“Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” In the name…
Our brothers Nicolas and Charlie have recently been teaching retreat groups how to practise contemplative prayer. They looked to the masters to see how they might go about it, from Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross to Martin Laird and Lawrence Freeman. I don’t know whether they looked at John the Baptist. Because of course, we don’t really know what John taught his disciples. Presumably he taught them to pray like him – like wild men of the desert, like prophets and penitents, like wielders of the axe at the foot of the tree. Or for anyone who’s seen the Martin Scorsese film The Last Temptation of Christ, perhaps he had them standing around the banks of the Jordan, naked, head-banging and ululating to a frenzy of tribal drumming. Well, as courses on prayer go, I can see why that might sell, but I don’t think it’s very CR. Our motto is much more, “Keep calm and keep your clothes on.”
Jesus, fortunately for us, has quite a different approach. He teaches his disciples to pray simply – like children. We call his prayer the Lord’s Prayer, and so it is, but we could call it the Child’s Prayer. It’s a prayer of dependence and trust. It’s intimate and direct. A priest friend once told me his favourite confessions were children’s, because they don’t elaborate and they don’t make excuses, they just say, “I was mean to my friend.” Well that’s the territory we’re in here. “Father, I cherish your name. Make the world perfect and glorious, just the way you want it. Give us what we need. Forgive us the bad things we’ve done, because we forgive each other, we promise. And don’t let us get into too much trouble.” And that’s it. Luke’s version of the prayer is especially short and sweet.
In case we’re worried it’s too short and sweet, Jesus tells us to keep calm. He gives us two analogies to help. We all know a friend will help a friend in need, even if they might take some persuasion. We all know a parent will feed a hungry child without any persuasion. Now when it comes to God, we need a gear shift in our thinking, not a shift in degree but in logic. Because with God, the question of persuasion doesn’t even make sense. He is all gift – he is the creator. You can’t persuade him to be what he already is. It is he who persuades us. He wants to feed us before we know we need to be fed. We need to be transformed by the renewing of our minds, as Paul would say. We need to spend time with the teacher.
This prayer give us time. Its lines are sparse. There is space in between them, space for the teasing out of meaning. There is plenty to be done here and plenty of ways we could go about it – textual studies, historical studies, studies in our contemporary reception. We could delve into the Jewish tradition of the unspoken divine name, the theology of the Kingdom, the psychology and sociology of the mechanisms of forgiveness – the list goes on and on. The teasing out of meaning in a text like this will never be exhausted. And yet none of its meaning is hidden. There are no secrets in the spaces between the lines. We are not in the realm of Gnosticism, of esoteric teachings behind the public ones, reserved for the initiated few. These are the vain philosophies Paul warns us against in our reading from the letter to the Colossians.
It isn’t like a Harold Pinter play either, all subtext and double meanings, lines dripping with dark implications, broken by long pauses freighted with the threat of the unsaid. No, this prayer is not at all like that. It’s more like Shakespeare, where generally speaking there is no subtext and the characters say exactly what they mean. Shakespeare is not opaque. He is not mysterious. Rather he is so truthful, so profound and so universally applicable that we can keep unpacking his writing for a lifetime. That’s what this prayer is like, and infinitely more so. It’s like a sea that is clear and deep. Everything we need to know is revealed on the surface in terms a child can grasp, but if we want to dive deeper, we can. As we unpack these verses we will no doubt find surprises, but we won’t ever find that we were duped. This is how Paul describes Jesus himself. All the fullness of deity dwells in him, and he’s right here speaking to you now.
No, this prayer is not like a Pinter play – but we are. We are full of subtext and hidden meanings, dark implications and the threat of the unsaid. Our waters are deep and murky. And so the space between the lines is for the teasing out of meaning not so much in them as in us. They resonate so truly that they can sound out our hidden depths and elicit a truthful resonance in response. They can dive down and explore the shipwrecks of our past, salvaging them. They can bring up dark secrets and reveal them to be bright treasures – opportunities for redemption. As bits and pieces are brought to the surface we grow in clarity, even as we also grow in complexity. That is to say, we grow up. This is not just the Child’s Prayer but the Son’s Prayer. It is the man Jesus communing with his Father. Grown-up sons and daughters knows their parents’ business and take their part in it. Jesus is teaching his disciples to pray as fully responsible and fully entitled heirs to the kingdom of God. Now that’s a prayer course I’d sign up for.
We do not grow up alone but together, as siblings. The most potent way to pray this prayer is in community, as a choir or congregation. As we speak or sing these words together our bodies are moved by a common resonance, a felt recognition that my forgiveness of you is God’s forgiveness of me, that the holy name is whispered in each of our hearts, and that daily bread shared means enough for everyone. Our seas are connected by the deep channels of the Church, which open out into the ocean of God. There all the treasures of the Kingdom are waiting – waiting to be discovered. They are ours if we want them. If we seek. If we ask, “Lord, teach us to pray.”
Amen.