Slipping into prayer

Teach us to pray, the disciples asked Jesus in yesterday's Gospel. Maybe there was something about him at prayer - a stillness, an intensity, an inner radiance - that the disciples envied, and craved for themselves, imagining it could be easily taught. And I like to think that Jesus' response was less about which words to use, and more about the attitudes we bring to our prayer: intimacy alongside adoration; surrender and acceptance; trust-filled awareness of our weakness and of our needs... all contained in constancy and perseverance, and in community - our and us, not just me. So, not words, which are virtually absent from how I pray - a few words; a short sentence or two at most. A few words, because, when praying for something or someone, I find the spacious, open, ever-widening Heart of Jesus to be an excellent repository for all the pain and prayer I then pour into it; a repository in which nothing or nobody is lost, or languishes forgotten at the back of a shelf. 

The day before, I had come across this reflection about praying on train journeys - trusting that these little prayers might consecrate carriages as I travel... I read it with interest. I, too, have prayed on trains and buses, though not necessarily in intercession, or with an awareness of consecration. I have prayed on busy thoroughfares too, and on well-trodden walks, and briefly, urgently, whenever I hear the siren of an ambulance or fire engine. And I slip into this prayer intentionally, even if only for a few minutes; but there have been a few times, too, when the slipping is almost imperceptible, so that the realisation that I am praying is often preceded by the fact that I am praying. 

And I am transported back to my first memory of that realisation - not on a train or a high street, but in a bathroom. It was February or March 1995, a month or two after I had become a novice. I had struggled and fumbled with prayer for the past few years: authoritative books and people would tell me I should be doing one thing, but the inner pull within me, quietly strong and insistent, would draw me elsewhere, where roadmaps were hazier and harder to find. And now here I was: somehow, bizarrely, through the grace of God here I was, embarked on a stage of formation whose very essence is deep, prolonged prayer, into a way of life rooted in prayer and contemplation... 

I was cleaning the bathroom, and for some reason I had decided to descale the washbasin's taps. Nowadays, I'd simply spray some Viakal on them, and then polish for a few, satisfying minutes, but back then it was harder work, taking much longer. And as I scrubbed and rubbed and chipped away, there was a moment - sudden but not abrupt; gentle but so very real - when I realised, when I knew, that I was praying. Without intending to, or noticing; not with words, or thoughts, or a hymn swirling in my head, but with a quiet union at the very depths of my being. And with this moment came a surge of awed, almost incredulous joy. I was praying...!!

I sometimes think of that moment while I am cleaning taps. I do not ask for it to be repeated; it is enough that it has happened, that I have the memory, and the awareness that it is indeed possible to slip effortlessly into the immensity of God. Mostly, though, my prayer is more fidgety; more quotidian and ordinary: like the disciples, I too crave stillness and intensity... I too need to ask Jesus, constantly, to teach me to pray; to come with his stillness and be the One who prays in me...