Prayer Is Our Life: Lenten Meditation

by CCW | 18 March 2009 11:49

Prayer Is Our Life
Fr. David Curry

[1]

Rumours of Lent swirl about in the snow-mist of the Valley and dance in the beams of the mid-winter’s sun. What I am about to say concerns the season of Lent but in its larger dimension. It concerns the Lent that is our lives, our lives in pilgrimage. I want to say something about prayer and a rule of life.

We all have, I suspect, too narrow a view of prayer and, as a consequence, too narrow a view of Christian life. The consequences of such narrowness are deadly. Where religion is reduced to simply an optional aspect of life, it ceases to be religion. Where prayer appears as simply an item in the smorgasbord of optional religious activity, it ceases to be prayer. To the contrary, religion is life essential and prayer is its necessity. The recovery of a sense of the necessity of prayer means the rediscovery of our essential selves in the very life of God himself.

We are to be a people of prayer. That is to be taken, I think, in the most radical sense as meaning a people who are defined by prayer, a people whose lives simply are prayer. How can this be? Because of what prayer in its largeness properly is. “Prayer signifies all the service that we ever do unto God” (Richard Hooker). It signals the Godward motion of our lives. How is that possible? Only through Jesus Christ. Only as our lives are in and towards him in his love for the Father. Prayer is our life in the Son’s love.

Many of us, clergy and laity alike, have just been through the dreary round of annual meetings in our parishes. (Did I say dreary? Surely I must have meant exciting!). No doubt, it is a real test of faith to see how such things can belong to prayer. And yet somehow they must. Only consider.

What is properly active in such meetings is the virtue or activity of prudence – practical wisdom. Our Lord bids us “be ye wise as serpents” (Matt. 10.16). Prudence is right reason about things to be done. It seeks the ordering of all things to our end in God. As such it comes under the umbrella of prayer; it enters into our life with God in Christ. Consequently, prayer in this larger vision requires a rule of life because prayer in its radical sense is ordered life.

The connection between prayer and prudence, it seems to me, may be best seen in the biblical contrast between the creeping serpent and the crucified serpent as explained by the 17th century poet and preacher John Donne. “Serpens serpens humi/Serpens exaltatus, The creeping Serpent, the grovelling Serpent is craft; The exalted Serpent, the crucified Serpent, is Wisdom.” The creeping serpent of the Fall is the instrument of that which opposes the truth of God. It insinuates doubt about the goodness of what God has called good; in fact, “very good” (Gen. 1.31).

The consequences of the actions of the creeping serpent signal its character, the character of false or fallen reason. It is craft or cunning. And notice where it looks. It looks downward. “Creeping wisdom that still looks downward is but craft and cunning”. The result is to eat dust and creep upon the earth, but such is the perfect image of false reason; it creeps and crawls; it is dust and death, not life.

“Prudence”, on the other hand, as Jeremy Taylor remarks, “is a rare instrument towards heaven” in the ordering of all affairs Godward. It is the wisdom of the exalted serpent, the crucified serpent. In the wilderness journey of ancient Israel, the murmuring, carping, complaining, downward-in-the-dust looking people are at once scourged by serpents, but then healed by looking up towards the image of those serpents – a bronze serpent raised up before their eyes – that they may gaze upon it and be healed.

The story is told in The Book of Numbers 21.9. You see, Jesus not only exhorts us to be wise as serpents – looking upwards rather than downwards – but he is himself that end towards which we look to be healed and saved. Looking towards him we find the true character of our lives as prayer, our lives in him. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3.14,15).

“Crucified wisdom, that looks upward, is truly wisdom”. It is gathered into prayer because it looks up and towards the crucified Christ who on the Cross looks up to the Father. Prayer enters into that love of the Son for us in his love for the Father and gathers all the affairs of our world and day into his intention. “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself” (John 12.23).

Prayer in this radical sense of ordered life is the purpose of The Book of Common Prayer. It is a system of the ordered life of prayer, not a service book of prayers, not an activity book for religious exercises. Instead, it embraces the whole of our lives and seeks to make our lives prayerful by drawing the whole of our lives into an ordered relation to God’s Word and Spirit. The purpose is the purpose of Revelation itself; nothing less than the living of our life in and towards God. As Cranmer so eloquently puts it: “He that keepeth the words of Christ is promised the love and favour of God and that he shall be the temple or dwelling-place of the Blessed Trinity”.

