I begin by recalling the Archbishop of Canterbury’s
words in a sermon delivered last Ascension Day:
…today, Ascension Day, the friends of Jesus face the fact that they are
going to have to get used to living in a world without Jesus – or at least,
living in a world without the Jesus they have known. After those frightening
and exhilarating few weeks of Easter, when – amazed and confused – they have
almost got used to the possibility of meeting Jesus in unexpected faces and
places, he is now saying to them, ‘It’s going to be different. Don’t expect to
see me around in the old way.’ They must have felt deeply disoriented, even
fearful.
…The friends of Jesus are called … to offer themselves
as signs of God in the world – to live in such a way that the underlying
all-pervading energy of God begins to come through them and make a difference. If we are challenged as to where God is in the
world, our answer must be to ask ourselves how we can live, pray and act so as
to bring to light the energy at the heart of all things – to bring the face of
Jesus to life in our faces, and to do this by turning again and again to the
deep well of trust and prayer that the Spirit opens for us.
We are in a different position from the first disciples of Christ. They
had got used to living with Christ personally, in an intimate and close
relationship of sharing bread, prayer, and teaching. We do these things without
the personal presence of Christ except in the spiritual sense: the Holy Spirit
is with us, as Jesus promised, at all times. We know, as Peter’s sermon in the
second chapter of Acts reminds us, that Jesus himself has been
‘exalted at the right hand of God’ (Acts 2:33). The right hand of God is the
place of authority and power.
The Archbishop had begun his address with these words,
which are particularly pertinent in Christian Aid week:
Plenty of people look around and say, ‘This is a world without God’.
It’s a world where, moment by moment, children are dying in poverty of
preventable diseases, where tyrants are planning to secure their power over
suffering populations, where men and women are struggling to put their lives
back together in the wake of natural disaster and where people are dying in
loneliness and living in anxiety all around us. Any Christian with a shred of
intelligence will surely understand why so many are driven to say, ‘Well, it feels
like a world without God’ – and perhaps in secret they agree that, for quite a
lot of the time, that is indeed how it feels for them too.
Reflecting this
week on the place of prayer in the Church, I can see why it feels as though it
may be a world without the presence of God working through the Holy Spirit.
That it sometimes seems so is not just because of the role of structural
poverty and evil in the world. It is also because of the weakness of our own
prayer life.
Whenever I go
through my own period of ‘spiritual dryness’, or difficulty in prayer, it is
because I have forgotten to use that most wonderful of manuals of prayer,
Leslie D. Weatherhead’s A Private House
of Prayer (1958). What is so good about Weatherhead’s prayer technique is
that is relatively simple, but divides up prayer into its separate aspects. If
we clump these separate aspects of prayer together the result is that we will
tend not to pray effectively, because these different aspects represent different
things.
Leslie Weatherhead imagines 7 rooms,
each with a distinctive purpose. Do not rush through all the rooms looking for
God, he tells us. He can be found in every one. The order is important. He
wants to assert first the Divine Presence and realize the fact (and preferably
the feeling) that there is ‘Someone there’ to pray to. All through the
Bible, God asserts his presence with his people, and it is real prayer to
remember the sentences which recall this to our mind. Our Lord not only
promised ‘Lo I am with you always even until the end of the world’, but also
the Holy Spirit ‘that He may be with you for ever’. In this first room I repeat
those great words ‘with you’.
Having recognized that God is present, that there is
‘Someone really there’, in the second room we can move on to praise, thank and adore him. ‘It
is a good thing’, Weatherhead encourages us, ‘to imagine this room full of
morning sunshine: it is the room of thanksgiving. Each of us has something for
which to praise and thank God. Indeed
it is a revealing thing to write down a list of those things for which we
should thank God. We should adore him for all he is in himself – and as we do
so, we should call to mind his attributes and remember his love, his splendour,
his power, his beauty, his wisdom, his holiness.’
Doing so makes us terribly conscious of our own
unworthiness, so we turn then to forgiveness and the unburdening of our hearts.
Room 3 is ‘rather dim and shadowy as we enter but brighter as we move across it
to the window. It is the room of Confession, Forgiveness, and Unloading. Here
we confess our sin, not just in a general way but really being honest. Most of
us are sometimes jealous, malicious, unkind, proud, irritable, intolerant,
impure. But God is always ready and willing to forgive us. We can move toward
the window, pull up the blind, and let the streaming light of loving
forgiveness and acceptance flood the room. We are loved, understood, forgiven,
and accepted.’ Before we leave this room, too, we must make sure that we are
ready to forgive others who may have sinned against us.
Cleansed by forgiveness we are ready now to receive from God in
room 4, the room set aside for affirmation and reception. As Weatherhead puts
it, ‘We are no longer to dwell on the depths to which we have fallen but on the
heights to which God will lead us. God is waiting to give. Jesus put the matter
in an unforgettable sentence: ‘What things soever ye desire, when ye pray,
believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.’ (Mark 11:24.) Psalm 23
is suitable furniture for this room. ‘It does not ask, “O Lord, be my Shepherd”.
It affirms that he is. It does not
ask for guidance. It rests in the affirmation that the soul is being guided.’
By the time we reach room 5, the place for purified
desire and sincere petition, if our previous experience of the earlier rooms
has been successful, then ‘we want to love more deeply both God and our fellows
and promote God’s interests even more than our own. We stop saying, “Give me”,
and start saying, “Make me” and “Show me” and “Use me”. This is the place where
we ask for renewed trust and stronger faith and more tolerant love for those
who differ from us.’
Room 6 is the room of prayer for others. ‘Some may
think it odd to put intercessions for others so late’, Weatherhead observes, ‘but
it is when [we] have [ourselves] got nearest to God and asked him in petition
to do things for [us] and in [us] that [we] can be of maximum help to others.’ In
our prayers for others it is enough ‘to say the name of the person slowly,
calling him to mind in as vivid a picture as possible, and then imaginatively watching him or her emerging from his or her
difficulties, being made well – if we are praying about his health – being
made confident, courageous, serene, joyous, or whatever it may be.’ Avoid negative
emotions such as pity or fear, which may hinder rather than help the prayer for
others. ‘The conquest of grief lies not in suppressing it but in holding our
minds still before the Lord (to use an old Quaker phrase) till we are filled
with the realization of His Life and Power. Then, and only then, is our longing
to help the other and lighten the burden made possible of fulfilment.’
The seventh and final room is imagined as a big room at
the top of the house (or in a bungalow, a large room with a view of the garden), which is set aside for Meditation. ‘Here we sometimes
take an incident in the Gospels and try to do what Ruskin said he did, ‘to be
present as if in the body at each recorded act in the life of the Redeemer’. ‘In
this way, imaginative communion with him can have – as nearly as possible – the
results of being with him in Galilee. That communion is surely the strongest
transforming power in the world. What it did for Peter and John, it can do for us.’
There is no one magic formula for prayer in each and
every circumstance, or to meet the spiritual needs of all of us all of the
time. I can only say two things in recommendation of the system advocated by
Leslie Weatherhead. If you experience dryness in prayer, try it for yourselves.
You will be refreshed. And when we have forgotten about it, as sooner or later
we will, because our attention spans vary, then come back to it. Each time
you experience it you will be renewed. Best of all, get hold a copy of his book yourself because his meditations on scriptural passages are often profound. For
a reminder of God’s presence in the world, in spite of apparent evidence to the
contrary, the prayer method advocated in A
Private House of Prayer takes some beating.
