‘Lord, teach us how to pray, as John taught his disciples.’

With Lent fast approaching, in an extract from his new book, Eavesdropping, Henry Martin offers a reflection for Ash Wednesday on ways we can be helped with our prayer …

I never liked the song ‘From a Distance’, not even when Bette Midler released her version of it in 1990. I think it is the insistence that God is always watching us, but only, well, as the title says, from a distance. I preferred Joan Osborne’s 1995 song, ‘One of Us’, asking how it would be if God were human, like you and me and what on earth that would look like. She imagines a face-to-face encounter with God and challenges us as to what our question to God would be, if we were allowed only one.

The disciples of Jesus have the opportunity to ask him as many questions as they want. Some of his answers blow their minds or reveal things they would rather keep hidden. Often, they blather away about trivial matters, as if they are unaware who stands before them. And then at other times they ask the kind of thing that we might, if we knew we could only have one question.

On this day, they are near to Jesus while he prays and when he finishes, they approach him and say, ‘Lord, teach us how to pray, as John taught his disciples.’ Jesus replies not with a lecture course, a reading list, a parable or even a series of exercises. He simply gives them the perfect prayer, which in turn they have handed on to us as ‘The Lord’s Prayer’. I wonder if they recognise, in that moment, the enormity of the gift they are receiving or whether it takes them a while to appreciate how Jesus’ answer is so much more than they hoped for.

Eavesdropping could be a very short book. The disciples want to know about speaking to God. They ask Jesus. Jesus gives them the perfect answer. He teaches them a prayer that, with a few simple brushstrokes, paints an astonishing picture of how things can be between us and God. This is the essence of everything we need to say to God. There are breakfast bars that purport to contain in a couple of bites all we need to keep us going for the whole morning. The marketing spin is as sugar-coated as the product is sugar-saturated. In contrast, Jesus’ prayer really does offer us all we need, a way of bringing ourselves completely to God in one small prayer.

God according to Jesus is a loving parent, to be honoured and closely trusted. This is where Bette Midler loses it for me. In her song, God views the world as a perfect blue green planet, but he is too far away to see the guns, bombs and disease. We can see them, because we are here on the ground. But God is comfortable with his distance and he enjoys a sanitized view of harmony, eagles and love. This is not how Jesus speaks of God. He teaches his disciples that God is intimately involved, he is ‘Dad’, ‘Abba’, building his Kingdom right here among us on earth. He provides for us, pardons, teaches, guides and protects us. And the disciples come to believe that Jesus is, God with us, ‘one of us’.

It is also good to see what Jesus does not say in his lesson on prayer. He makes no mention of location, times of day, frequency, mind-set or posture. In childhood the answer to the question, ‘How do I pray?’ was, ‘Before you go to sleep, you have to kneel down by your bed, bow your head, and place the palms of your hands together,’ We might even be shown Dürer’s famous painting of praying hands. Young George Arthur had clearly been taught that this was the way to say his prayers. He is the timid new schoolboy entrusted to Tom Brown’s care in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. On his first night in a public school dormitory, he asks permission to wash his face and then changes with great hesitation into his nightgown. The dormitory is a noisy awkward place, but George Arthur knows that he has a duty to perform.

‘It was a trying moment for the poor little lonely boy; however, this time he didn’t ask Tom what he might or might not do, but dropped on his knees by his bedside, as he had done every day from his childhood, to open his heart to Him who heareth the cry and beareth the sorrows of the tender child, and the strong man in agony.’ 1

Not surprisingly there are some in the dormitory who find this demonstration of piety amusing and the one who sneers the loudest gets Tom Brown’s boot thrown into his face. This makes for a sweet moral story about the duty of older boys to protect the vulnerable, but I cannot help but feel that George Arthur had been over-instructed in his lessons on prayer. No one could deny his courage, but this story tells us more about nineteenth-century British society than it does about how we speak to God. Certain key points, not found in Jesus’ lesson, clearly have been drummed into young George Arthur.