Common Prayer is the ordered life of prayer in its totality. For The Book of Common Prayer, you might say that prayer is a rule of life – ordered life – our life ordered in and towards God’s Son and Word, crucified and exalted. “Lift up your hearts” means the lifting up of the whole of our lives in prayer; “into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23.46) is the prayer of the Son to the Father in the embrace of the Holy Spirit, the total prayer into which we, too, are gathered.

The Rule of Life presented on page 555 of The Book of Common Prayer (Cdn.1962) simply calls attention to this sense of our lives as ordered prayer. Rather than speaking directly about what is there, let me offer instead a 3-D picture of what it all might mean. It comes down to simply this – Devotion Demands Discipline.

Devotion: The disciplines of Lent and the celebrations of Easter seek the deepening of our devotion. Devotion is our active, whole-hearted love of Christ in whom the love of God and the love of neighbour meet. Devotion means the deepening of our love in the doctrine of Christ – the purpose of his Word. The Prayer Book pattern of spiritual life seeks just such a deepening of our devotion. The Liturgy – our ordering of worship – provides a holy means by which God’s Word is measured out and applied to our souls according to the purpose of his Word.

The forms of worship – the order and pattern of our services – are not static and lifeless. They are themselves full of life and we only live when we live most fully in them. They are the expressed order of our life in Christ. God wills that we should will what he wills and to that end he gives us his Word. The heart of God is revealed to us in the words of the Son and we enter into the heart of God through the wounded side of the Father’s Word and Son. Devotion centres our hearts upon Christ and draws us into his heart.

Demands: Religion that will be true religion is no optional extra to our life – like icing on a cake, nice but not essential. Quite the contrary, it is life essential, life lived in the heart of the Son’s love for the Father. This is no “gentle-Jesus-come-and squeeze us” kind of religion! By no means. Christ does not merely invite our consideration. He actually demands, even commands, our love. The Christian Faith, alive and well, is demanding. The Christian Church, clothed and in her right mind, makes demands – holy demands – on our time, our thoughts, our wills; in short, our whole lives. It really cannot be otherwise than total when at the heart of it all is the “full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice” of Jesus Christ.

Our liturgy is demanding, Lent is demanding, we are demanding, and yet, such is our life. There are demands, even great demands, because God wills even greater things for us than we can either desire or deserve. To embrace these demands is to enter into his love for us. “Watch and pray”.

Discipline: A disciple is one who learns. The learning of Christian discipleship means our following Jesus Christ so as to be taught by him. The whole of this learning is the whole of our life in Christ. It is not just a mental activity but, more fully, the carrying through of our thoughts into actions – holy thoughts expressed in holy actions, themselves thoughts in motion. We are creatures of intent. That is our freedom. It means the ordering of our souls and bodies to Christ “whose service is perfect freedom” (BCP, p.11).

What we know and what we love appear in what we say and do. Such is the condition of spiritual creatures. That we suffer the consequences of our actions belongs to the character of rational freedom. No doubt, our creeds are often better than our deeds, our intentions better than our actions, but surely, it is rightly wanted that there be an harmony between what we believe and how we behave. Discipline seeks such an harmony as the necessary counter to our easy hypocrisy.

It is a matter of ordered love. “Set love in order in me” (Song of Songs, 2.4 – from the Latin). You see, discipline is not primarily something imposed from without, but rather something embraced from within. It is expressed in the whole of our lives, soul and body, inwardly and outwardly. The ordering of our love appears inwardly in the ordering of our thoughts and desires and outwardly in the ordering of time, appetite and money.

The ordering of thought and desire centres on the activities of repentance, prayer and study. Lent reminds us that we are to be a penitent people. The point is not something negative but of good effect, in fact, beneficial. It may be said that as “the unexamined life is not worth living” (Socrates), so the unrepentant life is not worth saving. God will not save us without our wills but only through our wills, that we might will what he wills.

Repentance means looking at our lives in the light of God’s Word, acknowledging where we have fallen short in our love of God and one another and where we have fallen away in sinful “thoughts, words and deeds”. But first and foremost, it means turning towards God. Repentance is not possible apart from the recognition of God. Thus the confession of sin is always the praise of God.

