Seasons of prayer

Monday, June 22, 2009

Eileen O’Hea’s voice is describing seasons of prayer. I’m listening to a tape in the small room at St. Peter’s Church where a Christian meditation group (www.wccm.org) meets once weekly to listen to a taped talk and then sit in silence for 25 minutes.

O’Hea is talking about prayer as a cycle, likening each phase of our experiences to the mood of the season.

Sometimes, you can feel those shifts with seasons. Other times you’ll go through the cycles in the course of a week.

Right now, she says we’re in the time when we feel God’s delight in our very existence. Summer prayer. So much now seems less tiring; prayer comes more naturally. You sit in morning light with warmth coming through the window. Fall prayer, she explains, becomes a time of transition, a time when you’re drawn away by projects and ideas. Then there is winter prayer, when you often strain, and feel a sort of dying away by times. “Winter is for hardy souls,” she says. Spring then comes and allows you to begin again. Resurrection, and a sense of freedom are the hallmarks.

Little wonder summer in North America is often a time of retreats. It takes me back.

I have often told friends I became a believer at the age of 11, in Pioneer Village summer camp. My mother thought it was a camp for horse riding. In fact, it was a Pentecostal-style bible camp. An accidental collision occurred between Evangelical ferment in Eastern Ontario and a Unitarian/agnostic kid whose father had just died from a painful pancreatic cancer. A broken kid, at that point, who moved into the summer season’s love affair with the transcendent to begin healing.

I remember the knife game. You threw the pocket knife into the ground by your friend’s feet and, if it stayed, he moved his or her foot to that place. The winner was the one who could still stand up at the end, legs spread wide, while the other toppled over. There was horse riding, and shooting on a range, and badges with stars. There were large outdoor services and counsellors who pulled you out of bed to urge acceptance of Jesus into your heart, as you stood outside on the moist, cool midnight grass in bare feet and pyjamas.

The hallelujah acceptance, prompted largely by peer pressure, wasn’t the moment when I became a Christian.

But it came weeks later. I was a skinny kid sitting on a hill in weather so warm you could just wear your shorts and sandals, and there were tall grasses, tall enough that the fuzzy, caterpillar-shaped flowers were in full shape. I don’t think anyone in the world could have found me on the slope amidst the grasses, but I felt God’s comforting presence then, God’s summertime delight in existence.

That sense of complete forgiveness and acceptance has ever since seemed what Jesus was here to teach. You can’t force that, or even suggest it. It happens when it shall, and it burns irrevocably into a soul, as creator and creature join in their ever-sought-for union.

When I left the camp, my mother accidentally threw away my bible. There was no church where I went to further explore those emotions, and the community of Christians I would encounter wouldn’t really even arrive for over 20 years. But that moment remained.

The moments of peace tend to call you back, and you sense the invitation to develop this further in those various seasons that O’Hea speaks of. Jesus, a teacher of enlightenment, spoke of this in John 12:36, “While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of the light.”

Oddly, and in a related way, I’ve been thinking of judgement of others lately. It came from covering elections, and from writing a story about a man judged in court for killing another man with his knife after a night of drinking outside a Halifax bar. At the end of his sentence for the killer, the judge leaned forward toward the young man and said: “If you continue to choose the path you’re on, you will find it a path straight to hell.”

The judge wasn’t being purely religious. He was using plain words to speak of a world where this young man was taking himself, a world so self-centered, that it presumed the right to take another’s life and to cause unspeakable grief. That is indeed entirely opposite to the moments of wholeness I’ve described. The judge chose his words as an observation, rather than as a condemnation.

We can take ourselves to these places of hell, or of refuge. We either endure the seasons, arrive at times of spiritual rest, or we don’t. Choose wisely, advised the judge.

But also, there is the practice of finding the light, something he perhaps didn't have time to get into.

O’Hea teaches people how to meditate in the Christian tradition, which is to sit still and say nothing, repeating inside your head the Aramaic phrase for Come Lord (Maranatha), and to do so regularly each day. I admire her way of speaking, and her description of the journey so many of us are trying to be on. Our last gathering at St. Peter's comes this Monday night. Then, this August I’m planning to organize a small group to meet in the Church on Monday nights, at 7 p.m., to practice meditation in the sanctuary. Perhaps I'll play that recording again.