Prayer is as natural as breathing, and as necessary to life.

"Prayer is the soul's sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed..."

That is the opening couplet to one of the finest hymns in the English language, a concise and generous exploration of the kaleidoscope experience of Christian prayer. I mention this hymn here because a number of the words and ideas used by its author, James Montgomery, have significant echoes in the poem "The Moor" by R S Thomas. It is likely that Thomas knew, and even sang Montgomery's hymn. Reading hymn and poem together, several parallels in thought may be traceable, though I think it very unlikely Thomas was in any conscious sense borrowing from Montgomery.

Rather, these two authors were men for whom prayer was a complex form of communication with the Divine, and required the full range of human sensibility, capacity and affective responses. When they tried to articulate the inexpressible and sometimes all but inaccessible truth of communing woth God, and when they attempted any adequate description of experiences both diverse and ambiguous, they settled for oblique references rather than direct definition. In doing so they created space for prayer to be far more than liturgical carefulness or extempore verbalising. Prayer has to be understood on the scale of God rather than reduced to manageable human tidiness. There has to be room for risk, unpredictablity, wildness, and times of silence, absence, unexpected dislocations and surprising revelations of God and world and the heart that dares to pray.

In other words prayer needn't always require words or form. Often without giving a thought to God the experience of God's presence or absence is signalled in the ordinary moments and days of human experience; but also, even if occasionally, when prayer may be furthest from our minds, a presence is intimated in times and places surprising, extraordinary, frightening or consoling.

Before turning to Thomas's poem it is worth pondering several of Montogomery's words and phrases. Prayer happens when "sincere desire" distils into the concentrate of what ultimately we give our heart to. It might find words, or it may simply be whatever it is that sets our heart on fire, with anticipation and with longing. Desire is not wrong; in fact we are more likely to die of complacency than passion. But desire what? Montgomery doesn't say. "The burden of a sigh" is the body language of sadness; can sadness be prayer, with or without words? "The upward glancing of an eye" is that instinctive acknowledgement that however clever, resourceful, vulnerable or empty we are, beyond our own horizons is a mercy and grace all but invisible, but on which we depend, all the while hoping it is dependable. We live by breathing air and oxygen; Montgomery crafts a couplet that uses that hard reality of existence to make prayer a matter of life and death:

"Prayer is the Christian's vital breath,

The Christian's native air,..."

The echoes of God breathing into the first human beings to make them living souls are unmistakable, and intended. "Native air" is about feeling at home, the smells, the taste, the familiarity, the sense that this is what, and this is where, and this is who, we are made for. In all these phrases there is a reluctance to closely define prayer, even less an interest in creating a doctrine of prayer. Instead human experience of longings articulate and inarticulate, of anxiety that troubles and sadness that burdens, of speech both simple and exalted. Even the deeply human lifegiving yet all but unconscious rhythm of breathing by the contraction and expansion of muscles. Each of these is something like what it is to pray. Prayer is more than any of them, more even than the sum of them, but each of them is capable of reminding us of our capax dei, our capacity for God.

With those thoughts - that prayer can erupt from nowhere, often needs no words, is initiated from outside of us by One we neither control by our will nor constrain by our words, and that prayer is more about desires and tears, our praise and penitence, and that prayer is as natural as breathing and as necessary to life as air - with such thoughts, now read R S Thomas's poem about "The Moor", and hear faint echoes of Montgomery's words.

And to say it again, those echoes are not set up by any conscious borrowing on Thomas's part. The explanation lies in the rich common discourse and reserve of men like Montgomery and Thomas (and George Herbert, but that's another story). Such poets refused to define prayer because in so doing they would be in danger of defining too closely the God who both initiates and answers our prayers, who ambushes when we are not looking, and interrupts when we are speaking and not listening.

This is the God who may choose to be present or absent, and whose choices must always be according to a will that is beyond our understanding but is known to be gracious and generous; a God whose love when felt brings " a moistening of the eye...", and who is ever and forever in the background and foreground of our lives, the proof of which is in those moments when the "air crumbled and broke on me generously as bread."  

The Moor, R S Thomas

It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God was there made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In movement of the wind over grass.

There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart's passions -- that was praise
Enough; and the mind's cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.

..................................

Here are the first three stanzas of Montgomery's hymn

1 Prayer is the soul's sincere desire,
uttered or unexpressed;
the motion of a hidden fire
that trembles in the breast.

2 Prayer is the simplest form of speech
that infant lips can try,
prayer the sublimest strains that reach
the Majesty on high.

3 Prayer is the Christian's vital breath,
the Christian's native air,
his watchword at the gates of death:
he enters heaven with prayer.

...................................

This is the first of two posts on "The Moor".

Comments

[Robert Edward Gurney]

Very interesting.