Prayer, both in its radical sense and its simpler sense, seeks the union of our wills with God’s will. It signifies the putting in order of what we think and imagine, what we desire and subsequently pursue. The Book of Common Prayer is not given simply for our public worship, primary and essential as that may be. It is also given for our daily use, both putting us in mind of God’s Word and placing our affections in accord with his will. The Prayer Book gives us prayers and an order of prayer drawn from and in the words of Scripture.

Here, then, is a holy means for the ordering of our thoughts and desires. The Prayer Book provides for our daily prayer through the Daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer.

Study means being eager to learn. Thinking upon God’s Word and upon what follows from God’s Word is no luxury but a Christian necessity. Religion without mind is either fanatical or moronic, either willful assertion or empty-headed; in any event, brain-dead. But “let this mind be in you” – the mind of Christ. He is God’s Word and Son. The Word with God became the Word with us so that we might learn from him, if we will. “Learn of me, for I am meek and lowly” (Matt.11.21). He humbled himself for our sake so that we might learn from him, but only if we, too, will be humble and open to his Word, only if we will be disciples, those who will learn.

We need to learn because, after all, we don’t know it all! So take up a book for Lent. Perhaps you would like some suggestions. Then read one or more of the following: Exodus, Ruth, Job, Jonah; Mark, Galatians, 1 John; C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters and Letters to Malcolm Chiefly on Prayer, Charles Williams’ The Descent of the Dove, Jaroslav Pelikan’s Jesus Through the Centuries, or one of George MacDonald’s many novels now available in abridged versions. But in any event, read and study. Be eager to learn.

The ordering of time, appetite and money: The ordering of time, appetite and money is the outward expression of ordered love.

The ordering of time: We all complain about not having enough time for anything. I have a feeling that the problem is that we are mostly too busy about nothing. Do we determine things in the course of the day or are we simply determined by the things which happen? Are we defined by circumstance and happenstance, or do we plan the when and the what of our doing? And do we plan to be busy simply because “it helps make the time pass”, or because “it’s something to do”? Such things amount to a busy nothingness.

The problem is twofold: allowing external events to rule our day, on the one hand, and filling the day with the doing of anything out of a sense of emptiness, on the other hand. In any event, we forget that each day and each part of each day is given to us. Each day is “the day which the Lord has made” and we should “rejoice and be glad in it” (Ps. 118.24) and make something of it according to his having made it. We should and can act with purpose.

Beginning and ending the day with prayer brings a sense of purpose. It means seeing the day – both the things which happen to us and the things which we plan to do – as embraced by the grace of God, providing opportunities to love and serve Christ in one another, praying our thanks to him for whatever things occur in the run of the day. This means making time for prayer and study, not left-over time, but intentional time, time that is deliberately set aside for quiet, prayerful, contemplation and study. It means persevering and continuing in such holy time regardless of the inevitable interruptions and the all-too-frequent wanderings of our wayward minds. “In patience possess ye your souls” (Luke 21.19).

Could we not all make at least the beginnings of a beginning by allowing five minutes in the morning and five minutes in the evening of every day in Lent for prayer? Pray the Lord’s Prayer and the Collect for Ash Wednesday (BCP, p. 138) and/or the Sunday Collects, having before our mind’s eye Christ crucified and drawing into his passion those whom we love, the tasks of each day, and the cares of the world. Could we not do this with our children, with our families? Such prayer time adds up to hardly more than the time Christ hung on the Cross for us (Mark 15). To this can easily be added one of the Scripture lessons appointed for the mornings and the evenings of each day (See BCP, pp. xxii-xxvi).

Such prayer time will begin to pervade our lives with a sense of purpose and joy. Even the idle times of each day can be turned to good use – praying for someone who is sick by recalling their face and/or name to the presence of God, adoring some aspect or other of Christ’s boundless love made known to us from the Scriptures or in our lives. You see, we need not be defeated by circumstance. We can be defined by grace. “Be it unto me according to thy Word”(Luke 1.38).

The ordering of appetite: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the God” (Deut. 8.3, Matt. 4.4). Lent begins with the temptation of appetite and ends in the pains of appetite. The victory of the Cross overcomes both. Our Lord is tempted by Satan to turn stones into bread; our Lord on the Cross cries out, “I thirst” (John 19.28). What is his thirst?

It is at once sharply physical and intensely spiritual, but they are not of equal force. The thirst spiritual is our Lord’s thirst for our righteousness. It is a greater thirst than the thirst physical but only in the sense that his physical thirst in the effect of his spiritual thirst – i.e. desire – for our salvation. He is on the Cross for us. That is the insistent and undeniable Christian claim. His response to Satan provides the measure of the righteousness which he is, even as he is that Word which eternally proceeds from the Father.

