The long watches of the night

Ok, I know I'm not off to a great start with my prayer journey. Not many posts yet, and you may be in danger of forgetting what it's all about!
The truth is, I've been struggling to find time to be with God in more than a perfunctory way. Many demands of my time and energy in recent days, and one of the negative consequences of being too busy is that I sleep less well.

For me, lying awake in the small hours is the time when I succumb to guilt. I remember all the things I haven't done, and I think about the ways I wasted time yesterday instead of shifting more things off my to do list.

Where does this guilt come from? For years, I thought it was God speaking to me. It never occurred to me to wonder why he always had such negative things to say in the middle of the night. I think the truth is more to do with the way my mind works - when awake at night I generally feel worse about myself than at any other time.My thoughts turn to guilt more easily that blessing.

I'm learning to remind myself that God is nice, and he loves me. OK, he might have some stern things to say about the way I serve him badly, but he is adept at saying them in ways that build me up, not in ways that grind me down.

The first thing to be done on this prayer journey is to shift away some of the rubbish that gets in the way of my relationship with God. Night time guilt - that's first for the wheelie bin.

Finding God in unlikely places

I'm meant to be on a prayer journey at the moment. As you know, if you're a regular follower of my blog.
But nothing has happened this week because of various things, one the main ones being the arrival of OFSTED at my local school.
I'm not allowed to divulge the outcome of the report before it is published, but anyone who has connections with the world of education will know how stressful the inspectors' visits can be.
It was very hard not to get caught up in the tension, and to let nerves get the better of me when with Sue the Chair of Governors, I took my turn to be lightly grilled.
It turned out not to be the ordeal I feared. The inspector was calm, friendly and understanding. She smiled. She urged us to relax. She communicated that she was here to inspect, not to judge.
In short, she did all that I wanted to do for the staff - bring a little sniff of the peace of God into the school in the midst of the anxiety and fear.
In the midst of a time of great testing, God was present, brought in by the most unlikely of people, found in the most unsought for place - the person of the OFSTED inspector.

Relational Prayer 3 - The Exercises

As I begin my journey of prayer, beginning with the easy and obvious, here are the exercises that Gerard and Chrissie Kelly recommend in their book, Intimate with the Ultimate.

Prayer is relationship

Consider the elements that contribute to a healthy relationship: you might think, for instance, that time should be invested, not only doing things together but simply being together; you might suggest that listening is important, each person being truly heard by the other; you might want to say that complete transparency and honesty are essential. Make a list of the five or six most important elements. Now ask yourself, what is the place for this in my relationship with God?

Prayer is trust

Take some time to reflect on your walk with God over the past 12 to 24 months. Ask yourself where are the high spots where you have truly trusted God, and where are the low spots, where you have given way to fear? What made the difference? What can you do to see fear expelled? Try noting in a journal the things you have said and done that might be construed as being born out of fear – then, on another page, those things born of trust. Do you see a pattern in the difference between the two? Are there ways you can shift the balance from being fearful to trusting?

The empty chair

Therapists sometimes use a technique of recreating a conversation you have had in the past by asking you to talk to an empty chair, imagining that the person is there in front of you. Try doing the same for a while with God. Rather than praying to a God “somewhere out there”, imagine God on a chair beside you. What do you want to say?

Emmaus Road

If you have struggled in recently to find time to pray, take a literal walk with God. If possible, walk somewhere where people will not think you crazy for talking to yourself. Book some time: two hours; a morning; a whole day and talk to God as you walk. Shout at him if you have to; cry if you need to. Imagine him asking you “So how is life going for you?” and “How do you feel about that?” and “What would you ask me if nothing was considered off limits?”

Table for two

A few years ago we created a prayer installation in the church on the day of the village fête. Part of it consisted of a table, laid for two, with a jug of juice. Each person was invited to take a seat, pour themselves a drink and dine with Jesus. Given such an invitation, what would you talk about?

Letters of love

If you sometimes find it hard to talk to Go, write to him. Write, “Dear God ...” and then say what you've been trying to say. Explain yourself; ask your questions; express your feelings. Sign off with love, then seal the letter and set it aside. Three months later, read it and ask, “Did God answer?”

His prayer – your prayer

Use the words of the Lord's prayer as your framework for prayer. After each phrase, simply pray about the things that come to mind. If you run out of time, write some of the things down to pray about later. Come back daily to the list. Pray daily; ask daily; forgive daily; seek guidance daily. Let the categories sparked by the Lord's Prayer become the categories in which you pray: use the filing cabinet Jesus designed for you because he knew that you would need one ...

Relational Prayer 2 - Why we just don't get it

I'm starting a journey into prayer, and beginning at the beginning.

