Fr Peter Helman

Dear friends,

I recently came across a poem by Madeleine L’Engle. Perhaps you know it?

——

“Word”

I, who live by words, am wordless when
I try my words in prayer. All language turns
To silence. Prayer will take my words and then
Reveal their emptiness. The stilled voice learns
To hold its peace, to listen with the heart
To silence that is joy, is adoration.
The self is shattered, all words torn apart
In this strange patterned time of contemplation
That, in time, breaks time, breaks words, breaks me,
And then, in silence, leaves me healed and mended.
I leave, returned to language, for I see
Through words, even when all words are ended.

I, who live by words, am wordless when
I turn me to the Word to pray. Amen.

——

L’Engle says so very wonderfully what we often feel, that prayer is something other than what we expect. Prayer unsettles our sense of what prayer is and how we go about it. We come to God in prayer, and our words, once offered, teach us to wait in silence to hear what God is speaking. God knows our hearts, for “it is he that made us, and we are his” (Psalm 103:3). And that is where the joy comes in.

Prayer, for L’Engle, is God. Prayer is the loving voice of God always already speaking within us, deep within our being, even below the surface of our awareness. And that is on the one hand alarming and on the other immensely freeing. It is alarming because if prayer is God, we’re left to wonder what is ours to offer and whether any of it matters. We who want to learn to pray echo the plea of the disciples, “Lord, teach us to pray.” That prayer is God, though, is also infinitely more freeing because if God is always already speaking – praying – within us, we are released from the fear that we can be beyond the love of God if we do or say the wrong thing, and that what we do and say might dissuade God’s love for us.

Someone once wrote, “From time to time, we find within ourselves the form of words and impressions and stirrings well up, at times in the shape of a sense of yearning, awe, gratitude, or compassion, God speaks in our hearts and invites us to respond.”

What is ours to offer God in prayer, then, is nothing other than our selves, our souls and bodies. We respond to God’s loving invitation, as we learn to let prayer happen in us, to let the words of Jesus become our words. What we bring to God in prayer is already God’s, for we are God’s beloved children. Our hearts behold him who is our friend and not a stranger. The voice of God invites us to be present and available and to rest in the hope that prayer is at work within us already.

Peace to you today~

Fr. Peter