Master, teach US to pray

Other people praying. Somehow, the sight always draws the eye, commands one's attention. We are fascinated.

Monks, books in hands, calmly singing the Divine Office in choir.
A nun, eyes cast down, contemplative, totally engaged.
Buddhist monks, eyes closed, motionless in saffron.
Jews in yarmulkes and prayer shawls, bowing by the Western Wall of Jerusalem's Temple.
Muslims in straight rows, bowing heads to the ground in unison.
A lone Hindu sannyasi, focused on a point a thousand miles away.

Ineluctably, one wonders: what are they experiencing?

Some of us recoil, discomfited. Why is that? Fear of the unknown in what we are seeing? The pray-ers' having and our not-having whatever-it-is puts a great gulf between them and us, between their worldview and ours. It makes some of us fearful and we flee, sometimes taking refuge in denigrating both prayer and pray-ers. It's comforting to tell ourselves that we do not need what they think they have, which anyway is a delusion.

But we do need what they have, though, and it is no delusion. People do not live long lives of discipline and deprivation and remain content in a mere delusion. The scales would fall from their eyes sooner or later and they would go, and try to make 'ordinary' lives with all the world has to offer.

Even in our ordinary lives we can share what these pray-ers have, in our bad times, our good times, our everyday, nothing-special times.

There are no atheists in foxholes, they say. Fear makes us pray, by instinct - an in-built faculty.

When our hearts suddenly burst with gratitude for one of life's loveliest, most awesome blessings suddenly apprehended... a love, recognised... sunlight in a quiet wood... sudden relief from great suffering... to whom are we grateful? We pray our gratitude, not knowing to whom.

Some of us yearn with inchoate hunger for what we recognise that these others, these praying others, seem to have, but we ourselves have not. One sometimes hears: 'I wish I had your faith.'

It is often taken for granted that prayer follows the dawning of faith but, counterintuitive though it sounds, sometimes it is the other way around: faith follows from prayer.

To have what the pray-ers have, with or without intellectual belief, one needs only to imitate the practice: to pray. Just to begin, knowing nothing about what we are doing. Just - pray. Not understanding to whom does not matter, in the beginning. Merely acknowledge the possibility of the existence of a personal entity infinitely greater than ourselves but who recognises us and our longing, One to whom we can present ourselves and our longing, just as we are, however blindly, as though into a darkness. But it is darkness only to our poor sight, because in that darkness, warm, bright Perfect Love lives.

That is enough, to begin to pray: 'Are you there? I think you may be, and if you are, well, here am I, just me, just as I am.'

There. You are praying.

And out of the darkness, Love will respond. Love can do no other but respond to a humble, openhearted, nakedly honest call. Heart speaks to heart. Mind-to-mind can come later. The heart knows.

The Apostles had been brought up praying in the Temple and the synagogues, like everybody they knew. They had thought that they knew what prayer was. But now, watching Jesus as He withdrew some distance from them and prayed alone for a long time, they realised that His prayer was entirely different from their familiar ritual which seemed, in comparison, to be little more than adherence to a formula, although a holy, beautiful and time-honoured formula, to be sure. But something was missing. They now saw that something, and they wanted it.

Watching the Master pray opened their eyes to their hunger, their need, their helplessness, their not knowing how to pray as He was praying.

When he returned, they pleaded with Him: 'Master, teach us to pray. We want to pray as you pray. Master, teach us to pray as you do.'

And He did. "When you pray, say: 'Our Father...' "