Purposeful Prayer

Today's Eucharistic Lectionary gives us Is 55:10-11 and Matthew 6:7-15. Both about words, but apparently from different directions. In the passage from Isaiah the prophet compares God's word to the rain. Rain, he says, has a purpose, it makes the earth abundant and fruitful - similarly God's word will not return empty - it will accomplish that for which it is sent.

This sense of purpose is both reassuring and challenging - especially when coupled with the Gospel - that passage where Jesus tells us how to pray in what we now call the Lord's Prayer.

To say we should always be purposeful in our prayers is obvious but also somewhat misleading - our idea of purpose is results oriented and our judgement of results is not always reliable in a world where we are asking God to usher in an upside down and challenging Kingdom. We do not have metrics to measure success in prayer, it is not about the length, how long we can sit still for, how much we think we understand. Like rain, some of the work of sustenance and growth is done on the surface, through leaves and the pieces of plants which we can see - but for the most part that is the fruit of the rain, the real work is done deep underground, breaking up soil, making space for delicate roots and nourishing those roots, encouraging growth.

This sometimes a gently and quiet process, sometimes a violent one. Rain is a good mirror for the way we experience God - a drizzle, a shower, a storm, a drip and sometimes simply sitting by a stream, enjoying the swaying reeds, fed from the water table far below. Prayer too comes in may different voices. We have our formal prayers, the poem of John Greenleaf Whittier from which we use some verses as the hymn Immortal Love, for ever full, has this verse

Through Him the first fond prayers are said, our lips of childhood frame,
The last low whispers of our dead are burdened with His name

There is in these words a good sense of that flowing and ebbing truth of communication with God through all our life.

But although Jesus gives us words, in the Lord's prayer, there are times when the words make no sense but somehow you can still pray. I don't know whether you have experienced that - sometimes people worry that that means they cannot pray - words feel like a massive ocean falling and rolling around us and if we are not aware that we can float on the surface of them we can feel like we are drowning. But sometimes it is OK just to let the words go for a while - I know when I came out of hospital after surgery words were a bit elusive in my prayers - but I also knew it didn't matter and that they would come back if that was God's will. Simply knowing, and resting and being sometimes have to be enough - and that is purposeful living, to allow God.

You will often hear me say that I am chatting to God. Purposefulness and chatter at first may not seem to go together, after all isn't chatter a bit idle to be something intended and careful. But that is where we have to be careful - being the the presence of, spending time with and having no obvious outcome for that time is to truly give ourselves over to God for a while, sometimes we frame that with words, sometimes with silence, but the important thing about prayer is that God talks back. This has huge consequences for both our personal and public prayer lives - and that is a whole other talk.

When I was younger I remember someone telling me that when you are drawing something you should spend nine tenths of your time looking at it and one tenth drawing. How would that be if that were applied to our spiritual lives? I am not sure the ratios are practicable for most of us - but it is worth taking the lesson on board, that we cannot accurately represent something in a picture without really looking at it and living into it - carefully and purposefully.

What I am trying to say, then, is that we are called to be purposeful as God is purposeful - but God's purpose is not often reflected in our busy-ness. That every word God speaks has meaning and purpose should be profoundly reassuring to us but that is not the same as trying to catch all the rain which falls from the sky and then watering everything ourselves - which is too often the sort of model we seem to adopt.

We do have to allow God's purposefulness. We have so much science, so many explanations and so much reason that it can be hard to sit back and allow. We repeat the words Jesus gives us with purpose - sometimes we are more aware of this than others - sometimes we will pray hard for daily sustenance, other days wonder at the coming of God's kingdom. But we remember as we offer any prayer, we are in a two way conversation, that God is replying and that God's reply is never without purpose. Even when our own voices seem tremulous or even silent, God is working God's purpose with us, that rain is seeping in and around us. Our image of ourselves may be a famished and droopy but that is not God's vision or will for us.

"For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it to bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth, it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it". (Is 55:10-11)

Amen. Come Lord Jesus.