Prayer is a relationship. We all know that. It's not reading out a shopping list to God, or mouthing some special formula of words whose meaning has not been internalised. No. We talk to God, and God talks back.

I know this, and I sometimes experience it to be true. However, I still fall back into a different way of thinking and behaving, which Gerard and Chrissie Kelly, in the book "Intimate with the Ultimate," call humanity's default setting when it comes to relating to God, or the gods.

Christianity, they say, has a more sophisticated spirituality, but it has to work hard contradict this way of thinking that we all lapse back into.

So what's it all about? It's about the fact that when we don't know who we are talking to, we act out of fear instead of trust. When we don't feel that we know anything about the God we are trying to communicate with, we can't embark on a relationship with any degree of trust. If the trust isn't there, then we've no idea what God's attitude is towards us. He might be angry, he might be capricious, he might be indifferent.

The first thing we must do, then, is appease him, or impress him - do something to capture his interest. Otherwise, how will we know that he'll even bother to listen to us? So we bring a sacrifice. Not a dead animal, like ancient people used to, but something. We give up something for Lent. Perhaps that'll impress God. We go to church. I mean, that's a sacrifice for a start. Sit on a hard pew in a cold building listening to some vicar droning on - surely God will be impressed with our dedication if we do that!

The whole point of the sacrifice is to change God's attitude towards you. You want to get him onside, then perhaps he'll answer your prayer.

But that is not why Christians should pray. Or Jews, for that matter, because in this case Old and New Testament speak with the same voice. We don't pray to change God's attitude to us, we pray to change our attitude to God. We've got it completely backwards.

The Bible, Old and New Testament, tells us time and again that God loves his people, that he wants to bless them, that when he's cross and disappointed with them it's because they won't come and speak to him, and would rather worship someone else. God sounds more like a wounded lover than a stern father. God wants our friendship. He likes us. He enjoys hearing us pray.

If only we could understand that - everything else would change!

To back this up, the Kellys quote Isaiah 55. That link will take you to the whole chapter, and you can see how it begins with a lovely offer from God to come and enjoy all kinds of wonderful things free. We haven't got to pay for them, we haven't got to offer sacrifices to get them, we haven't got to impress God with our holiness to deserve them. We just have to come and get them.

But if you read on, you can all too easily lapse back into default mode spirituality  Because later, it talks about God being so different to us:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

There you are then, we think. God is so far above us, we can't begin to understand him or relate to him. We can't possibly know what he thinks of us. We'd better go back to the old way of thinking, and come with a sacrifice, just in case. People even quote these verses as a justification for times when they've prayed for something and felt their prayers weren't answered. 

But that's not what it's saying! If you read this chapter properly, and don't chop a bit out of it and examine it in isolation, you'll understand.  Isaiah is saying, yes God is far above us, yes the sky is really really high. But it's from the sky that the rain and the snow comes, which waters the earth and makes it bring forth its fruit. Doesn't matter how high it is, the blessings still come. Doesn't matter how high and mighty God is, he still loves you, still blesses you, whether you deserve it or not.

Get it through your head. God is not against you. God loves you, wants to bless you, wants to relate to you, wants you to trust him and believe in him, and let yourself be changed and healed by him. He really does.

What we need to do (what I need to do!) is examine our attitudes, and try and trust God. It's called faith. Often it seems crazy, flying in the face of the evidence. But if we don't try it, we'll never find out if it works.

Relational Prayer 1 - An Introduction

I'm getting ready to launch our prayer series tomorrow in church, and so I need to be starting it for myself.
What's it all about? As a church family, we clearly identified that we want to learn how to pray better, together and alone, and it falls to me as the vicar, to teach people how to do this.
Unfortunately, I don't regard myself as an expert in prayer, so I decided the best way to do it would be to go on a journey myself.

I'm using Gerard and Chrissie Kelly's book "Intimate with the Ultimate" as my guide, and it has seven chapters talking about different aspects of prayer, all flowing from Jesus' own invitation to his followers: "Walk with me, work with me, watch how I do it."

I like the way the Kellys make it sound easy, and do-able. That's how prayer should be, surely. Not an A-level requirement for super saints, but the stuff of Christian life.

And they begin with the simple idea that Prayer is a relationship. Well duh, you're probably thinking.

Understandably so. We've known that since Sunday School, haven't we? Except that we don't know it. We don't really know it.

If we knew it, we would do it. And we don't. or at least, I don't. Not in that familiar, easy, natural way that I crave. Not often. Tomorrow's post will explain why Gerard and Chrissie say that we don't get it, and after that, I'll talk about how they suggest doing something about it.

The Kellys suggest a series of exercises to get us into this way of thinking, and I'm going to try as many of them as I can and report my progress here. Another post will set out what they are, and how I'm going to do it.

So if you see me walking through the woods muttering to myself, don't be dismayed. I'm not losing it, I might possibly be finding it!

