This is the introductory article in a series appearing in Exeter Cathedral’s monthly news, complementing the material I contributed to the “Explore Prayer” section of the Cathedral website. I hope you find them helpful.
You are infinitely loved by God, and God is waiting and longing to be with you. Prayer is simply the expression of our relationship with God. But it is often mystified or diminished. On the Cathedral website we have provided an introduction to prayer with hope that it will help you deepen that relationship with God and draw you closer to the community of other praying people in our communities. There are three sections:
- What is prayer? Like life, prayer can be seen as a journey, a journey into God.
- Prayer in the Cathedral About the life of prayer in the Cathedral and how you can join in.
- Resources for Prayer Guidance on different forms of prayer and information about helpful resources.
We will be drawing on this material in future editions of the Monthly News, to help continue the momentum from the recent Week of Prayer, and in the hope that you can find a form of prayer that sustains you. We will also be drawing on the wisdom from “Writing the Icon of the Heart” by Maggie Ross, which we are currently reading in our Slow Book Group. To start us off, then, Ross writes:
“I often wonder if all the fretful, frenetic activity in our lives isn’t a human way of … driving away the signs that are everywhere around us; signs that are calling us to stop, to wake up, to receive a new and larger perspective, to pay attention to what is most important in life, to behold the face of God in every ordinary moment.
“Behold. Behold the God who is infinitely more humble than those who pray to him, more stripped, more emptied, more self-outpouring … [I]t is in the depths of this beholding, in the silence of the loving heart of God, that the divine exchange takes place most fully, where each of us in our uniqueness and strangeness is transfigured into the divine life.”
In the group, we discussed how it is so easy to lose the sense of wonder we have as children, but how it is still possible to regain and practise it. Prayer can be as simple as stopping to wonder at the face of God as seen in ordinary things: the way a parent bends over their child, or a rainbow, or an ivy leaf rimmed with frost, or a moment of care given in a hospital, or the shining contours on a conker, or a smile. And then to give thanks and to hold that thread as you go through the rest of your day. Behold.
Maggie Ross blogs at https://ravenwilderness.blogspot.com/.
