From the vicar (28 August)

Dear St Giles’ and St Margaret’s church families,

Last week in both churches we marked St Bartholomew, which means that we didn’t have the collect for the Tenth Sunday After Trinity, which goes like this:

Let your merciful ears, O Lord,
be open to the prayers of your humble servants;
and that they may obtain their petitions
make them to ask such things as shall please you;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

I was listening the other day to a special edition of The News Agents, hosted by Emily Maitlis, on the question of whether Christianity, and religion in general, was on the rise in the UK amongst young people.

A couple were interviewed who had recently turned to Christ, and they said it was because they had repeatedly found that on a number of occasions “their prayers had been answered”. Now, I am thrilled for them and wish them all the best as they embark on their life of faith together, but I couldn’t help but want to ask them some more questions.

What did it mean for them to have their prayers answered? Did it mean that they got what they wanted? And what would they say to the sceptic who might say that it was all just a bunch of coincidences?

The danger with hitching our faith to the idea that God will answer our prayers if we pray hard enough / long enough / with sufficient conviction is that, sooner or later, we will find that we are not given what we want or even (as far as we can ascertain) what we need. This can obviously be pretty faith-shattering.

One way to avoid that is to castigate ourselves, to believe that there is something wrong with how we were praying. And maybe there was, but not in the way we might think.

This collect by Thomas Cranmer (adapted from the old Latin Sarum Rite, with likely roots in the Augustinian tradition) turns the common idea of prayer upside down. Rather than viewing it as a way to persuade or manipulate God into giving us what we want or need – as if our God was akin to the proud and arrogant gods of the Greek pantheon – prayer becomes a way of aligning our will to God’s.

We receive things from God, not because we have tricked him into giving them to us, but because we have asked “such things as shall please you“. This rather begs the question: how do we know what shall please God? And the apparently rather circular answer is: through a life of prayer.

There is a (perhaps intentional?) irony in the collect which asks God to “let your merciful ears… be open to the prayers of your humble servants” when it is our ears which need to opened, to truly listen to God’s will for us.

There isn’t a single “correct ” way to pray – although I’d urge anyone not to reject too quickly any of the many powerful approaches which have been developed within and without the Church over the centuries (there’s a reason they have lasted so long!). But our varying commitments (e.g. family, work, volunteering) and our differing personalities might mean that one person’s prayer life looks quite different to another’s.

But whatever approach we take, I’d urge us all (myself included!) to listen to God a bit more than perhaps we already do.

And on that note of listening, I leave you with a beautiful Tudor setting of Cranmer’s original version of the collect: