The Father Oliver Coss Column: Pray always, pray often

A web of intricately inter-related services that are under pressure often manifests itself in long queues at A&E, but our health crisis is a little more local than that. How many people in the long line at the Emergency Department are there because their local health options were exhausted or obstructive?

Embedded in the comments (and yes, I know you should never read the comments) was, however, a fellow who saw my column as evidence that I didn’t believe in prayer. The same accusation was thrown at Jesus on the Cross, “Save yourself! If you are the son of God, come down from the cross!” (Matthew 27: 40). However, on the cross Jesus prayed for those who were shouting insults, for his executioners (bringing one at least to conversion of heart), and announcing forgiveness to the penitent thief crucified alongside him. Prayer is wrongly conceived when we think of it as a means of circumventing ordinary course of the world in order to get what we want. It is properly conceived when it is an act of making space within the ordinary course of things into which God might speak. Whatever we might gain or lose during the course of our earthly life, we recognise in prayer our constant need and the many causes we have for thanksgiving.

Christians are encouraged to pray not merely out of the pressing need that may or may not be in front of them, but because we have a consistent and human need to nourish a relationship that, with eternal hope, will sustain us beyond this passing world. So I prayed about a wounded elbow, and eventually I saw a doctor and found some treatment. But in that day, I prayed before the day’s work began. I prayed before eating. I prayed before preaching. I prayed at a meeting, and for those I encountered in several different situations. I prayed with a student preparing for exams, and with another person enduring some great difficulties, and for others not present because they had lit candles or left prayer requests on cards that they found in church.

And when that day came to an end, and I prayed again, I could look back and see that it had been suffused in prayer, each part containing a moment where I resorted to God as my helper; his kindly Spirit as my companion in a world that too often tolerates appalling loneliness. This is not always easy. There are ‘dark nights of the soul’ as St John of the Cross experienced, but where there is space, we are continually called back to him who loves us in all our frailties. And the fruit of this is not that we might change God, more that he might change and renew us.