PRAYER - GOD'S WORK IN US
Notes and quotes from a talk given to adults who have decided to follow Jesus
by Bishop David Chislett

"There is no life without prayer.
Without prayer there is only madness and horror."
(Vasilii Rozanov)

"Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you" (James 4:8).
"It is for us to begin.
If we take one step towards the Lord, he takes ten toward us
- he who saw the prodigal son while he was yet at a distance,
and had compassion and ran and embraced him."
(Tito Colliander)

"Come now, little man!
Flee for a while from your tasks,
hide yourself for a little space
from the turmoil of your thoughts.
Come, cast aside your burdensome cares,
and put aside your laborious pursuits.
Give your time to God,
and rest in him for a little while.
Enter into the inner chamber of your mind,
shut out all things save God,
and, having barred the door of your chamber,
seek him."
(St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109)

When we become practising Christians, we realize that whatever part our initiatives seem to have played in the journey, what has really happened is that we have finally surrendered to the One who in his love has been drawing us to himself. We realize that he calls us not just to know about him, but to actually know him. We have gradually come to see that he is seeking to establish and grow a relationship with us.

So, the first thing I want to share with you today is that what we know about relationships in general can help us understand our deepening relationship with God. We already know that the only way to understand someone and get to know them is to spend time with them, to linger with them, to open up to them, and to listen to them. That exactly corresponds with getting to know God!

FRIENDSHIP WITH GOD

Prayer is our friendship with God, our daily relationship with him in which we bring before him our worship, our hopes, our sins, and our fears. Prayer is both listening to God and speaking to him. It is making him the focus of our lives.

It might surprise you to hear me say that prayer is essentially a COMMUNAL thing. ALL prayer, including what some people call our "personal prayer life," is actually part of the movement of love between the Son and the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit into which we were plunged in our baptism when we were incorporated into the Church's prayer to the Father.

Unfortunately, a lot of people - praying people at that! - get this wrong. They succumb to the kind of individualism that in the long run causes spiritual and sometimes even spychological havoc in their lives.

Note these words of Aleksei Khomiakov:

"No one is saved alone.
He who is saved is saved in the Church
as a member of her and in union with all her members.
If anyone believes, he is in the communion of faith;
if he loves, he is in the communion of love;
if he prays, he is in the communion of prayer."

And Father Alexander Elchaninov says:

"Ignorance and sin are characteristic of isolated individuals.
Only in the unity of the Church do we find these defects overcome.
Man finds his true self in the Church alone:
not in the helplessness of spiritual isolation,
but in the strength of his communion
with his brothers and his Saviour."

THE ADVENTURE OF "BEING WITH GOD"

Mother Mary Clare writes:

"To stand before the living God, what an adventure;
to stand face to face before the living God
not in a vague way in a place we call heaven,
but in the here and now of our moment to moment living,
by, with and in Christ,
as we are made part of his prayer and his offering
through the power of the Holy Spirit."

God has called us to be his friends. Friendship involves communication, two way dialogue, and a posture of heart, an open attitude, toward the other.

In terms of our growing relationship with God, this posture of heart includes recognition of our heavenly Father's greatness, goodness, power and mercy. In prayer we respond to his love, we speak to him, we often use gestures to express what is in our hearts, and we determine to do what he asks of us.

At one level, of course, we can never understand prayer fully because it is an entering into the inner life of God, and a sharing in that life. But at another level, as practising Christians we believe that God has, in fact, revealed to us aspects of his inner life that help us to understand many things about prayer.

Obviously, the greatest revelation God has given to us is THE BLESSED TRINITY - the knowledge that within the inner life of God there are three distinct persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God himself IS "Trinity" - a community of sharing, a community of love. In this relationship, the Son has always offered perfect prayer and praise to the Father. As I have already said, by the Holy Spirit we are drawn into this eternal movement of love.

In Galatians 4:6 St. Paul says:

"The proof that you are sons (of God)
is that God has sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts:
the Spirit that cries, 'Abba, Father'."

The cry "Abba, Father" spoken continually by the Spirit through us is basic to the Christian understanding of prayer.

The heart of this sharing is the union of Jesus and his people in the Mass. To quote the Anglican-Roman Catholic Agreed Statement on the Eucharist, we are

"caught up into the movement of his self offering."

In other words, it is overwhelmingly in the Mass we are made part of the prayer of Jesus, the essence of which is the eternal movement of love and self-giving between him and the Father.

