Author: CCW

“I will that all men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands”

Praying everywhere and all the time. That is the radical meaning of prayer. It signifies, as Richard Hooker puts it, “all the service that we ever do unto God.” In short, it is about the Godward direction of our lives. What that means is the challenge. But at the very least it suggests something about the power and nature of prayer. It suggests that prayer belongs to our thinking and our loving and our doing; in other words, our very being.

This opens us out to a broader view of prayer, though one which is deeply embedded in our liturgical tradition of prayer, in liturgical prayer itself. Nothing signals the Godward direction of our lives better than the liturgy, itself a labour, a human work but one which has been infused with the grace of God. Paul’s Letter to Timothy alludes to an aspect of this, namely, the physical gesture of holy hands uplifted in prayer. It suggests the orans position, a visible way of signifying our openness to divine grace and to the ways in which God’s grace shapes our lives through prayer.

The Gospel from Luke reminds us that the heart of all prayer is the Lord’s Prayer. That prayer gathers us into the intimacy of the Son’s love for the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. It is the prayer which Jesus teaches us to pray – when you pray, not if. Apart from the literal words there is the deeper meaning of that prayer. The story which he tells that accompanies the teaching about the Lord’s Prayer is about persevering in prayer.

What is that about? Simply this, that God wants us to want what he wants for us and through prayer we are engaged in learning to ask what it is that we should be seeking. Knowing and desiring are both part of the dynamic of prayer. The Gospel makes it clear that persevering in “asking, seeking, knocking” results in “receiving, finding,” and in the “opening” to the will of God. Something is required of us. It is our wanting God’s will to “be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Rogationtide is all about prayer and prayer is all about asking. It means, however, the willingness to learn what to ask for and in what way. It is nothing less than the reality of our lives as lived for God and with God and in God; and all because of the Resurrection. We are gathered into the very motions of the love that is the Trinity.

“I will that all men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands”

Fr. David Curry
Rogation Monday, 2015

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“And the Lord showed him all the land”

How do we look upon the land, upon our world? Do we see it as something to be exploited and used to our benefit and interest economically and materially? Or do we see the land more spiritually and intellectually in ways that might condition our use of it? How can we separate ourselves from the land? How we look upon the land equally speaks to how we look upon ourselves.

In our secular or civil culture, this is Mother’s Day but in the liturgical patterns of prayer and praise it is Rogation Sunday. The word rogation signifies prayer but with a profound connection to the land and our world. In the great Eucharistic gospel for today, Jesus tells us about his coming into the world and about his leaving the world. Somehow the world itself is gathered into the spiritual motions of the Son’s love for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.” And this makes all the difference for the understanding of our lives wherever we find ourselves in the world. There is the possibility for our affection for our places in the land and for a real commitment to the good of the land. The world does not stand over and against us in terms of our relation to God. As Jesus says, “I have overcome the world.”

We are challenged about how we see the land and about how we see ourselves in the landscape of creation redeemed. That is the great message of Eastertide and of this Sunday. The lesson from Deuteronomy tells the story of Moses being allowed to see the promised land before he dies. He sees but does not enter into the promised land. In the lesson from Acts, Paul preaches the Resurrection in Antioch Pisidia by way of reference to the Exodus and the promised land. “And as they went out [of the synagogue], the people begged that these things might be told them the next sabbath,” (Acts 13.42). We can be changed by what we hear – again and again, it seems.

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