Prayer - We don't know the half of it

www.telegraph.co.uk

There is water on Mars– or at least some sort of brine, and questions are no doubt already surfacing. Who will be the first to lay hold of the planet’s mineral wealth? Who will claim its forbidding terrain, give it a corporate name and then, in ignorance and haste, wreck it?

Perhaps these questions have already been answered, which only confirms the fact that destruction of the irreplaceable is the price we all pay for the ignorance and greed of past generations compounded by the selfishness and duplicity of the present one. This being the case, there is little reason to suppose that the fate of Mars will differ from that of Earth.  

The wealth of Mars, brought through its trickle of life giving water, will be unevenly distributed. Its key beneficiaries will justify their own short-term selfishness on the basis of ‘trickle down’ economic theories which are proving unjust and unworkable and whose methods also contribute to the ultimate destruction of planets – our own, and potentially others.

This whole destructive process feels unstoppable because, it seems, there is no single ultimate justice which we can trust and to which we can be accountable, no source of mercy to engage with us in the taking of responsibility for what we do with life itself. As a direct result of this, we seem to be losing sight of the purpose of our very existence. We are drowning in our own lostness.

It is as if the more we learn, the less we know, because in our haste to acquire, achieve and be something other than what we are (frail and fallible creatures, but who are gifted with intelligence and free will), we have lost our connection with the source of life and truth, from which comes the kind of deep understanding which issues forth in right judgment and responsible leadership.

Faced with this reality, systems and the people which systems ultimately control and govern (even though such people believe that it is they who are in control) start to fall apart. We are seeing this in the systemic disintegration of the institutional Church and we are seeing it in the panic experienced by the Labour party as a result of the unexpected arrival of two righteous people to lead it. No doubt everything will be done to try to undermine these people and so de-stabilise a hope-filled situation.

This general state of rapid disintegration resembles a piece of knitting which is falling apart. The work goes well until a few stitches get dropped. If these are not picked up and re-worked immediately, the piece unravels to a point where it becomes irretrievable. The human predicament, and the state of the planet, are like intertwined stitches which are part of a far greater work. In the case of knitting, when one stitch goes, the whole piece disintegrates, unless the knitter is quick to spot the situation and has the patience to work down to the dropped stitch and pick it up.

In terms of the world and our own lives, we are dependent on a creator God who is forever picking us up, and picking up our dropped stitches. When we become aware of this, and work with his purpose for us, we become agents of his salvific process. We engage in his ongoing work of redemption. This is the work of prayer.

There is no telling how this mending and re-making actually functions, because prayer takes place within the uniqueness of every human heart. It also depends on faith, and faith itself is only known in the human heart. It is not an intellectual exercise, so no single person can judge whether another has or does not have the faith needed to make prayer a reality in their lives. Similarly, nobody is in a position to judge whether someone’s prayer has been ‘effective’, or tell them how to make it so.

Faith is not just a matter of belief. It is about recognising and owning our need for God’s mercy. Prayer begins with facing into one’s deep need for God and daring to let ourselves be touched by his love. When we do this we bring with us our planet’s fragility and the strangely alien beauty of worlds as yet barely discovered. In whatever way, or whatever circumstances this encounter with God takes place, his mercy is recognised first of all in prayer. It is felt for what it is and never forgotten. It elicits a response. 

There is no way of ‘proving’ that this response has had an effect in any given situation. Who knows if apartheid would, or would not, still prevail in South Africa if millions of people had not allowed their need for God and for his mercy to enable some of them to be proactive in overcoming that particular evil? Whether or not they took direct action, they were all involved in the work of prayer. The same can be said of those who pray into the evils of the present day.

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