Connections - an article by Aelred, April 26, 2010.

In the past ten years the explosion in communications, worldwide, has changed the way a lot of people experience life. Young people, particularly, (but also some not so young!), find the immediate link with friends and others, through their mobile phone, the internet, and a web site such as Facebook, an essential part of daily living. And yet humankind has always had a sense of the inter-relatedness of life on this planet. John Donne, the 17th century writer and poet had such a sense -

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind ... (John Donne, Meditation XVII, 1624.)

Donne in that piece was thinking especially of the death of someone - 'for whom the bell tolls'. (London in the early 17th century appears to have been a very unhealthy place and preachers and poets found in this theme a happy hunting ground!) But in daily life we are very much part of all of humanity. There are times when, despite the dizzy pace of life today, we pause and sometimes reflect and ponder. It is in that small window of openness that lie the possibilities that Christians call prayer - or in other words Connections! And prayer is as multifaceted as life itself. I shall be suggesting that we need broad and deep ideas about Christian prayer and that this richness of prayer depends entirely upon our understanding of God. In today's world, the divine, God and the risen Lord, are not feasibly 'out there' or 'up there'. For people today, if the idea of the divine is at all acceptable, God is with us in the process of all that happens. In simple terms, he is with humanity - if we are to believe in the divine at all.

Jesus appears in the gospels not only as the one who gives commands - "So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you ..." (Luke 11: 9) - but also as the one who goes apart to pray, alone, in silence and notably in the moment of the transfiguration. In the fourth century the hermit movement replicated these quiet sojourns of Jesus in prayer. Communities of prayer arose in the sixth century and the church took them under her wing, giving them credence. Then, still in this historical mode(!), at the Reformation the monasteries in the Western church were largely emptied - they had, perhaps, become ossified. Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch in one of his books remarked on this, saying that the tradition of monastic prayer was jettisoned at this time in favour of 'services' and a preference for a literal understanding of Scripture!!

While God and the risen Lord are always with us, the problem of all prayer is that we are not always with them! But more than other pressing concerns, people have always found it possible to respond either in those windows of silent pondering or in more prolonged times set aside. What so often provokes us to do this is what wells up within us to give thanks to God and for others. This is characteristic of Christian prayer as it also is of common worship in Eucharist. It is in this human context of thanks that the directness of asking becomes more natural and humble; and spearheads our support for others both near and far.

But I would not have begun writing about prayer if that is where we must stop! Connections, as I began by saying, is the characteristic possibility for all of us at one time or another. In other words to talk about prayer as confined to religious communities of one kind or another is to say too little about how we should live in today's world. For cheek by jowl with those with whom we live and meet - on the Millennium Bridge or in Times Square - there is the ongoing silent but real inter-connectedness of what we have been describing as prayer. While faith means a positive acceptance of God's approach to me, there is yet for others the possibility of living in a sort of 'prayerful' existence of positive Connectedness with others for good. So let's say that, apart from ourselves, there are many of our contemporaries who are also struck by the human need to Connect at the deepest level with others and who do so in the shadow of the God to whom they cannot, at the moment, respond.

Prayer is, in the end, a matter of love for people (as for God) - so beautifully captured by this Jewish writer -