"Lord teach us to pray", said the disciples. From the very start Christians have known that prayer requires disciplined effort, focused thought, and the sacrifice of time. But the disciples' request presupposes that prayer can be taught; not just prayers, but the how of prayer. Prayer as practice, or technique, or habit, or skill, suggests a functional or instrumental view of prayer. Prayer makes things happen, prayer works, prayer makes a difference. It's something we do.
Many a book on prayer takes this approach, and one of the best is Richard Wagner's Christian Prayer for Dummies. Seriously. The approach encourages practice, experiment and discipline, and outlines basic training in prayer, even a section on turbocharging our prayers. Prayer is a subject you learn about alongside Windows 10, Wood Turning, Wine Making or Existentialism - other books for Dummies.
But then there are books that aren't so much about the practical how of praying, but the theological whys and wherefores. A theology of prayer begins to explore different types of prayer, considers the God to whom we pray, and ponders the problems and questions that always come up when we pray.
Julian of Norwich has a different approach again. She isn't so much teaching her Christian readers how to pray, as teaching them about the God to whom we pray. She is specially keen to pass on what has been revealed to her about how God hears our prayers, inspires our prayers, and certainly desires our prayers.
By doing this she is portraying a God who is accessible, not to be feared, holy but loving, a God who needs no persuading to hear and lovingly receive the cries of the human heart, whether praise or plea. In Julian's thought, prayer is not one way traffic from human to divine, it is a conduit of love through which divine love communicates with the human heart, inspiring and enabling the response of loving trust and grateful joy.
"He looks on us with love and wants to make us his partner in good deeds. And so he leads us to pray for what it is his pleasure to do. And he will reward us, and give us endless recompense for these prayers and our goodwill - which are his gifts to us...God showed such pleasure and such great delight, as if he were in our debt for every good deed that we do. And yet it is he who does them. And because we ask him eagerly to do things he loves to do, it is as if he said,: 'What could please me better than to ask me - eagerly, wisely and willingly - to do the very thing I am about to do? And so, by prayer, the soul is attuned to God."
That last sentence, "And so, by prayer the soul is attuned to God." Julian's understanding of God being delighted in the very fact we pray is in startling contrast to any idea that prayer is a wrangling or pleading with a demanding God. She is redressing a theological balance here. God is not the stern task master demanding we exhaust ourselves labouring away at persuading God to hear and answer prayers. On the contrary, God initiates prayer, gives grace, energy and words to our prayers, and he "leads us to pray for what it is his pleasure to do." It isn't going too far to describe this as a spirituality of playfulness, prayer as a serious but non-competitive game.
When all our praying is said and done, isn't what we really want just as Julian describes, the soul in those moments of praying "attuned to God." During these times of reflection in Lent, that is a profoundly simple goal in our praying, and itself a key definition of what prayer is, "the soul attuned to God."
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