Rupert's Blog

The Prodigal Son is an incredibly well known story (Luke 15:11-32).  But often the focus is on the younger son, who leaves home with his inheritance from his not-yet-dead Father, squanders it, and returns to find and experience the grace and kindness of the Father.

What is less often looked at is the older son, who stays at home all the time, working hard on the family estate, faultless in so many ways, and yet we discover in the story that he is every bit as lost as his younger brother.   We first get a hint of this, when the welcome home party for the younger son is in full swing, and the older son returns home.  Instead of entering into the house, he stays outside asking a servant what is going on.  Then angrily he confronts his Father with all the simmering resentment under the surface of his heart, due to his perceived lack of appreciation for all his hard work and the unfairness of the treatment of his brother.

The self-righteousness of the older brother is harder to see in our own hearts than the blatant rebellion of the younger son.  We can do all the right stuff.  Outwardly, we can seem a good Christian.  We can attend church; always helping out; serving; teaching; praying with others; bringing friends to church etc.  But we are doing all this out of duty.  We can even pray regularly.  But our prayer seems to revolve around the work we are doing.  The Father seems more like a boss, who is directing the work, than a loving dad who enjoys hanging out with his sons.

And deep in our hearts, the situation is even more desperate, when we find a moment to stop the activity to reflect on its condition.  We find we resent the success of others, even someone secretly hoping for others downfall or comeuppance.  The joy of others new found faith or simplistic versions of faith annoy us.  Occasionally the anger and resentment bubbles out, but mostly we keep it under control by business and noise and not stopping.

For if we stopped, we would be confronted with the hardness and darkness of our own heart.  We would be confronted by our own anger and jealousy.  We would be confronted by own lostness.  And we might also be confronted by the irresistible love of the Father, wooing us back home.

Why don’t we pray?  Because it is sometime just too scary to stop all the activity and to be confronted with ourselves, alone with God.

There are deep movements of our hearts, that in the normal course of events, we are often unaware of.  They surface during times of change or transition.  They surface when things that we have relied on for a sense of meaning, are no longer there.  We might choose to remove ourselves from them for a season (eg. a sabbatical, regular retreats); they might be removed due to a normal transition in life (eg. leaving home, getting married, having kids, kids leaving home, retiring) or they might be removed due to unforeseen circumstances of our lives (eg. bereavement, losing our job, divorce).

Let me tell you a story I told last Sunday at church.  My sabbatical was in two parts.  The first a course and holiday.  The second part was 11 weeks, based at home, but with no emails, tasks, things to organise, sermons to preach, people to see, things to plan etc.  The focus was prayer, scripture reflection, study, reading and personal reflection.

The first few days of this eleven week period I sorted out my out-of-control inbox, cleared and sorted piles of paperwork, and drafted a daily and weekly plan of prayer, reading and study for these 11 weeks.  By the end of the third day, the one thing I hadn’t done, was the very thing I was there to do: pray.  Nor open my Bible.

One of the things I learnt from this, is that time is rarely the reason why I don’t pray.  Desire is.

But I learnt something deeper from this story.  It revealed something about my heart.  I learnt about some of the searching questions I have about God and myself, which rarely punctuate my consciousness, but when other things are stripped away they were glaringly obviously to me.

This Sunday at Community Church, I will talk about uncovering some of the deep questions, and how bringing them to the surface can reveal why we don’t pray.

Or “Why don’t we don’t we Pray? – Part 2

Part 1 can be read here.  This is a short summary of the first part of what I said yesterday (Sunday 13th September) at church.  The audio will be available from our website in a day or two.

“There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.”  CS Lewis. The Problem of Pain.

Our desires often seem to ebb and flow, but it perhaps more helpful to see we have different desires competing for our attention and to gain the upper hand.  We may want to ask the girl out (a desire that flows in one direction) competes with the desire not to face potential rejection.  We may want to get fit by going to the gym, but we may prefer to watch the TV instead.  We will end up acting on the strongest desire.

So I think people of faith do want to pray.  They know the value.  But often, we also want to do other things (stay in bed, have the radio on in the car, read a paper on the bus, watch TV, have a  coffee with friends) which compete with our desire to pray.

However, I believe, deep in the heart of every human being is longing for something Divine.  Something beyond ourselves.  To be loved and to love.  To be secure and held.  To have value and purpose; adventure and significance.  To be part of a world where there is no suffering or pain.  These “deepest longings” are often untapped and lie dormant, but speak of our being made in the image of God.

These desires are dangerous.  To long for something deeply opens us up to pain.  The longing will inevitably not be fulfilled to some extent (this side of heaven anyway).  It is much safer to keep these wild longings buried away, where they can’t cause so much trouble.  But in the process we lose something of ourselves, and what we were created for.

These deepest longings can’t be discovered by our rational mind, which is bad news for many of us raised in our terribly rational western world.  But they can be tapped into through music, story, poems, art, images, beauty, creation, scripture and prayer.  We can learn to recognise these deep longings, and as they poke their head above the surface of our lives, and if we nurture them, they can become powerful motivating forces for prayer.

The desire to pray (and for God) resides within every human being.  We just need to let it out.