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Prayer for the week
Tim Pike commends a good prayer for ‘spiritual’ people
| Do you need me? I am there.
You cannot see Me, yet I am the light
you see by.
You cannot hear Me, yet I speak
through your voice.
You cannot feel Me, yet I am the power
at work in your hands.
I am at work, though you do not understand
My ways.
I am not strange visions. I am not mysteries.
Only in absolute stillness, beyond self,
can you know Me as I am,
and then but as a feeling and a faith.
Yet I am there. Yet I hear. Yet I answer.
When you need me I am there.
Even if you deny Me, I am there.
Even when you feel most alone, I am there.
Even in your fears, I am there.
Even in your pain, I am there.
Though you fail to find Me, I do not fail you.
Though your faith in Me is unsure,
my faith in you never wavers.
Because I know you, because I love you.
Beloved, I am there. James Dillet Freeman (1912-2003) |
 God is there, too: the astronaut James Irwin salutes the US flag on the surface of the moon during the Apollo 15 mission in August 1971 PA |
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IT IS SURPRISING how rarely I and the people I know talk to one another about prayers we have found helpful. This prayer is an exception. Bishop Anselm Genders CR, who died recently, sent this prayer to me a few years ago. Beneath it he wrote: “Tim, you may find this useful. I use it daily. +AG”. I keep it tucked into my Breviary, and often open up the little piece of paper it is written on, and pray it through. It is an unusual prayer, inasmuch as it contains, like some of the psalms, words that God is addressing to us. I like it because it seems good and necessary to have prayers that require us to listen to what God might have to say, instead of constantly bombarding him with our own words. What comes across most strongly in this prayer is the utter and unchanging dependability of God in his determination to be with us. Whether or not we know it or like it, God is one who has determined to be always and everywhere with his people. The prayer itself does not mention Jesus. But I often think it reads like an elaboration of Christ’s last words to the disciples in Matthew’s Gospel: “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age” (Matthew 28.20). It is a prayer that takes seriously the tribulations of life, and the difficulties of being a person of faith. In some places (“even in your fears . . . even in your pain ”), it feels somewhat emotive, which is not a mode of communication I am instinctively keen on. Yet all of us experience moments of fear, need, or pain. Most of us, at some time, will have the worrying doubt whether God is there at all. In these moments, it is good for religious people to have a familiar prayer that speaks to the situation: “Even when you feel most alone, I am there.” One false temptation of “spiritual” people is to be ever on the lookout for experiences charged with revelation or transcendental meaning. I like this prayer’s rather brisk dismissal of all that nonsense. “I am not in strange visions. . . Only in absolute stillness . . . can you know me.” Yet how hard it is to find the discipline to create those pools of stillness in our lives so that we can know God is there. But that is what has to be done. I had not come across James Dillet Freeman before I was given this prayer. The excellent Wikipedia says he was a poet and a minister of something called the New Thought denomination “Unity”, which made me think he was not an obvious choice for a traditionalist such as Bishop Anselm. Be that as it may, this is a prayer that speaks to people in their everyday lives. And it also has a certain cosmic cachet: the astronauts of Apollo 15 took a microfilm of the prayer with them to the moon, and left it there. Even if you happen to be passing by that way, God is there, too. Fr Tim Pike is Vicar of Holy Innocents’, Hornsey, and Warden of the Company of Mission Priests. |
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