"Where prayer has been valid..."

Last night I watched the final part of the BBC2 mini-series 'Extreme Pilgrim', where Peter Owen-Jones visits the Monastery of St. Anthony, in the Egyptian Desert, and spends three weeks alone in a mountain cave, under the watchful eye of Father Lazarus, who lives as a hermit on the mountain above the monastery.

Peter, an Anglican priest, says in the introduction to the programme that he feels sometimes as if, as a Church of England vicar, he is more a civil servant than a servant of Christ. Part of the reason for his pilgrimage is to discover if he truly can serve his parish as a servant of Christ, or if his role is compromised beyond recall.

It is fascinating enough to watch Father Peter as he grapples with these matters, and with the intense isolation of his borrowed cave cell, and comes in the end face to face with the living God. The programme was very well-made, and the usual pretence of soliloquy before an all-too-obviously present cameraman was replaced by Peter's being given a video camera to record his thoughts, sometimes with lip-biting honesty.

The person who caught my attention, though, was Father Lazarus, a man of great humour and erudition, and a gentle but immense spiritual presence. What he must have been like to meet in person I can only imagine - on TV he was unforgettable! He spoke at some length to Peter about what he would have to face, alone on the mountain, and how the enemy would try everything to drive him away, or failing that, to render him incapable of prayer and self-recollection. It was on prayer that Father Lazarus spoke most tellingly. He explained to Peter that, when one prays "beyond lists and intentions," repeating the Jesus Prayer, or the Kyrie, alone in the silence, one is praying as a representative of the whole human race; coming into the very presence of God with, in a sense, all of humanity hard-coded into the very cells of one's being. Our prayer then is for Christ's mercy on all of humanity, all of creation really; we are literally interceding, standing between God and all that he has made, out there on the bare mountain.

I have rarely if ever been so moved by a television programme. It was wonderful to watch Peter come from fear, through doubt and torment, into joy and peace, to see the deep affection between him and Lazarus, even though they had not spoken since that initial interview, and to witness his glad acceptance of all that God had called him into, leaving for home sure now of his vocation to his own parish. It was, for me, perhaps almost more wonderful to know that all I have felt so deeply about prayer for so many years is being lived out, had, as I suspected, been being lived out in exactly that form since St. Anthony's time, at the very beginnings of monasticism itself, by the Desert Fathers and Mothers and their successors. Father Lazarus' words resonated with all that I feel most deeply, and his advice to Peter I heard somehow as if it were addressed to me, in the little desert of my own rule. I don't know that I shall ever see it in the same way again.