The Experience of Group Prayer

Extract

The only way to find out about the experience of a prayer meeting is obviously to take part; all I can do in these pages is to drop a few hints, in the hope that they will stir a chord or two, so that something will get across.

People sometimes talk as if prayer were a purely human act; but this is not Christian doctrine. Prayer is the act of the believer, the one who says T live now not I but Christ’ (Gal. 2, 20). It is only in Spirit and Truth that we can offer prayer to the Father (John 4, 23). It is because Christ prays, that we, in the same Spirit, can pray. Prayer is a divine activity in which we, by grace, participate. (On all this, see Herbert McCabe’s very lucid account in Doctrine and Life, August 1970.) It is always ‘the Spirit and the Bride’ who prays (cf. Apoc. 22, 17); we can only pray because God himself gives us prayer (as the Lord taught St Catherine expressly). All prayer, in so far as it is true prayer, is ‘infused’; the contemplative is the one who knows it by experience. In our prayer groups, therefore, we aim to pray with the prayer that God himself gives us.

Now as we become more and more sanctified, our prayer too becomes more and more attuned to the prayer of Christ. That is what we aspire to. But we must avoid two antithetical traps. On the one hand, we must not assume forthwith that anything we utter at a prayer meeting is automatically underwritten by God; we may on occasion get a ‘witness’ of some kind to assure us that our prayer is truly willed by him, but that is a different matter. The other trap is to sit and wait until God actually forces something out of us. Dom John Chapman used to reiterate: ‘Pray as you can, not as you can’t.’ We must start where we are. There may be a great gulf set between our ‘own’ prayer and that of the Spirit, but both are important.