Vicars That Don't Pray

What would you say if an accountant did no work with money or numbers? What would you say if a train driver didn't go near a train? What would you say if WATCH didn't produce petitions? 

You would know that all was not right with the world. That's what. 

The rest of this post can be regarded as something of a personal confession - but I feel inclined to write about something that could be construed as such a problem as I allude to above. 

As a church-going boy and then a church-going man I spent an appreciable time with God in the liturgical times and in other times set aside for private prayer. Then I was ordained and that was that for prayer - or so it feels at times. 

Priestly ministry is the very best work a human can do. I wouldn't do anything else and without it, I am not fulfilling the purpose of my birth. That I can share it with a wonderful wife and best-friend, with two gifted and beautiful daughters, and in a place where we feel rooted and settled is perfect. But all this comes at a price. Parish ministry, by very definition, has taken us away from the place from where we were sent - often the places where our families and friends were, and often the places where we once found God. Priests are nomadic people and we rarely stay anywhere for longer than a decade (which may seem like a long time but really isn't). 

Priests who are vicars (as well as those in other roles) are priests who have much work to cram into a week. Someone once said that priests are incomprehensible on one day of the week and un-contactable on the other six. We don't hide away doing nothing - we are grafting away somewhere.

The bottom line is that I hardly find a moment to pray - unless I count the liturgical and public events. As a disciple of God, I no more touch base with Him as I do with my dear old mum, by brother and sister or my dearest friends. If you have a priest in the family, you will know what I mean. I console myself that blogging is prayer, that gym time is prayer time, that a few minutes running around like a dementer in the shower is prayer time, or else cooking or gardening. I console myself but never fully convince myself. And I am not alone. In her book 'The Cracked Pot', Yvonne Warren states this situation clearly based on a national study of clergy. 

Something has got to give. While most of me thinks that life is booming (and it is, Deo Gratias), there is a part of me that had withered and lies like an un-watered seedling. The thing is, I can't tell people that the Vicar doesn't pray enough - it is not what they want to hear. Am I not meant to exemplify prayer, to be before God with the people on my heart? I am not alone, as I say, and it is a perennial problem for priests - which is odd when you think about it. Perhaps the world only regards a day as 'done' when it is filled with tasks completed not time taken for space (read 'prayer'). 

Toning Up for God

...you know I have been going to the gym...

Yes, I have successfully managed to squeeze my corpulent reverential bulk into a gymnasium to a sufficiency that demands the language of plurals. I run some, row some, stretch pull and lift some - then I steam and spa, shower, coffee, home. I have even lost a stone of lard since Christmas, so there.

I used to go to the gym when I was late-teenager and did, believe it or not, sport the odd formed muscle. You'd be hard pressed to discern shape under the blancmange that caresses every inch of my ontologically-changed form nowadays, but aspire I do, and sweat too. 

There are many good arguments in favour of keeping fit as a sort of 'Temple preservation exercise', to maintain the mean-altar that the Lord places in our unworthy hearts. I subscribe, reluctantly, as one who finds it hard to exercise these days. I accept too that as fleshly creatures, we are a complex assortment of the circulatory, muscular, skeletal, endocrine, immune and digestive to name but a few. We make even the most complex computer look like an abacus, and we cannot endlessly neglect our bodies. 

So, to the gym I go in the presumptuous hope and belief that I am doing some good as I fast approach my forties. I don't aspire to a muscularity as offered in the image, or to be able to run a marathon, but simply to live long and live the best I can. 

As I look around the gymnasium, itself set within a Temple of Sport (Twickenham Rugby Ground), I see much that attends to the needs of all that makes us animals the same as lions and tigers. As humans, and as those created in God's image, we are so much more than skin, bone and sinew. We have a facet of our being that sets us apart from all other creepy crawlies and birds of the air - and that is our innate spirituality. 

