Prayer is Coming to Stillness

This was part of what was shared at the recent Prayer and Spirituality Evening, looking at stillness.  In a previous post, I looked at some practical ways in which we can nurture a stillness in our minds and bodies.  Andrew Hook talks here about the need for stillness as we come to pray:

Spirituality is embodied prayer, prayer that seeps out into the way we view ourselves, others, God and the life itself. On the Radio 4 program Something Understood the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in his discussion on prayer with Mark Tully, makes a number of important comments (to read a transcript of part of the interview see the “read more” section at the end of the post) . He talks of making room for the welling up of Christ’s life with us but states we have to still our body and mind and let something flower, or put another way, in the words of the poet Mary Oliver, ‘make space for another voice to be heard.

It is impossible to pay profound attention while living out a frenzied life. Williams refers to our absence rather than God’s, that we are not present to the moment – to where we are. We are often in multiple places and ahead of ourselves, disconnected from our inner self and our bodies. He says that we have to wait and stay with it, for this convergence, for this seeping of one with the other, and that there is a habit of listening or letting things happen to be cultivated.

Concentrating on our minds for a moment…

• Our minds are addicted to thinking, they have to be trained to pay attention (to what is). Our thoughts are preoccupied with the past and the future. There is always only now, which is where God is found. We strategise, plan, forecast. We try to be ahead of the game. We compete and compare and often stay at this level.
• The mind has been compared a multitude of monkeys jabbering and flitting from branch to branch in a tree and to wild horses running round a paddock. This is where we live most of the time. So what to do with the mind, this fussy, distracted defensive mind?
• “Thoughts are like rubber balls, the harder we throw them away, the harder they bounce back at us. Gently lay the ball down by focussing it not resisting it.” suggests the writer Simon Small. We notice them, but don’t judge them.
• A Scripture can act as form of soft focus. Not something to intently chew on like a football manager on the sidelines of a game but a gentle distraction for the mind.

A few words on the body…

It’s not that I have a body but I am a body. Creation, incarnation, resurrection (Jesus’ and then our own) all point to increasing levels of embodiment. Matter matters. The spiritual and the physical are intimately entwined. In Celtic thought the body is the echo or mirror of the soul. The image of God has been woven into the fabric of our being, notes the Celtic writer Philip Newell. The Blessed Trinity dwells deep within our bodies and so we aim to allow this life of Christ to well up is us like a tide.

So, when we pay attention to the present moment, without commentary or judgement to both the inner and outer worlds, the mind begins to still. Space appears around and between thought. A seed is planted and will mature.

Interview with Rowan William, Archbishop of Canterbury:

What are you doing when you pray?

[I am] ..allowing the life of Jesus to come alive in me, through the Holy Spirit. Which means from the depth of my being as a believer there rises up a kind of welling up of life and love directed towards that mysterious source of Jesus’s being that we call God the Father. So when I pray I’m trying to make room for that. I’m not trying to fill up the space. I’m not trying to do something but almost be carried on that rising water. The Four Quartets, Eliot’s Four Quartets – the pool was filled with water out of silence. It’s a beautiful image and that’s something rising up. But for that to happen you have to let go of a lot. You have to still your body and your imagination and let something flower, let something happen and your mind and your feelings sooner or later have to get out of the way. So prayer is communion. It’s that allowing, as again someone said ‘the depth within the depth outside to come together’.

On intercession…

’You don’t send in your list of requests, you don’t bombard God with your demands. You just hold the image, the sense of that person or a situation in the presence of God as if you want the one to seep into the other, bring those two realities together in your mind and heart.

How do you find time to pray and be quiet in this life you are living?

‘I’m too busy to pray for less than 2 hours a day.’ said Archbishop Desmond Tutu …The busier it gets the more essential it is to make the space, because simply going from one thing to the next, if you haven’t tried to put down an anchor somewhere you will really be exhausted and distracted. It’s bad enough as it is but it’s a matter of trying to make time early in the morning to put the whole day in perspective and having enough space then to frame the rest of the day but also simply making the most of those rare moments when not much is going on, to settle, physically settle. Breathe from the pit of your stomach for a few minutes, perhaps let a word or two come ‘Jesus, ‘God’. Just be there. Be there because as you will know, as well as I, that the temptation is not being there. It’s having your energies, your imagination somewhere where you are not actually present. Being with God is settling in the moment and when people talk about the absence of the God in prayer I tell people it’s not the absence of God but the absence of you. RS Thomas wrote a number of poems about prayer and they’re mostly to do with waiting, with silence, a sense of the absence of God and yet in the middle of that awareness of absence realising: well you have arrived, there is a reality and it’s beyond the words that you can find. You’ve got to wait, you’ve got to stay with it. Put down an anchor.

Is there a particular relationship between poetry and prayer?

I think it’s very much to do with trying to get out of the way of what’s happening, getting the managing, fussy mind out of the way. Poetry happens almost unexpectedly. Something clicks, something comes together. There’s a convergence you weren’t looking for. And the writing of that of that sudden coming together something that you hadn’t expected. To be in the frame of mind where these little coming togethers happen – you need a habit of quiet , a bit of a habit of listening, letting things happen. I find that the kind of inner disposition that helps poetry happen is not a million miles from the inner disposition that helps prayer happen.