Lessons: Psalm 40, 54; Deuteronomy 26:1-11; 2 Corinthians 8:16-24; Luke 18:9-14
Every morning I rise to make coffee and then to pray. I have done so for decades now using the Daily Office, Morning Prayer. In times past I have moved between using the full Office to simply reading the Psalms and Gospel and sit in silence after. This last decade I have prayed by the aid of the Saint Helena's Breviary, even before it was published. I enjoy the Convent's inclusive language in the Psalter for it sits well with my heart and mind. It opens my image of God and yet keeps it consistent with my tradition of Christianity.
Always there is time for intercession, though sometimes when I go into the deeper silence after the lessons, I come out again and forget others in my prayer. Then there is an "Uh oh." I remember to go back and pray my list of others.
I once prayed for very specific things mostly. Now I mostly pray in a less predetermined way, just holding a name before God and in my heart. I will pray for healing, guidance, blessing, forgiveness, wisdom ...as they occur to me. But mostly I rest a name in God seeking God's good. Sometimes I am also seeking some purification of how I relate to another, some clarity of how best to care. But as I grow older prayer is much less about me, my agenda, and is rather desiring to fall into God's agenda, to know it or flow into it.
Is this the right way to pray? I can never be sure but it is a way to pray. The ancients must have prayed this way as well as other ways. There is nothing new in prayer, just deep and shallow. Yet even these are acceptable to God who hears all prayer, who we believe to be effected by all prayer.
I do know prayer can go astray if it is only focused on my agenda. Then it can become me obsessive rather than God centered. I guess if one had to set a goal for prayer it would be to open one's self to God and God's great hope for each of us and all of us as a group.
Perhaps that is what is at the heart of today's Gospel. These two men who go to pray in the Temple have differing expectations of this time. The first goes to see how God-likable he is. He 'prays' "God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income." (Luke 18:11-12) In so many ways his self perspective has aimed high, except it has left him superior, self-impressed. Does not prayer mature us into seeing that the goodness we achieve, set our hearts toward, comes by the blessing of vision meeting opportunity and acted upon? He seems to have lost the perspective that even this is a gift from God that is to humble us even as we set ourselves to good. We are only good aspiring to God's good.
The Tax Collector is a different story. He, "standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner!" (Luke 18:13) His self perspective seems to us so weak. Yet it is perhaps a truthful statement. Perhaps he has jilted people with his off-the-top take on taxes. Was it just individuals or was it also the "system" he cheated? Perhaps he resented being thought of poorly by others as a day-in and day-out part of life and harbored resentment. Perhaps he disliked the bitterness it seeded in his heart. All of this or something else brings him to pray, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner!" We taste his despair.
So we are to wonder, which of these is more open to God's softening, molding, making? Jesus says it is the latter. He is the one who can justly hope for God to enter and effect his life. This "justly" is based on God being better than just.
This potential to be softened, remade, is the womb of prayer. This is the soft tissue of hope that longs for God's continual making. It does not so much matter what tool we use to get there, to go to this place of quiet and vision and self perspective and God perspective. It does not matter nearly as much as it matters that we desire God. Jesus' insights and teachings can be a most effective route when mulled over in quiet or with others' insights.
But the womb is in us all, waiting.
Two Went Up To The Temple to Pray Richard Crashaw, 1613-1649
Two went to pray? O rather say
One went to brag, the other to pray:
One stands up close and treads on high,
Where the other dares not send his eye.
One nearer to God’s altar trod,
The other to the altar’s God.
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