If I want sodding great big arms, I can sling some iron around. Big arms I gain but to what end? To pull down a steer and bite its ears off? Do big muscles and a thriving blood-system keep us feeling happy? Do they give a sense of wonder in the face of exquisite beauty? Do they help us know God even a fraction more? No, of course they don't. It would be the same as saying that a church is mighty because its roof doesn't leak, or that a bank will never fail because it has modern lifts. We focus on the the tangible and external because we can see results.

But we often neglect the intangible, immeasurable - and I believe increasingly to our peril. 

I have been working on a sort of idea born of the efforts I put in at the gym, an idea that might find life in my church. I believe, quite sincerely, that many Christians privately despair because they think that can't pray or relate properly to God. Of course they can, but that reticence often provides a barrier to the experience. Also, prayer techniques are acquired and learned like so many others. We are creatures of habit, good or bad, and sometimes we just need to be shown a new way. 

I will, in one form or another, be proposing the idea of a sort of a spiritual gymnasium (Pip and Gym?) where all-comers can be exposed to 'exercises' and receive a little guidance and advice (or more importantly, a time and a space). Presenting an opportunity, in a conspicuous form, to maximise on the relationship that is already there and already full will (I believe) give us all a greater ability to receive what is always there in abundance from our Lord. 

And now for something completely different

This is just to let you know, dear and beloved readers, that I am 'going where called' (I think), as I embark on another Blog called:

Flight Diaries

It is more of a spiritual direction blog than anything else, and a place where the more 'priestly' side of my mind and thinking will be wrought. It will be free of gadgets and most importantly, free of 'counters' - I offer my thoughts freely and into the ether. Who is looking at what is not my interest there!

Perhaps you will read it, maybe you will get something from it. Either way, I will proceed with it (with less frequency than here - or else my head will splat)

Spiritual Room

I was reading a fine book (as they all are) by Henri Nouwen, and he introduced me to the idea that a person's spiritual life (and every human has one) is like a room.

Only while I was writing about the state of my wardrobe in the previous post was I reminded about this rather warming idea. I am going to offer my 'take' on it, as I have had cause to do at various funerals and similar such gatherings.

I like this idea because it allows the person to be themselves. I have added my Guitar Hero axe to mine only this last Christmas; why? because I love Heavy Metal and mine isn't a vocation where such a disclosure is fully consonant. I love the committment and musicality of heavy rock music, more especially the music of Metallica. They write and perform many angsty songs about a whole manner of things that speak of things like God, sin and Forgiveness. They attend to war and its futility as well - so lots to cheer an ailing soul! But the thing about it is, I love rock music and my spiritual room is a place of utter safety where I can turn the volume up and just let rip. This room is where I can be me, truly and properly me. A few people have peered inside, but no-one has entered the door, they can't (yet).

I was once assaulted with some piffle of a theory that suggests that a person has their 'front stage' and 'back stage' personae. Meh: I am all one person, but I have facets of me that are important and they can be aired in safety in my spiritual room.

I urge you all to examine your spiritual rooms, or at the least level become acquianted with the fact that you have one. Some may call it the heart, but a room is a place that we can more fully relate to. It is, as I have earlier suggested, that can become cluttered and untidy, or it can be a barren and unfriendly place. It might even have its own Feng Shui, but that is an entirely other post!

The aspect of this that is most applicable at funerals is that the loved-ones of the recently died have leave, for the first time, to step inside the room of the one just gone. The amount of times that I communicate something hitherto unknown to their nearest and dearest is astounding. You think you know someone ... In my spiritual room, I can rest. I dont even need to withdraw from life as that is not often possible, but this room has a window through which I can gaze upon things that are otherwise hidden to me. Kids would know this as daydreaming, but no better theological reflector than a child ever walked this earth. All of us need to go to our Room, sit in the chair that we have put there. It is a place where I can be calm, happy, deeply chuffed off, silly, excitable and a whole other array of the bits of me that normally live in a box! I can take a novel in there or a good spiritual book, either is fine. It is also a place with a table upon which I can lay out the 'cards' of my hopes and dreams; I can order them, re-order them or even disregard them (I have waste bin in there too). The thing is, when I enter, I feel the same and I feel good.