Doing Prayer

 

From The Possibility of Prayer by John Starkey; "Christians have used the word communion to emphasize the relational side of prayer. Communion is the act of nurturing a loving relationship with God. Ronald Rolheiser desvribes it as getting close enough to God to hear him say 'I love you.' Communion is a transformative habit, but personal transformation can not be the ultimate goal or it will never be transformative. God must never be a mere enhancement to our self-improvement plan or a ticket to a better life. God is life itself. God must be the goal, the end, the prize. Communion is coming to God for the sake of God: for His beauty, His love, His presence, His joy. But transformation slips in through the backdoor and comes at us sideways. We are changed indirectly by our enjoyment of God."

Here are my lectionary words for April 12 - 18

April 12    Acts 3: 12-19          raised

April 13    Psalm 4: 1-3            set apart

April 14    Psalm 4: 4-8             ponder

April 15    I John 3:1-3              children

April 16    I John 3: 4-7              lawlessness

April 17    Luke 24: 36-48         understand

April 18    Jeremiah 44               contrition

Read carefully what Fredrick Buechner says about the Lord's Prayer.

Lord's Prayer

IN THE EPISCOPAL order of worship, the priest sometimes introduces the Lord's Prayer with the words, "Now, as our Savior Christ hath taught us, we are bold to say.. ." The word bold is worth thinking about. We do well not to pray the prayer lightly. It takes guts to pray it at all. We can pray it in the unthinking and perfunctory way we usually do only by disregarding what we are saying.   "Thy will be done" is what we are saying. That is the climax of the first half of the prayer. We are asking God to be God. We are asking God to do not what we want but what God wants. We are asking God to make manifest the holiness that is now mostly hidden, to set free in all its terrible splendor the devastating power that is now mostly under restraint. "Thy kingdom come . . . on earth" is what we are saying. And if that were suddenly to happen, what then? What would stand and what would fall? Who would be welcomed in and who would be thrown the Hell out? Which if any of our most precious visions of what God is and of what human beings are would prove to be more or less on the mark and which would turn out to be phony as three-dollar bills? Boldness indeed. To speak those words is to invite the tiger out of the cage, to unleash a power that makes atomic power look like a warm breeze.   You need to be bold in another way to speak the second half. Give us. Forgive us. Don't test us. Deliver us. If it takes guts to face the omnipotence that is God's, it takes perhaps no less to face the impotence that is ours. We can do nothing without God. We can have nothing without God. Without God we are nothing.   It is only the words "Our Father" that make the prayer bearable. If God is indeed something like a father, then as something like children maybe we can risk approaching him anyway. And about faith: Eyes of Faith   "WE ARE FOOLS FOR Christ's sake," Paul says, faith says—the faith that ultimately the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men, the lunacy of Jesus saner than the grim sanity of the world. Through the eyes of faith too, the Last Supper, though on one level a tragic farewell and failure...is also, at its deepest level, the foreshadowing of great hope and the bodying forth of deep mystery. Frail, fallible, foolish as he knows the disciples to be, Jesus feeds them with himself. The bread is his flesh, the wine his blood, and they are all of them including Judas to eat and drink him down. They are to take his life into themselves and come alive with it, to be his hands and feet in a world where he no longer has hands and feet, to feed his lambs. "Do this in remembrance of me," Paul quotes him as saying. In eating the bread and drinking the wine, they are to remember him, Jesus tells them, and to remember him not merely in the sense of letting their minds drift back to him in the dim past but in the sense of recalling him to the immediate present. They are to remember him the way when we remember someone we love who has died, he is alive again within us to the point where we can all but hear him speak and our hearts kindle to the reality of his presence.