When did you last say your prayers? This question makes all kinds of presumptions. Not least that people don’t pray. Or that prayer has any value. Or that there’s a consensus on how we define what prayer is, which of course there isn’t. One man’s meat . . . and so forth.
But what I’m trying to get at, I suppose, is the way that society has changed, the way we’ve all changed. The sense that something peculiar has been going on and suddenly we come round a bend in life and there it is staring us in the face. Like coming to a clearance in the middle of a great forest. Part of what has happened, I think, is that the religious enterprise has been sidelined in Irish life. And just as, in the past, we went along with the crowd going to weekend Mass, now we find ourselves almost discernibly, making a U-turn and following the crowd going in the opposite direction. It has something to do with time. Once we had no labour-saving devices and yet we had plenty of time. Now everything we use saves time, but we seem to end up with less time than we ever had. We have become part of a bustling world where time – time for ourselves, time for our families, quality time – all seem to be in short supply.
With less time comes less space. Less room for attending to ourselves and the questions that try to surface in our lives: What is my life for? What does it all mean? Where does God fit in? What’s it all about? How can I put some shape on the twists and turns of my life?
With less time and less space comes less context. Because without time and space it’s not possible to stand back and see the subtle patterns in the tapestries our lives weave. Without context we can end up imagining that we know it all, that what is past has no value, that maturity and wisdom can come from the pages of a book or the advice of a guru rather than out of the distilled wisdom of a lived life.
Without context we end up on a merry go round of activity and movement that never seems to get us where we want to be. Without context we end up living and working for the future, forgetting the present and letting the happiness of the present moment slip through our fingers.
Even though we all know that waiting to live is a fools’ charter.
Love, as the poet Seamus Heaney said somewhere, ‘love the life you’re shown’.
How many parents, for example, are trying to survive their children’s childhood rather than enjoying even savouring those short magical years? How many parents imagine that beyond the frustrations of the teenage years there is some Nirvana without worry or unreason? How many people on their deathbeds regret they didn’t spend more time at work and less time with their families? (Very few I’d imagine!)
How many of us will in future years look back on the lives we live now and realise that these are the great and happy days that we will look back with great fondness? How many of us live as if, beyond the limitations of our present lives, there is a tranquil sea that we will live forever to enjoy?
There isn’t. There’s just death . . . and resurrection. We may not go there yet but that’s the ultimate context.
Life, no matter how long, is always limited. There comes a point beyond which none of us will go and there is a wisdom that comes from holding that reference point in our heads – not in any morose way but as a way of distinguishing the important from the peripheral.
Giving ourselves time and space and context is, I believe, ultimately about giving ourselves a context for reflection and prayer. It’s about welcoming the essential questions scrambling for attention just under the surface of our lives. It’s about facilitating a religious quest that can enrich the lives we live now.
Hands up all those who believe that our recent prosperity, great as it is, has made us any happier as individuals, families or society? Why then do we allow the quest for more to colonise large portions of our lives and leave us scraping around for time and space to feed the relationships that are the bread and butter of human fulfilment? How many spouses will one day see clearly the potential for happiness in a relationship that they now take for granted? How many former children will one day stand at a parent’s grave, overwhelmed with love and appreciation for a dead father or mother and who will spend the rest of their lives trying to forgive themselves for not seeing before what’s so obvious now?
Why is it that we must live so long before we learn so little?
Why is it that we can only appreciate what we have when we experience its absence?
We know it all now of course. The past is a distant country. We’ve nothing to learn now. So we get caught pushing life to its limits because we imagine that the more we get or eat or drink or own or enjoy, the happier we will be. And then when something mind-changing happens, someone is seriously ill or a loved one is dead and we find ourselves kneeling in the backseat of some church asking a God we scarcely believe in to come to the rescue of a life that ignores his presence. Something within us resonates with the beyond but we’ve forgotten the words.
So, after asking so many questions – and forgive me if you find them intrusive – let me return to that question I posed at the start: When did you last say your prayers?
Fr Laurence Freeman, internationally renowned as an expert on the subject of prayer, helpfully explains contemplative prayer in five simple lessons:
1. To pray go into your inner room and close the door. If you don’t believe that God is with you where you are, you won’t find him anywhere.
2. Be silent. You don’t need to babble prayers – as Jesus said about pagans, God knows what you need. You don’t have to ask him. Jesus tells us.
3. Let go of your worries and anxieties. Contemplation, is essentially about letting go. Put your worries in a boat and let it down the river.
4. Be attentive, it is the heart of contemplation. (This is why mindfulness is now so popular).
5. Stay in the present moment. Don’t worry about the past or the future. Contemplation is about sitting still and doing nothing – though sometimes doing nothing, is the hardest thing to do.
Prayer is the language of the soul. I pray, you all will know how fond God is of you.