Prayer's Outward Sign

April 18, 2019

Maundy Thursday

As someone who works in interfaith relations, I was concerned to hear of the recent hospitalization of the Dalai Lama. We have very few religious figures who speak across religious divides and he is an important global icon of spiritual depth, of generous living and the consecrated life.

But that is not to say I agree with everything he says. He is not a Christian and religious differences are real. We can admire the faith and spirituality of others while still holding theological differences.

So a few years ago I heard the Dalai Lama speak at my university, the LSE. He was talking about the challenges to peace and tolerance that the younger generation must confront, and he said that what the world needs is not people who pray but people who act. “Change does not come through prayer,” he said. “Change comes through action.”

I’m sure if I’d had a chance to explore that with him we would have found much common ground, but to me this bald opposition between prayer and action is completely wrong. We see it, sadly, in many of our churches too.

There are those that do seem to retreat into enclosed pious communities where the worship may be beautiful and the prayers are, no doubt, sincerely offered but where devotion has not driven people to be agents in the world. They have prayed for the coming of God’s Kingdom but they don’t seem to think they need to do anything to help bring that about.

And then there are those frenetically busy churches that are running all manner of outreach programs in the community but where the spiritual motivation for this activity has been lost. These churches just take up secular progressive causes, which may be very worthwhile, but there is no sense in which prayer is shaping that activism in ways that would make it more profound or more godly.

For me, faithful service of others is not the opposite of prayer, not even a mere response to prayer; it is prayer’s outward sign. Faithful service is prayer in action. We see that most clearly in the Christian mystical tradition such as the medieval Spanish mystic St Teresa of Avila. She wrote about prayer as the way of perfection, the exploration of an interior castle. She was a Carmelite nun and her life was a daily rhythm of prayer. And yet she sees prayer as the energy that animates all moral action in the world. Loving service is a prayer, an extension of Christ praying within us, seat on what she calls the throne of our hearts.

And so she gives us the famous words:
Christ has no body but yours,No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.

And Christ himself teaches us this lesson on Maundy Thursday. This is the night when he takes a towel and washes his disciples feet. But it is also the night when he offers the most extraordinary prayer for his disciples to the Father, the so-called High Priestly prayer in John 17. This is the night when he tells them that the new commandment is to “Love one another” and it is by showing love to others that the world will recognize that they are Jesus’ disciples. But it is also the night when he tells them to “watch and pray”.

So how do we connect prayer and loving service in our own lives? St Teresa would say that it is a mystical link through which God is forming our actions in ways we cannot control. And she is right. But we may, as we start setting off on her way of Perfection, need to be a little more intentional in reflecting on how our prayers inform our actions and the needs of the world inform our prayers.

When I come to the intercessory section of my morning prayers, I have taken to dividing that into two parts. First I offer to God what is on my heart for the world, for humanity, and for my loved ones. I name before God the suffering that has troubled me on the news and in my day-to-day interactions. Those will be as systemic as climate change or as specific as the homeless man who sits outside my building.

And then, in the second part, I pray quite carefully through my diary for the day. Asking God to be present at every meeting or event, and asking God what purposes I should bring to those agendas and encounters.

It’s a good discipline because, for one thing, if the day’s events that I pray about in the second half have nothing to do with the needs of the world that I prayed about in the first half, then I have to ask myself some difficult questions about what I’m doing with my time. Do my priorities map onto what I think are God’s purposes for the world. Linking the two reminds me that we all are, as St Teresa says, Christ’s body – his hands, his feet and his eyes – in this world of need that we offer to him.

Connecting up faith and action in each of our lives is a big ongoing task. We can think about our professional lives and how they can be more directly oriented towards God’s purposes for creation. We can think about our voluntary activities and charitable commitments, about how they can be stronger expressions of our faith. And we can think about how prayer and worship form our basic character so that we are agents of the Kingdom in our day-to-day encounters, in thoughtfulness, kindness, forgiveness to others.

But what we need to be clear about in this of all weeks is that action that is truly inspired by our relationship to Jesus Christ is costly. Washing the feet of others is costly. Walking the way of the Cross is certainly costly. That cost for us may take the form of a reduced income, or a loss of status or prestige. Two students of mine in London were arrested earlier this week because of their participation in demonstrations against Government inaction on climate change. That could be costly to them. But when I reflect that they were arrested in this week when Jesus was arrested, for standing up to greed and complacency out of their commitment to God’s creation, I certainly can’t condemn them for that.

So if you are able to spend a little time this evening at the altar of repose, there are many prayers you might offer but I want to suggest you do the following. Spend a little time offering to God the things that trouble you about the world, its crises and injustices. Then spent a little time reflecting before God on your daily life, your work, your commitments, your leisure activities. And then spend a while reflecting on how you might better connect the two.

Ask yourself, where does the cost come in? Where do I lose face, or dignity, or money, or status? And rejoice in that. Because just as this is the night of Jesus’ glory, so a growing in sacrificial love informed by prayer will be for our glory too.