Skip to main content

How Did Jesus Pray?


This is an address to the 3 in 1 group, given by John Franklin on July 2, 2023


How did Jesus pray? The gospel sources preserve a memory that deeply impressed them. Jesus withdrew to pray. But we know that while he prayed the prayers of his people, he sought intimate solitude with his Father. His silent waiting on God was the well he drew from.

 

Jesus was born into a people who knew how to pray.

They were not like others in the Empire who didn’t know which god to trust; they made altars to them all;

to get a hearing, they tried to wear them out; they threatened, scorned them. But this way was not the way of Israel. Their day began and ended, with the Shema; ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, you mind.’ And it was followed by number of blessings, the Barochah 

 

Some examples:

‘Cure us, O Lord our God, of all the wounds of our heart.  Remove sadness and tears from us.  Blessed are you who cure our wounds.’

 

‘You alone reign over us.  Blessed are you O Lord who love justice.’

 

‘Hear O Lord, the voice of our prayer.  Show us your mercy, for you are a good and merciful God.  Blessed are you O Lord who hear our prayer.’

 

‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has kept us alive and preserved us and enabled us to reach this season.’

These, prayers, even today, are all said in order. There is a lovely story of man who found himself lost in the woods at prayer time, and he was without his prayer book. He reminded God that he couldn’t remember the prayers, so he told God, “I will recite the letters of the alphabet, O Lord, and you can put the prayers together.”  This tells me that it is the intention of our hearts that authenticates prayer.  

Jesus will have known the prayers by heart, and like all his people, he will have prayed standing, with head up, though he threw himself on the ground in Gethsemane.

 

We see him praying through the day: he cures the sick with prayer, he blesses little children, he thanks the Father for showing things to infants rather than the wise. In it all, we see his absolute trust in God, and his communion with God. But the real source of his life and ministry is his silent waiting on God; his openness to God; his seeking his Father’s will. He is centred in God – God who is love, is goodness.

 

You may remember the Dusty Springfield 1963 song:

“I only want to be with you.” It echoes “As the deer longs for flowing waters…” “Be still and know… Sink down and know that I am God” “Into your hands O Lord…  Wait…”  And Zephaniah says God rejoices over us with singing. Was Jesus listening to the song?  Can we?

 

‘Wait on the Lord’. The Psalms say it 25 times, Isaiah 11, and there are 116 in total. Wait on the lord, so that, as Paul says, we may be strengthened in our inner/hidden self, that Christ may dwell in our hearts, that we may be being rooted and grounded in love, transformed by the renewing of our minds.

 

So how can we be like Jesus, open and available to the Holy Presence? How, like Jesus, can we be available to the healing, restoration, enlivening of God? Centering Prayer answers the how. Centering Prayer is about waiting. We wait on God.

Ps 62:5

‘For God alone my soul waits in silence, for my hope is from him’.

It’s about being there, like a lady/gentleman in waiting. It’s taking a vacation from yourself says Thomas Keating.  It’s making room for the promised fullness of joy. It’s being present, in the present, with the Holy Presence.

 

Centering Prayer has origins in the desert fathers. It’s in the 13th century Cloud of Unknowing. In our day, Thomas Keating has brought it to us, followed by people like Cynthia Bourgeault. So what is it?  Some of you will know it. It is putting stick in spoke of the wheels of the constant revolving of our minds. It’s making space so we are not constantly thinking, 

running around caught in thought after thought.

Centering Prayer shows how to release, not get caught. A thought comes and calls, but there’s no need to grab it, or let it grab us. Centering Prayer is the practice of un-grabbing

 

A lot of meditation practices give you something to do, something to focus your mind on like breathing, saying a mantra like Maranatha etc. Centering Prayer doesn’t work that way. Centering Prayer recognises that we get caught by thought after thought, and it shows you how to release them, to make space for God. They are there, but Centering Prayer is about not holding on to them

.

A thought is anything that brings your attention to a focal point. It can be an idea, emotion, memory, noise, discomfort.  They are all thoughts. Centering Prayer is about releasing the thought and making room for God. It is not renouncing, fighting, but releasing, letting go. And another will come. But we release attachment – not my will, but yours. In it all we are consenting to the action and presence of God.

 

So every time to you let go of a thought, you are consenting to the action and presence of God. 

And whether you know it or not, you are receiving help, support, solidarity, grace and mercy and love that is beyond you, yet wants to be in you.

 

So Cynthia Bourgeault tell us to note three things.

1.   Intention

Centering Prayer is not done with attention but with intention. This is central to Centering Prayer. Don’t bring your attention to a focal point like following your breath, a mantra – it is all a thought. This is about letting go. Intention holds us.

So what is your intention? If it is to be totally

available to the divine presence, the now, to God;

if it is to be deeply available to what is deeper, richer, than all the usual thoughts and emotions, then you are on the right track.  

Don’t intend to make yourself still and empty, it’s not going to happen. It’s not about getting peace, finding joy, lowering your blood pressure and all.  There are fruits to be had from the practice of Centering Prayer, 

but they are not our intention. Our intention is to centre ourselves in the Love, to be deeply available to this life-giving, deeper current of presence.

 

2.   Let the thought go.

We come with the deep intention to be totally available to God, and a minute or two later you are wondering about what to have for dinner, when the car needs a WOF, how you are going to answer that email. Catch yourself thinking, let the thought go.  

Don’t worry about whether you will be able to do this. You will know, there will come a moment when you see I am thinking. That’s the point when you gently let the thought go – without judging yourself, without recrimination. The only thing you can do wrong, says Thomas Keating, is to get up and go. 

 

3.   Sacred Word.

To help you remember your basic intention, to help release thoughts, use what’s called a scared word.

Choose a word. It can be anything.  Words like love, still, peace.  It could even be wind, air, or sun because it doesn’t have to mean anything. It is a tool, there to symbolise to yourself your intention, your desire to be open to the action and presence of God. But what makes it different from a mantra is you don’t recite constantly. It’s just there, like a reminder note you make yourself.  It’s there to remind you of what you are doing, to release the thought and make space for God.

Four ‘R’s…

Resist no thought

Retain no thought 

React to no thought

Return to the sacred word

I notice I am thinking, I use my word to let the thought go. And like falling asleep, the word will fall away from time to time, and you are just there.

So, sit comfortably, eyes closed, head up like a balloon and spine like the string as Kelvin says. Make space at the beginning to relax your body. And as St Ignatius says, bless the space you are coming to as you enter. Collect yourself into your intention.

I am opening to the presence and action of God.

I am here, you are here. And thoughts will come.

Each time you let them go you are returning to God, to consent. 

 

Once, in a Centering Prayer workshop, an elderly woman told Thomas Keating she couldn’t do it.  She had 10,000 thoughts in 10 minutes! “Beautiful, he said. 10,000 opportunities to return to God.”  So don’t try to make your mind quiet, instead look joyfully that every thought offers the opportunity to let go and return to God.

 

The invitation of Centering Prayer is to pray like Jesus, to wait on God in silence, with the intention of being open and available to his presence and action.

 

Our 3 year old granddaughter in Wellington came home from St Mark’s preschool the other day and announced, “My body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.”

Centering Prayer is about making space in the temple.

 

‘And so the yearning strong, 

with which the soul will long,

will far out pass the power of human telling;

for none can guess its grace, 

till they become the place, 

wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

         

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats
10 comments
Read more

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede
Post a Comment
Read more

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon
Post a Comment
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the
3 comments
Read more

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old
Post a Comment
Read more