I volunteered to facilitate a session with our little emerging community this weekend, exploring further, our journey of prayer.

In my own personal journey, I’m learning a new response: to be comfortable in the discomfort of unanswered prayer and difficult spaces. So in keeping with our personal journeys being exposed and displayed in our community journeys, I wanted to follow this theme.

I had an ‘end in mind’, in the words of the famous Steven Covey, I wanted the group to paint or draw an image that gave them comfort in their space of unanswered prayer, but we never quite got there. We painted, but not from the space I had intended.

So I had to make a new response in this space of leadership and facilitation, be comfortable in the discomfort of the process not being what I had planned and expected!

W Tozer threw the first spanner. In his book, Man: the dwelling place of God, he says that if our prayers aren’t being answered, we have to check whether:

1. They are in the will of God – that our prayers fall within the broad will of God for all people

2. We are living lives pleasing to God – he hears and only answers the prayers of those who walk in his ways

This set the cat among the proverbial pigeons – we all thought He heard all our prayers, those that were and weren’t within His will and irrespective of our lives and purity before Him.

I was trying to nudge the group past this, I didn’t want to get stuck in the theology, debate and discussion around this. I wanted to move us on to the euphoria of being okay and at peace with our unanswered prayers, it’s much more comfortable!

I asked everyone to think of an area of unanswered prayer: – what is God inviting you to in this space? What is He asking you to consider? What is He exposing in you?

Phillip Yancey’s book on Prayer quoted John Baillie’s thoughts on prayer:

- Let me use disappointment as material for patience

- Let me use trouble as material for perseverance

- Let me use trouble as material for courage

- Let me use reproach as material for long suffering

- Let me use praise as material for humility

- Let me use pleasures as material for temperance

- Let me use pain as material for endurance

This resonnated with our group, and I guess as facilitator, was glad to get to this point as I had wanted us to journey to the place of being comfortable in discomfort. We live in a world where are our slogans are ‘fast’, ‘produce’, ‘destination’, ‘results’ and any hint at contemplation, journey, being is possibly our, or should I say my greatest challenges.

John Baillie’s suggestion of us using success and failure as material for growth are in keeping with Ecl- a time to live and a time to die etc.

I think it’s a journey we’ve just begun – none of us wanted to be comfortable in our discomfort, and I think it takes time, nurturing and discomfort to realise that we can consider just being. So I hope our little community will pursue this ‘discomfort’ further.

We are presently exploring the notion of intimacy with Godde. The past two sessions have been conversational and controversial as well as inspiring and informative. The next two session are going to be exploratory and experiential.

Just as we can understand how two people are communicating so too can we model the communication of groups. We live in a culture of attendence. A small group of professionals produce events that we attend. Whether we’re going to the movies or going to a lecture we’re participating in something that others make happen. We’re on the receiving end; the organisers are on the delivery end. There is often little desire on the part of attendees to participate.

The dynamics are as follows:

stage => audience

In everything in life, however, we evaluate the outcome based on the stated goal. Just as we evaluate our entertainment life based on what we want so too can we evaluate our spiritual life.

If I want to see a good movie. I go to see a movie. I am able, afterwards, to distinguish between the objective and subjective aspects of the movie. Was it technically good? Did I personally enjoy it? What was the story? What did it mean to me?

The stated goal of church may likewise be summarised and evaluated. It varies from congregation to congregation. In some, it is good worship while in others good teaching. We are faced with the desire for intimacy with Godde and with the question of what that looks like in our context. What does intimacy with Godde look like? What does it mean for us to experience Godde? How can we evaluate our dynamics, as facilitators and as a community, in order to determine whether and how we’re meeting with Godde?

Session One & Two

We distinguished between a generalised experience of Godde based on what we take out of our congregational experiences versus the explicit, direct, distinct and personal encounters with Godde that are recognisably so. We recognised that we all have different personalities, different ways of relating to others. The way we relate to people is often the way that we relate to Godde.

