Before re-posting this service on Prayer which reflects some of the things I was thinking about nearly ten years ago when it was first written, here’s some recent research from May this year:
A quarter of adults in the UK have watched or listened to a religious service since the coronavirus lockdown began, and one in 20 have started praying during the crisis, according to a new survey.
The survey of more than 2,000 people, commissioned by the Christian aid agency Tearfund and carried out last weekend, found that a third of young adults aged between 18 and 34 had watched or listened to an online or broadcast religious service, compared with one in five adults over the age of 55.
One in five of those who have tuned into services in the past few weeks say they have never gone to church.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/03/british-public-turn-to-prayer-as-one-in-four-tune-in-to-religious-services
Google searches for “prayer” have surged worldwide in step with the surge of emerging cases of Covid-19, according to a European researcher.
The rising interest in seeking information about “prayer” on Google “skyrocketed during the month of March 2020 when Covid-19 went global,” wrote Jeanet Sinding Bentzen, an associate professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and executive director of the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics and Culture.
Using Google Trends data on internet searches for “prayer” for 95 countries, she said she found that “search intensity for ‘prayer’ doubles for every 80,000 new registered cases of Covid-19.”
The data-timeline showing search intensity on ‘prayer’ is flat before a country registers its first case of Covid-19 and then drastically rises after the first case is registered in a country for all regions of the world, including Muslim majority nations.
Daily data on Google searches for 95 countries demonstrates that the COVID-19 crisis has increased Google searches for prayer (relative to all Google searches) to the highest level ever recorded.
The level of prayer search shares in March 2020 was more than 50% higher than the average during February 2020.
Google Trends measures keyword searches as a share of all total searches so any increase in internet activity doesn’t skew the data…
Ok, so mostly for the benefit of a new group which has just been initiated at Mill Hill seeking to deepen our practice of prayer, but, if you happen to be passing by, for your benefit too 🙂 here is a service which was first preached in spring 2011:
“Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul.” MG Gandhi
When when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord.
The English Dominican Victor White OP used to maintain that people generally find prayer difficult when they pray for the wrong things. By this he meant that we often spend our time praying for what we think we ought to want, rather than those things that we actually want. It can be difficult to concentrate on a prayer for world peace, for example, if what we really want is a red Ferrari. For White, then, distractions in prayer are simply our real wants and concerns breaking in on ‘bogus’ desires for worthy matters: when we are praying for what we really want we won’t be distracted.
from ‘God Matters’
Scepticism is part of the prayer. […] Instead of scepticism I would call it a suspension of certainty, and this is part of the prayer. And then I consider that this suspension of certainty, this suspension of knowledge, the inability to answer your question, ‘Who do you expect to answer these prayers?’ is part of what a prayer has to be in order to be authentic. If I knew, if I were simply expecting an answer, that would be the end of the prayer. That would be an order, the way I order a pizza. No, I am not expecting anything. And my assumption is that I must give up any expectation, any certainty as to the one, or more than one, to whom I address this prayer, if this is still a prayer. […] It’s a hopeless prayer on the one hand, and I think this hopelessness is part of what a prayer should be.
I know that in praying something happens, even if there is no God in the form of a Father or a Mother receiving my prayer. I know that by the act of praying in the desert, out of love (because I wouldn’t pray otherwise) something might already be good in myself: a therapy might be taking place. I know that by doing this, I try – I will not necessarily succeed – to affirm and accept something in myself that won’t do any harm to anyone, especially to me. The impression that I do something good for myself or my loved ones, that’s the calculation. If through this prayer, I am a little better at reconciliation and I give up any calculation because I cannot calculate the incalculable, I can become better.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG_nyd45czM
Reading 2:
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train
Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child’s name as though they named their loss.
Darkness outside. Inside the radio’s prayer-
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.
Address – Prayer
I come across very different concepts of what prayer is and I‘m convinced there is plenty of room to accommodate many of them but I ‘m also convinced that some of our ideas of what prayer is – and isn’t – are out dated and unhelpful.
There’s a saying which goes something like: “tell me the God you don’t believe in and I probably wont believe in him either.”
The arguments against the existence of God almost all rely on a play-ground caricature of religious belief that very few actually believe in. And this caricature almost always extends into the area of prayer. The image of prayer suggested by thejoke I told at the beginning of the service is a very stubborn archetype, and we somehow don’t seem able to shift out of what is essentially a medieval way of thinking. As we heard in the first reading: “As if prayer is an order, the way I order a pizza”.
