunblane after the murder of 16 school children and their teacher in 1996:

I made my way to the school gates. As I approached, the street outside the school was deserted apart from a handful of police officers and a gang of youths aged about 17–20. As I watched, they took from their pockets 16 nightlights and, kneeling on the damp pavement, arranged them in a circle and then lit them. They stood around the candles for a moment, then one of them said, ‘I suppose someone should say some thing.’ As they wondered how to do it, one of them spotted me, identified me as a minister, and called me over with the words ‘You’ll know what to say.’ Of course the reality was quite different. As I stood there, tears streaming down my face, I had no idea what to say or how to say it. So we stood, holding on to one another for a moment, and then I said a brief prayer. That was the catalyst. A question came first: ‘What kind of world is this?’ Another asked, ‘Is there any hope?’ Someone said, ‘I wish I could trust God.’ ‘I’ll need to change,’ said a fourth one. As he did so he glanced over his shoulder to the police. He reached into his pocket and I could see he had a knife. He knelt by the ring of candles and quietly said, ‘I’ll not be needing this now’, as he tucked it away under some of the flowers lying nearby. One of the others produced a piece of bicycle chain and did the same. We stood silently for a moment, and then went our separate ways.

John Drane

2 HOW TO SLOW DOWN

So there just might be something in it – this ‘something else’. And we might have noticed some germ of an instinct, some stirring inside. A reaching out. An in stinct to say thank you, a need to say sorry, or a desire to help someone. But we can all too easily lose the moment unless we make space for it to breathe.

And that’s what we’re terribly short of in our culture – space to let quiet things breathe. The pace of daily life is accelerating and the demands are unremitting. It’s as if we got on the 8.15 from Great Snoring, the slow train that stops at every little village, but instead of chugging its way gently through the countryside it gets faster and faster, accelerating steadily and inexorably, streaming through every station, until the carriage is swaying alarmingly and we’re hanging on to our seats and to our luggage – and still the speed increases! When is it going to come off the tracks?

Or here’s another image. You know when your suitcase is full, and not just full, but absolutely full to bursting? You jam another shirt in and kneel on the case to shut it. And now there’s a sweater you’d forgotten. You stand on the case to force it shut. No more, you say! And then you realize you’ve left out your sponge bag. It’s just no use. You can’t fit anything else in. You need a different strategy. You need to start again.

In a culture where speed and the ability to ‘pack more in’ is becoming self-defeating, many people are crying out for space. They long to slow down. A group of porters were once rushing through the jungle at a ridiculous pace set by the Europeans who had hired them. Eventually they got to a clearing and sat down. The Europeans tried to get them moving again but the head porter said, ‘No, we’re not moving. We’ve come so far and so fast that now we have to wait for our souls to catch up with us.’ So does our culture.

Individually, therefore, we need to build some slowing-down time into our lives. Then we can listen to the quiet whispers from another country that we’re just becoming aware of. We need to look for the moments of calm in our day and stretch them out. We need to create times for stopping, taking everything out of the case and trying a different way of