Alison Morgan

 

Last summer I visited the island of Inner Farne, in Northumberland. It was to Inner Farne that St Cuthbert fled in the 7^th century, seeking escape from the hustle and bustle of the priory on Lindisfarne, further down the coast. Cuthbert wanted to devote himself to prayer, and he didn’t want to be interrupted. His chapel is still there; and in it I had agreed to pray with a friend who had been seeking God for some time, and who had come with me that day. I want to find God, she had said. And as we bowed our heads, it occurred to me that the lesson was all around us in the wind-tossed flight of the hundreds of arctic terns, once familiar to Cuthbert, who return annually to nest on the island. Perhaps becoming a Christian is like getting wings; wings which will free us from the clomping reality of land and lead us into the presence of the eternal God through prayer. It’s just a matter, for us as for the baby terns, of learning to use them.

 

There are many forms of prayer, and many approaches to prayer. One of the simplest descriptions of prayer is given by the catechism of the Roman Catholic church: Prayer is the raising of the mind and heart to God. A more modern definition goes like this: Prayer is turning our whole being to God, and staying there.¹ But even that is easier said than done. I once heard a radio interview with a bishop. How long had he prayed for that morning, the interviewer asked. ‘About 45 seconds’, he replied. It turned out he’d sat in his chair before God for an hour; but only in the last 45 seconds had he felt that the connection had been made.

 

For me, prayer began as a hazy, wordless thing, as I groped from land to sky in search of something bigger than me. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made, Paul wrote impatiently to the Romans. It was as if he were saying, open your eyes and get started! It’s good advice. I remember walking through a field of summer barley, watching the wind play across it like the breeze on the waves of the sea, wondering what was the source and secret of the astonishing variety of life I saw all around me, and what it required of me. I think that was the day my conscious search for God began, and it’s always a good place to come back to. Prayer is like a ladder, St Bonaventure wrote in the 13^th century – start at the bottom, meditating on the created world around you, for in it you will find the footprints of God.

 

One of the most inspiring and helpful books I have read is Richard Foster’s Prayer.²  It has 21 chapters, each on a different kind of prayer. For months I tried them in turn. Simple prayer exhorted me to just get on with it. The prayer of examen took me to Psalm 139, ‘search me and know me, see if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting’. He did, which was a bit unnerving. The prayer of relinquishment urged me to surrender my will to God’s, to offer him my hopes and desires and to leave them with him. I remember I prayed it in Italian – it somehow seemed safer. The result of that one was that we conceived twins. Then there was covenant prayer, with John Dalrymple’s challenging but undeniable observation that we only learn to pray all the time everywhere after we have resolutely set about praying some of the time somewhere. Be regular in your prayer habits, he urged. There was unceasing prayer, with the recommendation of the simple one-liner ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner’ – anyone can do that, even with feathers half grown. And there was, perhaps my favourite, contemplative prayer, the listening prayer which tries to shut out the competing voices of the world and creep into the presence of God.

 

To these I have learnt to add my own. Or at least, to give my own titles. Occasionally the lightning of crisis has crackled through my spiritual life, and I have come to call the result electrocuted prayer. It’s the opposite of shopping list prayer, the dutiful but rather rote offering of the needs of ourselves or others which sometimes we fall into. My first experience of electrocuted prayer was when the hamster died, and confronted with my son’s tears I rashly suggested we pray for it. Our hands went red hot, and the cold, stiff hamster imperceptibly twitched its whiskers. We watched in disbelief (mine) and awe (my son’s) as life gradually spread down its little body from nose to tail. It happened too when a 12 year old boy came forward for prayer in church for his glandular fever. ‘How was it?’ his mother asked afterwards. ‘Oh, it was fine – but you didn’t tell me about the electricity!’ was the reply. What is the explanation? I can only think of Jesus, touched by the woman who had been bleeding for 12 years. ‘Jesus felt energy discharging from him’, we read - the energy which sparked the big bang, energy made available to him and to us through the power of the Holy Spirit.³ The awesome energy of God himself, flowing through us in prayer.

 

Then there is what Foster calls authoritative prayer, more commonly known as prayer for deliverance. It’s a contentious subject, evoking reactions which range from ridicule to superstitious credulity. But I have no other explanation for the scenes I have witnessed and experienced than that just as there are entities called viruses and quarks which I cannot see, so are there entities called evil spirits which are similarly invisible but no less real. These entities may afflict people, and must be, to use the biblical language, bound and cast out. ‘Who are you?’ one asked me once, through the contorted face and altered voice of the person sitting in front of me. ‘No one at all’, I replied, ‘but I stand here in the name of Jesus Christ. Get out!’. The person looked up, confused; she’d seen a red flash of light shoot out of her head and fork down into the little wooden cross which stood on the table before her. Her nightmares, hallucinations and other problems ended that day.

 

Where then do we start, with this whole prayer thing? How do you learn to fly? Well, birds have different techniques. If you are a puffin on Inner Farne, your parents stop feeding you and you have no alternative but to hurl yourself in faith off the edge of the cliff towards the sea, and hope for the best. If you are a blue tit, you have all the time in the world to stand and peer out of your nestbox, choosing the right moment, encouraged by your family. Lapwing chicks set off on foot first, parents fussing round them. They all start in different ways. I suppose the important thing is to start, and then to keep going. In prayer there are no experts. 

 

This article was first published in Cell UK magazine.

 

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¹ See Basil Hume, The Mystery of Love, DLT 2004, p.47; and Angela Ashwin, From pain into prayer - opening up to God when life is hard, Harper Collins, 1997, p.xiii.

² Richard Foster, Prayer – finding the heart’s true home, Hodder & Stoughton 1993

³ Mark 5.30, The Message.