Into Great Silence: Luke 11 v 1-13 29th July 2007: Revd. Julia Boothby

A couple of nights ago I sat down with a film that I have wanted to see for a while called “Into Great Silence”. This film is a documentary style film which records the life of a group of Carthusian monks who live in the mother house of the order in the French Alps. It is a near silent film, designed to echo the silence of the order, the only sounds being the monastic chants of the daily office. These monks live and eat in silence in their own cell, working in silence in the monastery kitchen or garden or woodshed. They spend several hours each day in mental prayer and meet together only for the offices and a meal together once a week. The film, for once does what it says on the back of the box, and allows you to view it as part of a meditative experience where the film becomes the monastery, rather than depicting one. What I found fascinating was watching the monks at prayer in their individual cells. Each has a prayer closet where they can kneel or sit and for hours at a time they would go into these places to pray and meditate in silence. The silent intensity of their prayers seems to pervade the very fabric of the monastery and is an almost tangible power. I was reminded of their dedication to prayer whilst reading the gospel for today, the account of the disciples coming to Jesus and asking

“Lord teach us to pray.”

Go into any Christian bookshop, or indeed any mainline bookshop, go onto any Christian website or visit any church and there will be books, pamphlets and articles on how to pray. My own bookcase at home has several books on prayer and indeed I am reading at the minute “Sister Wendy on Prayer”, a book by that wonderful nun who has been on TV in various series on art. All of these can be useful, helpful and some are very good indeed. But, and I don’t think that I am alone in this, how easy it is to talk about, read about and think about prayer, and never to really get around to it at all, and if we do get around to it perhaps we find it so difficult that we quickly give up or assume that there must be a better way or method, and so perhaps we go back to thinking and reading about it but always struggling to actually pray. Watching this DVD of the monks and their prayer lives left me, fascinated by their focus and concentration in prayer, something that I struggle with. I have found great comfort in reading John Donne, that 17th century poet who wrote this;

“When we consider the manifold weaknesses of the devotions in time of prayer it is a sad consideration. I throw myself down in my chamber and I call in and invite God and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his angels for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door….a memory of yesterday’s pleasures, a fear of tomorrow’s dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in my ear, a light in my eye, an anything a nothing, troubles me in prayer.”

This is how often I find prayer to be, a battle to concentrate, to focus. And as I was challenged by watching the monks at prayer, so it seems to me that the disciples were even more challenged by watching Jesus at prayer. They were, after all, Jews who had been brought up to pray, daily prayers at home and in the synagogue, and yet as they watch Jesus pray they see something new. Indeed as they follow Jesus they see, as we do when we read the gospels, that his whole life was one of open communication with his Father in heaven. It seems to me that when they ask Jesus; ‘teach us to pray’, they are not asking only for some kind of guidance as to content, but also asking for the same spirit of open communication with God that they saw Jesus had. . It would seem to me that they did not only want to learn what to pray, but also how to pray.

And so Jesus teaches them, Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come…..words that we say week by week as we prepare to gather around the Lord’s table. The pattern prayer as it is often called because we can use it as a pattern for our own praying, beginning as it does, with praise and moving on to asking for forgiveness and then praying for our needs and the needs of the world. But what I want to focus on are the opening couple of phrases because it seems to me that they capture, not only what prayer is but also perhaps why we can find it so difficult.
“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”

Jesus tells us to begin prayer by focusing on who God is. He is our Father, one with whom we can enjoy intimacy and closeness, just as a child with a parent, so we can come to God. But, he is also God who is in heaven. We must never forget when we pray that we come to God who is creator, who is all powerful and holy, different from us. This is our God, the one who the prophet Isaiah saw in a vision. This is what he saw

“I saw the Lord, sitting on a throne, high and lofty, and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him….and one called to another and said;
‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory’
The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called and the temple was filled with smoke.”

This is the God who we are called to pray too, one whose name we are to revere, to hallow, to honour. And it is his kingdom we are to pray for, his kingdom of righteousness and peace, of justice and truth, of love and of joy. And so Jesus teaches us to look at God and to see who he is. And as we do so, as we see him in his glory and his majesty, as we see him as our Father, so we are to submit to him, to say;

“Your will be done.”

It seems to me that here is the crux of prayer. Yes, it is of course about asking for forgiveness, for praying for the world, for people we know and for ourselves. But surely all that we ask for is under girded by this, that we know who we are asking and we are submitting ourselves to him, acknowledging him to be the Creator, whilst we are his creation. And perhaps it is this that is one of our greatest problems in prayer. When we pray we are acknowledging that it is God who is in charge. We are doing what he has called us to do, and that means submitting our will to his, giving up what we would (quite often lets be honest, what we would rather be doing) and submitting our time to God and his call to us to pray. And this is a struggle. There will be times when praying is all joy, when communion with God is close and prayer is easy. But there are also many times when prayer is hard work. We stumble and fall; we struggle for words, to concentrate, to focus. Our minds drift off; as John Donne so eloquently puts it we are distracted by an anything, a nothing. Yet, and I think this is very important; it seems to me that this struggle to pray is actually prayer. It is my struggle, your struggle to be what we know God has called us to be. It is admitting our weakness; it is about feeling inadequate, about being humbled as we struggle to find the words, as we try the faith to keep going, to keep trying. Surely this is prayer of the most honest kind, as we are open and vulnerable to God.

As his disciples watched Jesus, I am sure that it was his obedience, his love and hunger and passion for God’s presence in prayer that led them to ask; ‘Lord teach us to pray.’ Not, just tell us the words to say, but give us that spirit of obedience and submission that we see in you, that very same submission and obedience in prayer that we see in Jesus as he struggles in the Garden of Gethsemane. This is the nature and heart of prayer and it is this we are called to. Because the wonderful truth is that when we pray God comes and dwells in us afresh. He gives himself to us in ways that we cannot imagine, in ways that we may not feel, but are given nevertheless. It is God who will direct our stumbling words, he who will govern our wandering thoughts, he who will plant deep within the desire to pray and pray and pray again. He does not ask us to manufacture these things, simply to come in humility and surrender and allow him to give them to us. God will come and meet with us, not matter how halting or ineloquent we are.

And, so it seems with such tender understanding of the difficulties that we will experience in prayer that Jesus, in the conclusion to our gospel reading today, tells the parable of the persistent friend, the one who keeps on knocking at the door, who shamelessly keeps demanding of his friend that of which he has need. So often we take this to be a parable about persisting in prayer for others, for the needs of the world, for the sick, for peace; and this is certainly one way that we can interpret this parable. But there is another. Jesus encourages us not to give up on prayer. We are, like the man in the story to shamelessly keep telling God our need to learn how to pray. To keep on knocking at his door and telling him that we want to want to pray, asking for the desire, the spirit that will bring us to God time and again in humble submission.
And the promise of Jesus to us all is that as we ask, it shall be given to us, as we seek, we shall find, as we knock, the door shall we opened. God will come, he will give us his Holy Spirit who comes to help us in our weakness and we will find our lives of prayer growing and changing. We are not all called to be monks, but whoever we are, whatever we do we are all called to pray, to make our whole lives a prayer to our Father in heaven

Sister Wendy in the opening lines of her book on prayer says this;

“When you set yourself down to pray, what do you want? If you want God to take possession of you, then you are praying.
That is all prayer is.”

May God teach us all to pray. Amen