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The Disciplined Search for Holiness

Candlemas : 2 February 2014  : Luke 2: 22-40

First thing, six days of the week, I come to this Church somewhere between 7.20 and 7.30 am. I open the doors, go to the Vicar’s chair in the sanctuary, and then for the next little while I wait on God in silent prayer and meditation, having begun first by writing in my journal about the pattern of God’s activity in my life over the past 24 hours. Then I talk to God about what is on my mind, and wait in silence giving God the room to connect with me in whichever way he chooses. After that I go to the Vicar’s stall by the organ, and say Morning Prayer. At the conclusion of this I pray in intercession, going through my day-by-day lists, praying for other Dioceses in the Anglican Communion, for other parishes in our Diocese, and for our missionaries overseas. I pray also for you, each one of you on the parish roll, so that you are all named once a week in our regular cycle of prayer. Others known to us through particular pastoral contacts are also held up in regular intercession. Later in the day, somewhere between 5 and 6 pm, I return to the Church and say Evening Prayer.

What the regular saying of the Divine Office does is to anchor me in the pressures of daily life, reminding me of whom I am and what I am supposed to be about in a world that is very keen to make me forget all of that. It also ensures that we at St Peters’s, Caversham are praying in union with the rest of the Church across the world. And it provides an engine of prayer so that the members of this particular part of the body of Christ are being regularly prayed for, even if they are too busy in their lives to pray for themselves. This approach to Christian spirituality was strongly encouraged at my theological college, which is partly why I think seminary training is very helpful for clergy. What is more this form of spiritual support is what Anglican parishioners have a right to expect from their Vicar. A parish priest with a disciplined spiritual life will also be a regular intercessor for their people

"Anna–never left the Temple, serving God night and day with fasting and prayer – Simeon–was an upright and devout man; he looked forward to Israel’s comforting and the Holy Spirit rested on him."

The x factor that enables Anna and Simeon to recognise that the key person they have been waiting for all these years derives from their disciplined search for holiness. The infant Jesus has no marks of celebrity or stardom about him to compel recognition. Discernment is required here. Only the eyes of faith, prepared by long years of discipline and patience, can see beneath the surface of things to the hidden and humble arrival in their midst of the God of Israel’s new initiative.

When people tell me that they don’t experience the presence of God - that there just doesn’t seem to be anything there behind the surfaces of reality, my first question is – do you pray, regularly and often? I know from my own experience that if I stop praying then I will stop experiencing the presence of God. It is just that simple.

We live in a world full of distractions, which abounds in anxieties, frustrations and enticements. The effect of all this constant pushing and pulling on the emotions, the viscera, and on our intellectual operations, is that we are always being drawn away from our true centre – we are always forgetting our baptismal identity. We are often self absorbed, or in a day dream, or in a tizz, or engaged in the kind of highly focussed problem solving, or analytical dissection of the empirical world, that is not conducive to contact with God.

Let me be clear about this – there isn’t an automatic connection between time spent praying and God turning up in our lives. God is not bound by our efforts to pin him down – he will disclose himself when he is good and ready. God is sovereignly free in his relationship with us. And prayer is a question of love, not technique. It is about building a relationship, rather than rolling out all the tricks of the trade known to the spiritual masters and mistresses down the ages. There isn’t a how to book that will infallibly lead you to a prayer union with God.

The way to think about it is this – what do I do to ensure that the friendships that matter to me are in good working order. That will involve time spent with these beloved others. It will be a matter of keeping in contact by a variety of means so that we let the other person know that we are interested in their doings. It is helpful too to change gear when we come into their company so that we become relaxed and unhurried in our conversation, with a mixture of humour and human interest that shows we are engaging with them at a number of levels. Atmosphere, emotional tone, and ambience matters too. That is why this Church is laid out the way it is. It is as though a selection of carefully chosen stage props have been brought together in such a way that we will be in the mood for a meeting with God.

So, when coming to prayer it is helpful to slow down, to clear a regular space in the day or night when we are unlikely to be interrupted, and to be our natural selves as we talk to God. It is important too not to be seduced or infatuated with our feelings. God doesn’t just live in our emotional registers. The often heard complaint that I cant feel anything happening ignores the reality that often God is at work on the submerged bits of us, his Spirit combining with our Spirit, to quietly and subtly rearrange some of our internal furniture. His characteristic way of operating through Divine grace is the change the underlying pattern of our thinking. Good things take time, as the cheese advertisement says, and God is aware that this kind of internal change is best taken quietly because rapid, direct transformation could well be experienced as a kind of psychic implosion.

Prayer isn’t just about us cultivating our inner life with God. It is also about asking God to do good things for others. I find it helpful to have day-by-day lists, and I recommend this for your prayer life too. If we don’t think through all the people and situations we want to pray for, and then put them down in an organised list that makes sure we bring them before God regularly, then what will happen is that we will sink into the groove of praying for a few people well known to us over and over again, while only fitfully remembering, or forgetting completely, many others who we want to uphold in intercession before God.

That is important because prayer changes things, even if they happen in God’s good time and not ours. So we want to make sure that the people we care about, and the situations that we want to change, don’t miss out just because we forgot. We need to be organised. It is all part of the disciplined search for holiness.

And that in turn is one of the hidden identity markers of the Anglican ethos. That is to say, our Church has come to understand through long experience that those who want to have a life with God will need to be reasonably well organised about it, and will need to build the routines of this committed search for God into the structures and habits of their daily living.

Finally, let me finish with one of the best descriptions of prayer that I know. It comes from the poem the Four Quartets, and that devout Anglican layman T S Eliot wrote it: