Prayer, Perhaps

You might have thought it was a simple matter to get Christians together to pray. Our Church Development Plan envisages doing that - deliberately and consciously to seek the will of God for Swanvale Halt church rather than launching initiatives which might be costly in time, money and human resources, yet not what the Lord was really after at all. Yet it hasn't proved easy at all. Giselle the Lay Reader was the one tasked with this but when she gathered a group of likely souls to see what they thought found them more willing to revive something we used to have, an ecumenical prayer group to concentrate on the needs of our local community - a worthwhile thing in its own right, but not what I had in mind. We thought, well, perhaps this is also a movement of the Spirit, so Giselle set up a session - but nobody could make it. OK, I concluded, I will just pick a couple of times, half an hour before Morning Prayer one day and before Evening Prayer another, get Jesus out of the aumbry (in the form of a consecrated Host in the monstrance) and onto the Lady Chapel altar, and sit there and see who comes. And last Monday there were five of us which I consider not bad. 

I asked whether people had any impressions they might want to share with me. Matthew had a reflection on open and closed doors, Giselle asked 'what is the congregation hungry for?' and seems to have developed an unexpected interest in the iconography of dragons, and Estelle was 'just thankful to be there' as she usually is. Fr Donald the retired hospital chaplain mused on the salutary effect of encountering Christ in the Sacrament and thereby accustoming ourselves to listen to one another as well as to Him, and how our society might be improved if its leaders did more of it, like Harold MacMillan popping into the Westminster house of the Society of St John the Evangelist to pray when he got the chance. He may well have a point.