The Letter to the Hebrews focuses on this by describing the faithful as a liturgical assembly joined to Jesus the great High Priest as he enters the heavenly sanctuary to offer worship to the Father. Speaking of Jesus, Hebrews 2:11-12 says:

"He who sanctifies and those who are sanctified have all one origin.
That is why he is not ashamed to call them brethren, saying,
'I will proclaim thy name to my brethren;
in the midst of the congregation I will praise thee.'"

The Holy Spirit has made us part of the prayer of Jesus and his Church. It can really help us to picture ALL our prayers as small streams entering this great river of worship between Jesus, the Church and the Father. This is what St. Jude means when he says that we should be always "praying in the Holy Spirit." (Jude 20).

MORE ABOUT THE HOLY SPIRIT

Whereas many of the world's religious traditions stress man's efforts to find God, the emphasis of the Christian Faith is on GOD'S INITIATIVE. The Holy Spirit is at work IN us, prodding and nudging, nurturing our relationship with the Father through Jesus. We simply surrender to this love by embracing and receiving all that Jesus did for us when he died on the cross, and then allowing the Holy Spirit to move within us, drawing us more and more deeply in an experiential sense into the eternal relationship of Jesus and the Father.

This Christian notion of prayer being God's work IN us lies behind St Paul's advice against worrying when we don't know what to say in our prayers:

". . . the Spirit helps us in our weakness:
for we do not know how to pray as we ought,
but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.
And he who searches the hearts of men
knows what is the mind of the Spirit . . ."
(Romans 8:28)

The more open we are to the Holy Spirit's work in deepening our union with Jesus, the more meaningful our prayer becomes. Something of the adventure of this is captured by Father Gonville Ffrench-Beytagh in his book A Glimpse of Glory. I read this passage in full, because it is so powerful, and illustrates far better than I could ever do what the New Testament teaches about the Trinitarian nature of the prayer of the people of God.

"The Holy Spirit is pouring, cascading forth, in tumultuous torrents of love pouring out into the Son, pouring himself in torrents of love. And the Son himself is joyously, gloriously, pouring back his love into the Father. In this great procession of love pouring forth love, it is the Holy Spirit who is poured forth; it is he who is cascading forth in this glorious love affair. And that love is so unlimited, so limitless, that it spills over.

"The Holy Spirit spills over. This is not because God can't contain himself, but because he is so longing to share his life of love and joy and glory, that he has made us as containers. That is what CAPAX DEI means - capable of containing God. Our glory and our purpose is to be filled with the reality which is God. We are designed to be filled with the love of God. We are like the great tankers, filled with petrol or milk, that go trundling along the road, marked 'Capacity 20,000 gallons.' But you and I go about with a couple of gallons sloshing around in the bottom instead of being filled with the fullness of God. Yet that is what he made us for. That is the purpose of our existence - to be filled with God. If we think of prayer being for that, then we are expanding ourselves to receive a share of what is poured out and spilling over of the tremendous infinite power of the love of God.

" . . . I once spent four astonished days at the Victoria Falls in Africa. I was being pounded into the ground by their deafening roar and the magnificent sight of the millions and millions of gallons every moment pouring out, cascading, thundering down into the gorge below. It seemed as if the Congo and the Zambezi had drained all the water out of Africa and there it was. For me this made a picture of the ceaseless activity within the being of God himself. It was like the cascades of infinite divine love interflowing within the Godhead between the Father and the Son. God the Father is begetting love; God the Son is begotten love; God the Holy Spirit is the ceaseless flow of love between the Father and the Son. The Spirit binds them together in the gorgeous, ceaseless torrent of love.

"And beside the Victoria Falls is the rain forest. It is a weird place where you can put on a sou' wester, hat, oilskins, gumboots, and walk into the forest and you're just soaked to the skin. Water gets through everything. The heavy mist comes from the spray that rises up from the great canyon into which the torrent flows. It penetrates everything and seems wetter than ordinary water. As the mist from the cascade will drench us and soak into us if we put ourselves there in the forest, so, if we put ourselves close to the Lord God, his love that overspills and overflows will soak us in the Spirit. We long to share his love in as far as it can be shared by human beings. And he has made us for that, he has made us to be CAPAX DEI, to stand, as it were, in the rain forest, to be drenched in the love of God. That is the spiritual life.

". . . the Falls make a picture of this torrential love of God which never stops. We are caught up into God's love in the prayer of the Spirit praying within us. And we are caught up with the prayer of all the ages and the prayers of all the saints and of our own forbears. We are in their prayers with the angels and the archangels. It is the one great paean of love, agonizing sometimes, from the great chorus of heaven of which we are a part."