The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

There are many passages in the Old Testament which now strike us as very strange, even obscure. They cry out as does our first lesson for a symbolic interpretation in order to add another more imaginatively intriguing layer to the text.
In the book of Exodus we learn of two separate manifestations of God’s presence in a pillar of cloud which leads the people through the desert by day, and a pillar of fire which leads them by night. By the time we come to the book of Numbers these two pillars have become one and the one pillar itself serves different purposes. The fire is manifest within the cloud but the glory cloud is now closely linked with the tabernacle. The tabernacle is the tent of meeting built according to the instructions given by God at Sinai. Though we must assume the glory cloud is still leading the people through the wilderness it has now taken on a new significance. It indicates when they are to travel and when they are to stay still. When it hovers over the tabernacle they do not move, when it is raised up they travel on. God’s presence in the glory cloud is therefore manifest both in movement and in stillness, or we might also say in action and in contemplation and with that suggestion we leave the cloud behind for a while to look at some of the teachings on prayer of St Thomas Aquinas whose feast day it is tomorrow.
The idea of prayer has a complicated history. Initially to pray means to ask God for anything. Paul, however, says that we should pray without ceasing, but it seems difficult to keep on asking God for things all the time. So prayer was equated by St Augustine with desire – the desire for divine blessing which should motivate our whole life. At the same time in educated circles people began to feel that prayer as simply asking God for things was rather naive, even demeaning.   They preferred to think of prayer as communing with God – a kind of prayer which could take various forms, some more superior to others. Thus prayer began to take on the meaning of contemplation – a pious affection towards God. So when Aquinas faced up to the task of defining what prayer meant he was confronted by a series of possibilities.
He chose to go back to the original meaning of asking for things, but that of course raises the question why we need ask God for anything when he knows in advance what we need. It also raises the question about whether we can change God’s mind; if he has foreseen how the world goes, how can our prayers make it go differently?
This of course is part of the bigger problem of human free will in a divinely constructed universe, but for now we shall deal with the smaller problem to which Aquinas provided an ingenious answer. Our prayers don’t interfere with God’s plan, they are part of God’s plan.  Our prayers do make a difference because God wills that our prayers should be part of what causes something to happen. We do not know what God’s plan is so we must go on praying because many of our prayers may be a part of what will genuinely make a difference to the world.
But then isn’t asking God for things rather a demeaning activity both for us and him? Are we not simply trying to exploit God in our own interest? Thomas Aquinas deals with this by pointing out the huge difference between asking someone to do something and ordering them to do it. Asking God involves admitting your dependence on him, throwing yourself on his mercy, which is in itself a kind of worship. As Simon Tugwell puts it, this is the kind of prayer in which we ‘sacrifice our own planning minds to God’. Proper prayer involves the  simple act of bringing a problem to God straight away and not working out in advance what he should do about it. All prayer will initially be confused even misguided.   This then ties in with Paul’s comment in Romans 8, that we ‘do not know what to pray for.’ Paul, however, goes on to say that the spirit helps us in our weakness. We should pray for whatever deeply concerns ourselves or others and if we persist in such prayer the activity of the spirit will begin to sort out our prayer  so that it becomes aligned with the will of God. We may start by praying for someone in trouble and the more we pray, the more we become familiar with their need, the more the spirit helps us to realise what in particular we should be praying for, for that person. We might even say that the longer we pray in this way the more contemplative our prayer becomes as we begin genuinely to attend to our own or someone else’s need.
. The word contemplation could originally mean just study, so any careful attention we pay to a text, or a work of art or a person’s need is a kind of contemplation. It is a sacrifice of self concern – a going out to what is there in front of us. A child’s homework could be a training in prayer, just as much as a surgeon’s concentration on the patient on the operating table. Both are contemplative.
Thomas Aquinas writing about contemplative prayer is much less clear than what he says about intercession. But just two further thoughts are helpful. In relation to contemplation he says that what most engages our interest is what we most want to share with our friends. He also says that the love of God and neighbour is the only proper motive for contemplation. This implies that you do not need to live in a monastery to be a contemplative. The more God engages your mind and heart, the more you contemplate God, the more you will want to share God with your friends, share what energises, fascinates and inspires you about God. In fact the only motivation for such contemplative prayer should be that you find a way of loving God more, and loving your friends more in God.
We began with the stop start progress of the people of Israel through the wilderness. They like us, are the pilgrim people of God. On the way we find much that engages our sense of our own and other people’s needs. On the way we are often motivated to pray the short sharp prayer – we have no time for the more prolonged kind of prayer which can so easily become boring. At moments on the way the glory cloud stops us. We are forced to pause and in those pauses, perhaps for worship, we have time to be more attentive to the needs which the journey exposes. We contemplate the glory of the loving Father on whom the whole journey depends and we bring uncertainly and painfully our needs to God, allowing the spirit to clarify and focus what we are trying to say. Some times things become clear  quickly and we soon move on. At other times  the presence of the cloud leaves us in a prolonged and uncertain, even disbelieving state. And then perhaps we might pray the prayer of our anthem: O Lord, my God, ?Though I forsake thee ?Forsake me not, ?But guide me as I walk ?Through the valley of mistrust, ?And let the cry of my disbelieving absence ?Come unto thee, ?Thou who declared unto Moses: ?”I shall be there.” – there on the stop start journey of the pilgrim people of God.