We briefly considered two processes mystics speak about – the via negativa and the via positiva. The via negativa (apophatic tradition, negative theology) is based around getting to know who and what Godde is through arguments of denial and deconstructive logic. The via positiva (kataphatic tradition, positive theology) is about trying to get to know who and what Godde is through the use of positive arguments and constructive logic. The balanced use of both processes is important. Firstly, each of us needs to deconstruct what we bring to the notion of intimacy with Godde; secondly, each of us has to reconstruct the notion of intimacy with Godde. Like most things involving personal and emotional growth this will be a simultaneous rather than sequential process.

We also considered three senses in which the presence of Godde is used. There is the omnipresence, personal and manifest presence of Godde.

By omnipresence we mean that Godde is present in all places at all times and in all things. Finding Godde in this sense is kind of like seeing the glass as half empty or half full. Where one person considers Godde present another may not and they are both equally correct.

When speaking about the personal or personalised presence of Godde we are talking about private spirituality, about your personal spiritual life and how you connect with Godde there. Whether you generally experience Godde when you’re out walking in nature, helping those in need, participating in worship, reading scripture, etc. is going to depend largely upon who you are, what you are like, and how you engage Godde in the privacy of your inner self.

The manifest presence of Godde is distinct from, though intrinsically interrelated to, the above. As the people of Godde, S/He promises to be known to us, to be present with us not just in the general, abstract senses in which we find Godde through activities or others but also directly and personally. Some limit their experience of Godde to reading from the Bible, others to listening to sermons, and yet others to doing other spiritual things. This is kind of like limiting your restaraunt meals to reading the menu alone, your fashion to watching fashion alone, your education to attending lectures alone. The experiences of people we read about in Scripture are what Godde promises to us – that just as they received direction in dreams and visions as well as by hearing Godde’s “voice” so too can we.

All three senses of Godde’s presence is important and just as we value creativity so too ought we to value intimacy with Godde.

This week (27th Jan) brings a new odyssey of spiritual adventure for our little group of crusaders. We tested some ancient paths with our liturgical Taize singing and then we founded some new ones using a piece of material and stones to represent our prayers rather than verbalising them. The experience was at times sacred, at times inspiring and at times also quite challenging and difficult. It’s a strange realisation how the experience of what is  spiritually meaningful is unique for each individual. 

Here is a summay of the mornings journeyings:

Taize singing. We divided into our various voice groups and learnt two songs that are sung at the ecumenical community of Taize in France. Each song has four parts – so the melodies take a while to learn but the words are very easy. The song is repeated over and over. We found that once we had learnt our parts, it was easy to get lost in the beauty of the sounds and nuances of the meaning of the words as we repeated them. It was our first time so we decided that this kind of singing was something we needed to carry through in order to fully enter into it.

“Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom” was the one song.

Nic picked up on this song in a scriptural reading where those words are found. The thief on the cross says it to Jesus before they both die.

Then we spoke about remembrance and forgetting…

We wrote down on a paper the things we remember that we should forget..the things that stand in the way between us and our relationship with God. We symbolically burnt these papers and had a time of open “confession” if you like. It was a meaningful experience. A quote stood out for me:

 ”Oh God consecrate these ashes; let them be for us, not the remnants of destruction but the refinement of our desire to know you…We welcome your refiner’s fire, remove our wood, hay and stubble and bless our efforts to seek after you. In Christ’s name we pray.”

Most of us have done a couple of sessions of Nia and so we played with the idea of movement in worship. Although there is still much to be discovered in this area – we made a dent I think in expressing symbolically through movement the thoughts and intentions that were coming through in the ealier stages of the meeting.   

Finally we prayed for one of our group and instead of using words – we prayed using objects to represent our prayers. This really highlighted for all of us how reliant we are on words to convey intention. The picture of our prayer tied up in material and stones on the floor became quite a poweful picture of the whole group’s prayer for this one member.

For me this session seemed to highlight the importance of symbolism in our expression of prayer, confession and worship.