Thread by @jarrodmckenna

Some thoughts on prayer.

There is a little line in the Rule of St. Benedict that says,

“If you hear [God’s] voice today, do not harden your hearts.”

I want to confess why it is tempting, some may say sensible, to harden your heart from the voice of God.

If prayer is just a place to project pathologies, a form of control, a seeking to conjure, a coercion of our will again the rest of creation, there is no danger in ‘hearing’ in prayer.

Echoes of our ego offer no threat. Projecting our pathologies in babbling will only fortify walls and validate the vision of our Babels.

The sound of our anxieties, photocopied desires & fears reverberating back off the walls of a hard heart are comforting confirmations. Particularly if we blasphemously address them as “God”. Our prison of ideology, pathology, clan & culture are safe from the threat of salvation.

As R.S. Thomas poem reads,

after the weather of
his asking, no still, small
voice, only the parade
of ghosts, casualties
of his past intercessions.

Part of prayer is learning to observe the parade of ghosts and casualties that parade through our thoughts.

Do not demonise them. Do not deify them. Learn observe them in the kind of compassion that first called you into prayer.

Under no circumstances call what we need to be saved from salvation.

Liturgy at its best gives us the poetry and grammar to interpret the tongues of our own heart in the devastating nakedness of laying upon the Ground of Being.

Prayer is that peculiar vulnerability where the grief of God can pierce our hardness of heart.

In prayer we come to hear that the cries of the suffering is the voice of God addressed to us.

‘There is not a friend like the lowly Jesus’. And to be his friend, is to be found where he is found.

Our sorrow, that he carries, is entrusted to us, as a call to action.

As we respond, this same sorrow is burnt as fuel of which the byproduct, hauntingly, is a sober joy.

Those who move beyond heaping up words know that if you listen in prayer, God is asking us to answer God’s prayers, in the power God provides.

In prayer we learn the men on Manus are our brothers. The refugee is our sister. The homeless youth, our child. The hungry, our mother. The incarcerated our neighbour. The poor, our people.

In prayer we see clearly, through the tears, that there is no them, only all of us.

And loved, loved, loved are *all* of us.