Fasting and abstinence are the means by which the Creator is honoured through the disciplined use of the good things of creation. They are given for our service of him and not for our immediate, sensual enjoyment. If ever we are to enjoy the world aright, it will be by enjoying it in God. This is the theme of Rogationtide near the end of the Easter season when we remember how the whole of creation, too, is raised up in redemption. We dishonour God and his creation, ourselves and one another, our world and day, even our environment when we suppose that every itch is to be scratched, every impulse to be satisfied, every passion to be consummated.

Fasting and abstinence do not mean the sublimation of these aspects of appetite. There is nothing intrinsically wrong about impulse, instinct or the passions of our bodies. No. Fasting and abstinence seek to constrain our thoughtless indulgence of them, our careless use of them. The whole matter turns on how we give expression to our bodily appetites, whether we choose to be defined by them, “their god is their belly” (Phil.3.19) or whether we seek their right expression according to the justice of God’s creation and the right order of his will, “as instruments of righteousness” (Rom.6.13).

Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are the major fast days of the Church; the forty days of Lent are the days of abstinence (See BCP, p.xiii). When we fast we restrict ourselves to one full meal, usually in the evening, and content ourselves with the simplest and barest of things for the rest – for example, a piece of toast, a bowl of soup, in any event, nothing fancy. The quantity and the quality of our consumption are reduced though never to the point of bodily injury. Abstinence means giving up certain foods, drinks or treats completely for the forty days of Lent. Why such disciplines as fasting and abstinence? The poet Robert Herrick puts it best: “to starve thy sin not bin”. In both fasting and abstinence, our thoughtless indulgence is checked, the goodness of things as derived from the goodness of God is discerned and celebrated, and the more responsible and considerate use of the things of this world is advanced. In this, too, we see the roots of the redemption of all forms of environmentalism and the corrective challenge to our consumer wastefulness. Let nothing be taken for granted but in everything let God be praised.

The ordering of money: “Where your treasure is, there will be your heart also” (Matt. 6.21). What about our hearts? Are they pinched and narrow, miserly and tight, or are they big and open, generous and sacrificial in the spirit of Christ’s love? Do we act out of that love as truly as know we should? I’m sure that we don’t and no doubt we easily excuse ourselves. There are always extenuating circumstances. There are always “but-s upon but-s”.

Yet the measure of our giving relative to our means always provides a pretty good measure of our love. What we spend for and how much we spend should tell us something about what we think is really foremost and central in our lives and what is only an after-thought. The ordering of money concerns whether our giving to the work of Christ in his Church comes first or last. Do we give to God the first-fruits of our labours or simply the leftovers, if any? It is not a question of the absolute amount of money – some have more than others – but a matter of commitment. The measure of Scripture ranges from the tithe (10%) – the first-fruits – to the widow’s mite, her all. But perhaps the single most important point is that it is given to God. It is given out of faith.

The ordering of money also extends to our free-will offering, most especially, almsgiving. This means money – alms – for the poor “whom you have with you always” (Mark 14.7), whether visible or invisible in our communities. I remind you of the “poor box” in some of our churches – the little, locked box with a slot – in which the loose change which wears holes in your pockets can go to help relieve the necessities of the poor. Also, I would remind you of our local Food Banks and the box in the narthex of many of our churches for regular contributions of food. The ordering of money and goods moves us beyond ourselves and into the compassion of Christ Jesus our Lord. Such is charity and such are its works.

Devotion demands discipline right down to our pocket-books and purses, but only so that we may be raised up into the Son’s love for the Father. In a way, it is about nothing more – or less! – than praying what we live and living what we pray when we say:

Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive them that trespass against us; And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, For ever and ever. Amen.

You see, his prayer becomes our prayer that his life may be our life, our life lived in him and towards him in his love for the Father. Prayer is simply ordered life.

Fr. David Curry
Christ Church

Prayer Is Our Life is also available from the parish as a booklet for $5 plus shipping.  Click here for contact information[2].

Artwork: Roger van der Weyden, Crucifixion Altarpiece (detail of central panel), c. 1445. Oil on oak panel, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2009/03/18/prayer-is-our-life-lenten-meditation/

---