I’ve been thinking a lot about prayer this week, and it seems to me that it must be central to Christianity – both to our lives as Christians, and theologically.

I’m a bit of a head person really – as you might expect of someone whose contribution to the great global conversation which is the internet is called “Be Informed” (not my suggestion for a name, BTW – blame Andrew who recruited me, one sunny afternoon on the St Kilda pier.)

As I was saying, I’m a bit of a head person really. My first response to an event (I first wrote “question” there) is “What does it mean”? This has a bit of a tendency to filter through to my Christian walk as well. I’m not some complete stickler for sound doctrine, you understand, whose first question on meeting someone is to quiz them on some abstruse point of doctrine. But I deal with things in a head first sort of way. This includes prayer. My temptation is to think of it as a system, as some data to be synthesized into some grand theological understanding.

I’m not saying that’s a bad thing in all ways. It enables me to stand back from the torrent of events a bit, helps me to think things through a bit. I’m less prone to getting swept up with the flow of what everyone else is thinking than I would be if I were more feeling dependant.

The flip side of this, is that I’m always in danger of forgetting, practically if not theoretically, that prayer is fundamentally about relationship. The spirit who prays for us cries Abba, Father, praying in groans too deep for words. Not: hmm. What does this latest datum mean?

Equally, I tend to treat Christianity as a bit of an intellectual exercise sometimes – a series of philosophically interesting, and hopefully satisfying, questions and answers. I’m much happier discussing someone’s ideas with them than praying with them.

But if I am serious about this, if I really do want to be a Follower of the Way, then I have to always remind myself that the way I am following is a person, not a philosophical system, like Buddhism seems to be, nor a set of commands like Islam appears to be. Both of these things come into it of course – love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind after all – but they have to be secondary.

And if I want to base my life on a person, then I have to interact with him. And that means prayer, in all its various manifestations.

I’m not a very prayerful person. I want to get caught up in it, live life in the constant awareness of the presence of God. But it is hard to get through the distractions of life – and our lives now are more distracting than lives have ever been I think, with the internet, television, radio, books… all good things, but all a temptation to get caught up in the busyness of life and ignore the still small voice.

So I’m going to pray more. There is no earthly reason why not to, and plenty of reasons why I should. The more I reflect on it, the more I realize how important it is.

I’ve also been reflecting on my reflection about prayer – a meta-reflection, if you will. In this blog, and in the conversations I have been having with friends, I have been focusing on petitionary prayer, as though that is the only sort of prayer there is, or the most important.

This isn’t at all what I think. I have been focusing on these because they are the most difficult, intellectually, as well as personally and emotionally. Because we are praying for changes in the external state of affairs, it is there that there is obvious evidence of success and failure, or at least potentially. It is the point where external reality provides a check on us. Do we really believe what we say? Is it, in fact, true? Does God exist? If so, does he care?

So I struggle with it. I want to take Jesus’ words seriously, and he said: if you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could command this mountain to throw itself into the sea, and it would do it. He says: knock and it will be opened to you; seek and you shall find. He, astonishingly, compares God to an unjust judge who needs to be nagged. And, most shockingly of all, he says: if you ask for something, believing that you shall have it, then God will do it.

What I really struggle with, in the end, isn’t unanswered prayers in general, but certain specific unanswered prayers.  For instance, we have prayed and prayed to have a child (as well as go through the humiliating experience of IVF), over a period of more than four years. Ask in faith? Check. Persistence? Oh yeah. Is this prayer in accordance with God’s will? Is it Christlike? Yes, I think so. God seems keen on children – there certainly seem to be a lot of them around. Jesus was certainly keen on them: let the little children to come to me. So I’m clear that it is within the God’s general will.

The struggle is: perhaps it is within God’s general will, but not for us. This self-evidently good thing, which so many people seem to achieve without any stress – without even intending to – is denied us. My struggle is this: how could this possibly be God’s will for us? How much easier to say that he just doesn’t exist, or, if he does, then he’s the Deistic watchmaker, not concerned with us humans at all. Where, in short, is God in all of this? When you are doing what seems to be his will, and he’s not doing the thing which would make it possible, then… what does it mean?

This is a struggle we are all going to have to face at some point – probably multiple points. Parents, partners, friends, siblings, our own children… they will all die, and so will we, in spite of our prayers.  I have just never had to encounter this before.

I guess this is where faith comes in. How do we retain faith in a God who loves us, when all around we are confronted with evidence which really fails to support it?

I don’t have a pat answer for that. There are a lot of things which could be said about it, and will be, but I don’t think that, ultimately, the answer to it is some piece of information, some doctrine. Because what we really want in that situation isn’t some answer, it’s the thing itself. If we are dying of cancer, the last thing we want to hear is that it is all part of God’s plan for us, at least not initially. A time can come where theoretical answers can help, but first has to come… I was tempted to say healing, but perhaps a kind of acceptance or peace might be a better term.

The underlying emotion here is, I think, grief. When a prayer like this, for healing and life, is not granted, then you are left with mourning. Either you’re mourning an actual death of a person, or you are mourning the death of a potential person – in my case, I’m mourning the death of my potential life as a father, and Anne is mourning her loss of a life as a mother. We are taken out from the normal run of people and life – singled out, it sometimes feels, for punishment.

I read a thing today which spoke to me. It’s from philosopher Roger Scruton, in his book Gentle Regrets. He says: “The Western response to loss is not to remove yourself from the world. It is to bear it as a loss, to mourn it, and to strive to overcome it by seeing it as a form of consecrated suffering…[F]rom a transcendental perspective…they appear not as meaningless afflictions, but as sacrifices.” (pp228)

This resonates with something that I have been thinking about recently. What if this meaningless loss is actually something God is working in? Is it making me more available to other people, becoming gentler and softer with the grieving? Is it making me ready to do a think I might not have otherwise been ready for? This is where it comes back to relationship. I want to build a trusting relationship with God, I want to become God’s sort of person, and it’s only through prayer that it’s going to happen.

I don’t know. It’s just a thought at the moment. A lot of the time I think: I don’t care about being a better person. I just want this thing that everyone else seems to find so easy. I’m wary of sounding like it’s all in the past now and I’m all better. But it is one of the things I learned when I was taking Spiritual Direction (which I did for a year) – you want to get to the point where you can see God moving in your life. And some days I can. Not all that often, I admit, and somehow I don’t think I’m ever going to be “better” – never the free spirit I was ten years ago – or even five years ago. I’m tempered I think. And I know that in thirty years time, when friends who haven’t yet got children are showing me their grandchildren, it’s going to hit me again. But I hope that God will heal me from the bitterness, and that he will grant me the faith I need to keep going, walking his way.

I seem to have come around again to the dark night of the soul topic I first visited a few entries again. I guess it is what is on my mind at the moment.

I’m also aware that I’m supposed to be making people more informed – but mainly I have informed people about my feelings, and very cathartic it has been too. I’m going to endeavour to make the next few entries a little more, well, informative.

A final thing: I’ve been reading PhilipYancey’s new book called Prayer, and finding it both useful and helpful (though I think he misquotes Lewis at one point). Perhaps I might review a few of its points during the next few weeks – informing about someone else’s meditations on prayer, not just my own.