Striving for the Still Centre – reflections on prayer
I WELL remember the earnestness with which Bishop Arthur Butler delivered his exhortation on prayer to me and the three other deacons in the Diocese of Connor away back in 1981. He said, “ Prayer must have a central place in your personal life, and one of your prime responsibilities is to teach other people to pray.” Over the years I have often revisited this apparently simple but profound and challenging exhortation, not least because it raises two questions which are bound to come to the fore, especially in the carrying out of a pastoral ministry: what is prayer?, and how do you go about teaching it to other people?
It goes without saying that in trying to nd an answer to both of these questions an obvious place to start is with St. Luke’s intriguing passage in which he describes how the rst disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray (Luke 11 : 1-13). As pious Jews you would expect the disciples to know how to pray! But in their encounter with Jesus’ devotional practice they perceived how far short they were of the true spirit of prayer. And so they urge him, “Lord, teach us to pray...”
The prayer of Jesus
Jesus prayed much, and in the Gospels there are descriptions of many di erent types of prayer used by him.The disciples must often have actually witnessed Jesus in prayer for them to be moved to ask him to show them how to pray. There was something inspiring and powerful about prayer as engaged in by Jesus. If the disciples were to really enter into Jesus’ experience of God they must learn to pray as he prayed. What the disciples would have seen so clearly about Jesus’ life was that it was a prayerful life, with a character to match, and that was the best possible incentive to pray.
* Full article available in printed copies.
George Irwin
a member of Affirming Catholicism, retired earlier this year after 27 years as rector of Ballymacash, Diocese of Connor.