The Jesus school of Prayer

I want to go on a journey to learn how to pray. I've been troubled by this desire all my Christian life, and I've decided it's finally time to do something about it.

Those are strange words and they need explaining. After all, I'm a professional Christian, a vicar, a leader of a church. So I should be an expert on prayer, shouldn't I?

Except I know I'm not.

There have been times in my Christian life when God has been so close, so real to me that nothing else compares to the delight of knowing him and being known. At such times, there was nothing I would rather do than stay in his presence.

But they never last. Most of the time, I'm too distracted, busy, tired, lazy, or all four to lift a finger to try and find my way back to his shining presence. Then I feel ashamed of myself, and say angrily, “What kind of a Christian am I? Do I believe this God stuff or not? Why can't I make myself live it?”

That's a bit harsh. I'm not all bad. But I'm not all good either. I struggle with seeing things through. I've made dozens of fresh starts. Again and again I've said, “This time it will be different. This time I really mean it. This time...”

And what's so different about this time? Only the fact that it's public. Two years ago, I publicly committed myself to reading the Bible through in a year. And to my surprise, I did it. I managed to find time every day to read large chunks of it, even the boring bits. I think the going public helped. It gave me an accountability that I otherwise lacked.

So now I want to invite you to come with me on a journey of prayer. I'm going to be talking about seven different aspects of the God-language that I want to learn, spaced out over a year or more (I'm not sure how long it will take.) I will be introducing each aspect to my church family in a sermon, and committing myself to a series of actions that will help me explore this avenue of prayer for the next month or so. And inviting others to do it with me. During that month, I'll blog and tweet any insights, encouragements or discouragements, then report back and introduce the next chapter.

It's inspired, hopefully by God, but also by Gerard and Chrissie Kelly, who wrote a book called Intimate with the Ultimate in 2009. I'll be using their seven headings, which conveniently all begin with R. I know I'm not a real Christian preacher and teacher, because I can never get my points to all begin with the same letter. 

Anyway, on this journey we'll be looking at prayer that's

Relational

Rhythmic

Restless

Rich

Reciprocal

Rooted

Revolutionary

Come with me. Let's see where the journey takes us.

8 o'clock Spirituality

Every Sunday I crawl out of bed an hour and a half earlier than I would choose to, and sit in my freezing study getting ready for the 8am Communion.
My Twitter companions at this hour are a collection of fellow Anglican clergy, for I strongly suspect that no other Christians have this peculiar tradition.

Long ago, in a galaxy far away, a friend and I had a conversation that went along these lines: "When I'm a vicar the first thing I'll do is abolish the 8 o'clock Communion." But I've never done so, and I would never dream of it.
Non-Anglicans are probably thinking that we're mad. But perhaps you too have shivered in a muddy field at 6am, while an off key trumpeter leads a bleary congregation in a threadbare rendering of "Thine be the glory."

Yes, the Easter Sunrise Service. Another example of Christian Masochism at its best.

Taking communion fasting, is I suppose an example of this. The idea is that the first thing that should pass your lips on Sunday morning should be the bread and the wine - as a way of saying that God comes first in my life. So, in that respect, going to the 8 o'clock communion is in fact a way of taking it easy and cutting yourself some slack.
However, it can also be a Rule. Rules, with a capital R are not always helpful.
Once, a very intelligent elderly ecclesiastical lawyer confessed to me that he was no longer going to come to church, because he couldn't go out without any food inside him, he was too wobbly. It seemed the perfect example of self inflicted Pharasaism. Why elevate a pious habit into a Rule that cuts you off from worship?

Other 8 o'clockers describe their reason for early attendance in church as "it gets it out of the way."

Gets it out of the way??

Before the really important stuff of life, like washing the car or reading the Sunday papers? Again, a funny way of describing your devotion to the creator of the universe.

Leaving the negative thoughts aside, there is something about the quiet gathering of (nearly always) elderly people walking to church - yes they nearly always walk - that is very special. 8 o'clockers are faithful people.  Vicars often moan about how their congregations only come to church every other week these days. "When I was young," they say, "we went to church twice on a Sunday. Nowadays we have to count ourselves lucky if we see people twice a month!"
Not so the 8 o'clockers. They'll be there, every week. Without fail. Usually half an hour early, for reasons that are completely inexplicable. Why is it that the main morning congregation never arrive more than five minutes before the service is due to start, and usually 5-10 minutes after, while the 8 o'clockers are forming an orderly queue by 7.30?

Once, years ago, the service at the church I belonged to was televised. We were all in place with 20 minutes to go, listening to the countdown before we went live and began to worship, with a rising sense of excitement.

The 8 o'clockers could teach us a thing or two about anticipation and faithfulness.