I needed chapter and verse on this story, so I typed, ‘Tom - Brown - Prayer’ and Google offered up an article called, ‘How to Get Your Prayers Answered, by Tom Brown’. A modern day Pastor Tom gives guidance on the best ways to get the answers we need from our prayers. He has a list, the first being that we should find the correct scriptural verse to support our request. Then we must be very specific in our request, making sure we ask and believe that the thing we want is on its way. Thirdly, we should thank God before it arrives, as a mark of faith. And finally, he encourages us to be entirely positive, shielding our minds from all negative thoughts about the outcome of our prayer. There is quite some distance here from the lesson Jesus gives to his disciples. Jesus teaches that God is paramount and God’s will and God’s kingdom are to be sought before our own. This is not about us getting the right deal for ourselves by following a prescribed formula, which, if said correctly, will twist God’s arm into acceding to our requests.

I once walked to the home of an inspirational woman. She was dependent on her wheelchair for even the most routine of household tasks. Her courage and determination floored me. However, as we sat drinking tea in her specially-adapted bungalow, I started to feel uneasy. She told me that she was, in fact, already healed. My eyebrows must have twitched or maybe she was already anticipating my reaction. She launched into a fuller explanation about how God had already given her full healing and mobility, but the problem was that she had not truly received this gift, and this was because she did not fully believe. Once she sorted out her own faith issues, she would become ‘normal’ as God intended her to be. I did not know what to say. I have, pretty much, taken walking for granted and as such I realised I was not best placed to instruct her on how to interpret her experiences (at least not on our first meeting). We prayed together, and she asked for God’s blessing to fall on me. As I made my way home I recognised a welt of anger growing within me at the additional burden that had been added to her. She had been taught that her faith was somehow inadequate and that for some bizarre motive she was withholding from herself, God’s generous healing. Why God heals some and not others, remains a profound mystery to me, however I feel certain that this woman has no need of self-reproach for the quality of her faith. She could instead question those who were teaching her about prayer and healing.

Jesus does not insist that his disciples come to prayer with an entirely positive frame of mind. He teaches no procedure or posture or mental state that will guarantee our desired outcome when we pray. He gives us the Lord’s Prayer, which teaches us to trust God for all that we need (but not necessarily all we want) and that God’s will is to be sought over all else.

So how does this help us with prayer?

Prayer is something we can learn. We will never learn everything there is to know. The act of praying is almost as mysterious as the God who we meet in prayer. Apart from Jesus himself, there are no experts in this art. There are only learners and some with a bit more experience than others. Those green L-plates, that new drivers display, are something we should wear as we pray, knowing that we will never shed them, because we will always be beginners, at least in this lifetime.

Prayer can be taught. And we have the same teacher that the disciples had. If prayer is hard going, fruitless, dry or seems pointless, ask for guidance. There are people around us who can help, or we can borrow the disciple’s words and ask God directly, ‘Lord, teach us how to pray.’

If we can think of nothing else to say to God, the Lord’s Prayer is our fall back. When my praying is stuck, I will try to say this one prayer each day. And if that is all I manage, then it is enough.

Eavesdropping is not a quest to sift through everything said to Jesus in the hope of distilling a perfect prayer blueprint and so guarantee we get the exact answer we want. There are numerous sites on the internet that will do this for us, if that is what we want to hear. Some are well-meaning, and others are just utter bilge. As we go through Lent we will eavesdrop on many requests and statements made to Jesus. Some of these are well worth mimicking or at least lend themselves to adaption for our own needs, but there is no magic formula. There is no one way of praying which presses some red button that God must answer. A disciple says, ‘Teach us how to pray,’ and Jesus answers by revealing the most succinct, rich and enduring prayer in history.

Eavesdropping: Learning to pray from those who talked to Jesus is available now in paperback from dltbooks.com and all good bookstores.

1 Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes, Part 2, Chapter 1