Well unfortunately we cant dismiss this quite so quickly because in many ways we are medieval in our thinking and the habits of the playground don’t disappear so quickly – if I’m careful to be honest with myself I can see that sometimes that sort of prayer does come as a reflex: “Oh God” we say throwing our head back “please let me find my key.” As if God being above us would be able to see that the key is on top of the fridge behind the spiderplant- and tell us.
Or we genuinely pray hard for a little life in the balance in an incubator. And then we wonder who we were with this sudden deity to pray to.
The medieval theologian St Augustine had a very different view of prayer as a matter of fact; he believed that we pray not to intercede with God, not to ask for something in particular but to allow ourselves to cultivate a habit of mind more in tune with the mind of God.
Now when I say the mind of God I remember that the English philosopher of enlightenment rationalism John Locke understood God as . And that the Jewish rationalist and mystic Baruch Spinoza in his Ethics ten years later proposed that mind is projected to an “eternal and infinite mind of God” Ethics 5, prop 35-42. More recently Paul Tilllich found it useful to refer to God as the ground of all being and many today conceive of god as ‘Ultimate Good’ and that is fine with me.
The Jewish religion is wonderfully clear that all our attempts to name, define, quantify or rationalize God are hopelessly doomed.
The Rabbi Abraham Heshel taught that the reason the Jewish religion has always forbidden making the image of God in any form is not that God has no image, but that the only image it is acceptable to form is one made in the medium of your life.
If I view prayer as an attempt to bring myself into better alignment, to allow myself to be more in tune with the mind of God, with something outside of myself at any rate, something bigger and better than myself perhaps, some certain other things can’t help but happen too. For a start I ‘ve acknowledged that I’m not at the centre of the universe – and in our particular culture that’s a deeply counter-cultural and even subversive thing to do.
To acknowledge that I am not at the centre is the beginning of humility, and humility can be said to be the most important of all spiritual practices.
“If in your life time you can pray only one prayer and it is thank you – it will be sufficient”. Meister Eckhardt. Eckhardt was another medieval theologian as a matter of fact, late medieval, and he is articulating a thought here that has a very modern traction: the power of gratitude to transform our experience of everyday life. Again it is not important to have a clear sense of who we are offering thanks to and I dont say that to be politically correct or to be inclusive of atheist sensibilities – I say it because I dont think its possible to be clear about this.
I say it because its more important to give thanks than to know exactly what it is that your doing or why. You can think of it a little in the way that a yoga teacher recently put it to me: “if you turn up the corners of the mouth you become a little more happy”. Maybe the action of doing has to come first before the certain knowledge of why.
So one definition of prayer might be “allowing ourselves to come into alignment with the way of the infinite and feel gratitude for the good”. Note that neither of these requires us to go to any special place, neither church nor cathedral, nor do we need to be baptised or confirmed or sworn in or signed-up and we dont have to be faithful, we dont have to be sure.
One of the strongest resistances to prayer is that we don’t have time to pray. I have a friend who meditates for an hour every day and when I said I would never be able to afford an hour a day he said “nowadays I can’t afford the time not to meditate”. He meant that his practice was what enabled him to make the best use of the rest of his time. Nevertheless for me ten minutes of quiet and calm is about as likely as a lottery win which is maybe why I especially like the idea that prayer can be what we do in any moment of our lives. And I love the stories of those mystics and sages who people say “all their lives were prayer” or “every breath was prayer.” This brings prayer into contact with what the Buddhist tradition calls mindfulness and what we might call “prayerfulness”.
There is a lovely story in Rumi: a man has prayed faithfully every day of his life and towards the end of his life he is angry and says: “all this time I’ve prayed to God and never once God have you answered” And the answer comes to him; but your praying is the answer.”
Mahatma Ghandi was one whose life was a powerful testament to the power of prayer I’ll end by reading two things that that twentieth century prophet had to say about prayer:
“I started with disbelief in God and prayer, and, until at a late stage in life, I did not feel anything like a void in life. But at that stage I felt that, as food was indispensable for the body, so was prayer indispensable for the soul. In fact, food for the body is not so necessary as prayer for the soul. I have found people who envy my peace. That peace, I tell you, comes from prayer; I am not a man of learning, but I humbly claim to be a man of prayer. I am indifferent as to the form. Every one is a law into himself in that respect. But there are some well-marked roads, and it is safe to walk along the beaten tracks, trod by the ancient teachers.”
“Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul.” It is daily admission of one’s weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”
A Space of possibility 