Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Wait for it...

Barbara Crafton writes in today's Almost Daily eMo, very much following on from my thoughts on prayer the other day:

...But I am always struck by how little it matters that I don't know [the people I pray for] personally. Prayer is much more than a festival of my love for someone else. God is active in it - mysteriously, of course, since it's God: God lives and moves in prayer and I haven't a clue how, or what will happen because I have prayed. I only know something will. Something will happen first in my life, because I have entered into prayer. And in the life of the one for whom I pray, in a way I will never know. And, because there is an ecology of prayer, a connectedness, something will happen in the world itself. The very world is changed because we pray.

None of which is much like ordering a pizza - we don't pray for something and then wait to see it we get it before we know our prayer made a difference. The difference comes first. We wait only for our power to see it.


Strangely perhaps, this ties in with a remarkable passage I was reading in Bp. Kallistos Ware's The Power of the Name:

The Jesus Prayer is thus a prayer in words, but because the words are so simple, so few and unvarying, the Prayer reaches out beyond words into the living silence of the Eternal. It is a way of achieving, with God's assistance, the kind of non-discursive, non-iconic prayer in which we do not simply make statements about God, in which we do not form pictures of Christ in our imagination, but are "oned" with him in an all-embracing, unmediated encounter.

It is this reaching out into what we do not know, cannot know, that is for me at the very heart of prayer. We can "know" God in the sense of being in intimate relationship with him, but we certainly cannot know God, nor his purposes or his timing, his kairos, in the way that we know a language, or a tune, or a familiar town. And so we reach out beyond what we can know about, into the place where all we can do is to be known, to hope, to wait.


Paul said:
I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

Romans 8.18-25

2 comments:

Paul said...

Lovely to read this in Advent. Thanks once more, Mike.

Anonymous said...

This is the most beautiful post, Mike. I especially like the part about being "oned" with God through the power of the Name. I sometimes pray the Chaplet of the Divine Mercy when no one in my circle is looking (very anti-liturgical, etc. mostly). I have been scolded for trying to pray mercy upon the whole world instead of upon specific people. I don't know how some of these prayers play out, but what if God is just waiting for someone, anyone, to pray a prayer of mercy. And what if my prayer only 'hits' 12 other people where they live and not the whole world? And then what if a bunch of other people pray and their prayers are also efficacious for only 12 others? I don't know what God is doing in other people's lives or how many people He will touch when I pray--especially when I don't even know them. But I have gotten hints at times that my prayers have gone out to specific people and not just into the wind. Lately, I've been witnessing a number of people connected with me beginning to receive amazing mercy poured out. Some of these people know me personally and some know me only by email, yet I have the sense that because I prayed, God is beginning to bless those people who touch my world. Might be my imagination, but I doubt it.