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jenny_islanderToday I am beginning a read-through of the chapter on prayer as a spiritual discipline.
Foster begins this chapter by quoting Julian of Norwich.
For some twenty-five or thirty years, Julian (or Juliana--sources differ) lived in a single room attached to a church in Norwich, England. She never left it. This was a personal choice that she attained only after applying for the position and proving her intent. Her only contacts with the world were through windows. Her room probably had one low down that served as a service hatch so that her maid could help her keep her room clean; one to the street, covered with a thin curtain, for light; and one into the church, so that she could join in worship services and also talk to anyone who came to her for advice. There she remained until the day she died, probably in the first quarter of the 15th century, at the age of seventy or eighty.
Supported by donations and the devoted service of a maid, she was subject only to the local bishop, this in a time when the Church wielded considerable power and was all about hierarchy. She was free to read--she was literate, although she may not have had any Latin--and to write. Her great work was a theological exploration of a series of visions that she had had while on the edge of death about twenty years before entering seclusion.
Julian had lived through riots, mass arrests, and the Black Plague. People came to her for spiritual advice during the decades of her life in that single room. But they didn't come to her because she had seen so much in the outside world. They didn't come to talk about her visions, as best we can tell. They came to her because she was like a living saint, and she was regarded as such because her life was absolutely dedicated to prayer. Surviving copies of handbooks written for people in her position describe hours spent in prayer every day.
How can a person pray for hours a day, every day, for years? And to what end?
Here is the quotation that Foster chose:
I am the ground of thy beseeching; first, it is my will thou shalt have it; after, I make thee to will it; and after I make thee to beseech it and thou beseechest it. How should it then be that thou shouldst not have thy beseeching?
I am irresistibly reminded of a scene from Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, in which a wise mystic tries to pass on the full insight of a life lived in the pursuit of enlightenment. His students, absolute beginners, are baffled. They can't figure out how his words have anything to do with what they came to him to learn. The mystic sighs and starts over. "We begin," he says, "with level flight." (All of the characters in the book are birds.)
Foster also recognizes this. His next words are, "Prayer catapults us onto the frontier of spiritual life." "Frontier" here has an American meaning, as a place beyond what you know but not inaccessible. You go there expecting to find things that you have never seen before, possibly never imagined--a place without detailed maps, a place that changes you. Julian of Norwich didn't know the word frontier, but she knew that feeling.
Onward:
Of all the Spiritual Disciplines prayer is the most central because it ushers us into perpetual communion with the Father. Meditation introduces us to the inner life, fasting is an accompanying means, study transforms our minds, but it is the Discipline of prayer that brings us into the deepest and highest work of the human spirit. Real prayer is life creating and life changing.
Abstraction upon abstraction. What does prayer, concretely, do?
"To pray is to change." Ah. "Prayer is the central avenue God uses to transform us. If we are unwilling to change, we will abandon prayer as a noticeable characteristic of our lives." Ouch.
I haven't even finished the first page of this chapter, but it's time to end this post. More later.
Foster begins this chapter by quoting Julian of Norwich.
For some twenty-five or thirty years, Julian (or Juliana--sources differ) lived in a single room attached to a church in Norwich, England. She never left it. This was a personal choice that she attained only after applying for the position and proving her intent. Her only contacts with the world were through windows. Her room probably had one low down that served as a service hatch so that her maid could help her keep her room clean; one to the street, covered with a thin curtain, for light; and one into the church, so that she could join in worship services and also talk to anyone who came to her for advice. There she remained until the day she died, probably in the first quarter of the 15th century, at the age of seventy or eighty.
Supported by donations and the devoted service of a maid, she was subject only to the local bishop, this in a time when the Church wielded considerable power and was all about hierarchy. She was free to read--she was literate, although she may not have had any Latin--and to write. Her great work was a theological exploration of a series of visions that she had had while on the edge of death about twenty years before entering seclusion.
Julian had lived through riots, mass arrests, and the Black Plague. People came to her for spiritual advice during the decades of her life in that single room. But they didn't come to her because she had seen so much in the outside world. They didn't come to talk about her visions, as best we can tell. They came to her because she was like a living saint, and she was regarded as such because her life was absolutely dedicated to prayer. Surviving copies of handbooks written for people in her position describe hours spent in prayer every day.
How can a person pray for hours a day, every day, for years? And to what end?
Here is the quotation that Foster chose:
I am the ground of thy beseeching; first, it is my will thou shalt have it; after, I make thee to will it; and after I make thee to beseech it and thou beseechest it. How should it then be that thou shouldst not have thy beseeching?
I am irresistibly reminded of a scene from Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, in which a wise mystic tries to pass on the full insight of a life lived in the pursuit of enlightenment. His students, absolute beginners, are baffled. They can't figure out how his words have anything to do with what they came to him to learn. The mystic sighs and starts over. "We begin," he says, "with level flight." (All of the characters in the book are birds.)
Foster also recognizes this. His next words are, "Prayer catapults us onto the frontier of spiritual life." "Frontier" here has an American meaning, as a place beyond what you know but not inaccessible. You go there expecting to find things that you have never seen before, possibly never imagined--a place without detailed maps, a place that changes you. Julian of Norwich didn't know the word frontier, but she knew that feeling.
Onward:
Of all the Spiritual Disciplines prayer is the most central because it ushers us into perpetual communion with the Father. Meditation introduces us to the inner life, fasting is an accompanying means, study transforms our minds, but it is the Discipline of prayer that brings us into the deepest and highest work of the human spirit. Real prayer is life creating and life changing.
Abstraction upon abstraction. What does prayer, concretely, do?
"To pray is to change." Ah. "Prayer is the central avenue God uses to transform us. If we are unwilling to change, we will abandon prayer as a noticeable characteristic of our lives." Ouch.
I haven't even finished the first page of this chapter, but it's time to end this post. More later.
