Reflection
Pause for Prayer
Pause for Prayer
I came across these words recently from the Buddhist nun, Pema Chödrön: When we pause, allow a gap and breathe deeply, we can experience instant refreshment. Suddenly, we slow down, look out, and there’s the world.
Just at the moment I’m finding it hard to see beyond packing boxes. We are in the middle of dismantling the house and moving back to the U.K. I know I need prayer, but it’s hard to pray. So, if you will allow me, this short piece might be a prayer, a little pause for me – but hopefully for you too! We need prayer that takes us out of ourselves, beyond our usual anxieties and limits to truly see God.
So here goes… Our Father. Not the God of one tribe or group or people like us. But the Father of us all. We could breathe that in. A God who calls us to be more than I – to become we – even though we are so different, rub each other up the wrong way, and are capable of make secret judgements about one another. In this trinitarian God (this God who is community and communion, who loves us beyond the uttermost - as a parent loves a child, as a child truly respects a teacher) we can be who we are meant to be, and live and move and have our being. Together we reach out to the One who is both beyond and absolutely here.
Your Kingdom come, your will be done. A lovely, symmetrical pair of ideas. God’s kingdom emerges when and where God’s will is done. And that could be in ‘outer space’ between people who want to surrender all for the sake of God and his piercing love, or it could be in that ‘inner space’ which is the womb of the soul. We could breathe that in. The Kingdom grows when a leper is made whole, when someone living with humiliating difference is accepted and welcomes, when a self-seeking egomaniac finds Gospel, when a dying man on a Roman cross gives up his life in trust and hope to his Father, when a person turns from anxious activity to silent prayer and trust.
Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. This seems conditional. To the extent I forgive others – those others who wind me up, who just have to open their mouths and I know I’m going to disagree with them, those who grate on me like a cheese-grater, those who hurt me – to the extent I can learn to forgive, I am forgiven. An immutable spiritual law. Ouch. Could we breathe in the scary scope of these words? And beyond the scariness, a whiff of freedom. To be able to let all of it go, all of that weight, and ultimately live in such a freedom.
Pause, wait, breathe.