I've been doing something of a retrospective on early spiritual influences, and I came across this book by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, called 'Living Prayer,' which both my mother and I, and our small group of contemplatives, read back in the early 1970's. The language is rather heavy, which I find much of biblical language to be, with the exception of some of the more beautiful passages such as psalm 23 and the beatitudes, so I am changing some of the words in the excerpt below, marked by [].
"[Prayer] to me means a relationship. I used not to be a believer, then one day I discovered God and immediately he appeared to me to tbe the supreme value and the total meaning of life, [yet] at the same time a person. I think that [prayer] can mean nothing at all to someone for whom there is no object of [prayer]. Therefore, as a foreword to this book on prayer, what I would like to convey is my certitude in the personal reality of a God with whom a relationship can be established. Then I would ask my reader to treat God as a neighbor, as someone, and value this knowledge in the same terms in which he values a relationship with a brother or a friend."
This is exactly what my mother impressed on me when I was six years old. When I told her that I didn't know what to do while sitting through mass in church, she said that I was to silently talk to God as if he were my friend. Because of the Catholic teaching (catechism) that I had already imbibed, I soon realized with chagrin that there was nothing I could tell God that he didn't already know. I used to tell God jokes, even though I knew he must already know the punchline, but just to be friendly. It turned into a habit of prayer. And even now, after so many decades, and many changes and evolutions in my ideas about God, after a theological education and exposure to Buddhist and to Daoist thought and practice, I still find value in this simple, basic lesson on prayer.
I also find that the way Bloom uses the word 'someone' in relation to God is very different from the evangelical approach that I have encountered that insists on a 'personal relationship' with God. Bloom seems to imply that to some degree this 'person' is a fiction, but a fiction that has a reality behind it that is ultimately mysterious to us, and which we struggle to characterize. Paradoxically, we find this reality to be both personal and impersonal, and in prayer we tap the seemingly 'personal' side of God.
What I like most about Bloom's approach to prayer is the value he places on silence. He writes, "One of the reasons why communal worship or private prayer seem to be so dead or so conventional is that the act of [prayer], which takes place in the heart communing with God, is too often missing. We all know in human relationships that love and friendship are deep when we can be silent with someone. As long as we need to talk in order to keep in touch, we can saefely assume that the relationship is still superificial; and so, if we want to worship God, we must first of all learn to feel happy, being silent together with [her]. This is an easier thing to do than one might think at first.
"Once the Cure d'Ars, a French saint of the eighteenth century, asked an old peasant what he was doing sitting for hours in the church, seemingly not even praying; the peasant replied: 'I look at him, he looks at me and we are happy together.' That man had learned to speak without breaking the silence of intimacy by words."
I feel I was very fortunate to have had mentors in prayer like Anthony Bloom, my mother, and for the impersonal side of God, my lovingly silent, seafaring father. Gifts.
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