Plenary, 14 Dec 2005

Meeting date: Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Official Report 409KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. Our first item of business today, as always on a Wednesday, is time for reflection. The time for reflection leader today is the Rev Tony Schmitz, director of the Ogilvie Institute, Aberdeen.

There is a well-known incident from the life of the Jewish philosopher, Edith Stein. Some years before her conversion from agnosticism to Christianity, she went into the cathedral in Frankfurt, where she saw a simple woman come in from the market place, put down her shopping bags, kneel down and pray. That scene, according to Edith Stein's testimony, made a remarkable impression on her and was a decisive moment along her path to faith. A simple person kneeling and praying in the cathedral—it is something inexpressible, something quite simple, something that we take for granted, but it is something so mysterious, this intimacy with the invisible God. We are not here concerned with an introverted form of meditation but, rather, with a quiet resting that draws us towards a mysterious other. At that moment, the Jewish philosopher Stein was as yet an unbeliever; it was more than two decades before her martyrdom at Auschwitz. At the sight of that simple woman at prayer, Stein could only surmise what soon became for her a certainty: God exists, and in prayer we turn towards him.

What an impression, in that case, it must have made on the disciples to see Jesus praying quietly for hours—or even all night long—as before an important decision. What was it, this protracted attention, in silence, to the one whom he called "Abba"? When he ceased, one of his disciples asked, "Lord, teach us to pray."

"Teach us to pray." That request expresses the yearning to enter the realm of that quiet intimacy, that watchful reaching out towards the invisible presence. His reverence before the mystery of Jesus's prayer is so great that the disciple does not dare to interrupt the Lord—to burst in on his prayer—with his question. He waits. He waits until Jesus himself comes out of prayer. Only then does the disciple dare to ask—dare to plead: "Teach us to pray."

Do we not find it touching when we come into church and find someone praying quietly? Do not we hear in those moments the murmuring of the spring that calls us to the living water? As Ignatius of Antioch, who was martyred 18 centuries before Edith Stein, wrote:

"There is living water in me, water that murmurs and says within me: Come to the Father."

Yearning for prayer is the enticement of the Holy Spirit in us, who draws us to the Father. Indeed, that yearning is already prayer; it is already the prayer of the spirit of Christ in us.