Village Shepherd

Some years ago we had a family holiday in Wales. From the Eastern most part of East Anglia to the Western side of North Wales is a very long way. It happened to be a blazing hot Bank Holiday weekend, so I need hardly describe the traffic or the journey.

Ian, as husbands sometimes do, insisted on driving the entire way. Having set off in the early hours of the morning, we eventually arrived at a dear little cottage set high on the side of a hill in remote Wales late in the evening. Needless to say, we were hot, tired and fractious.

Ian and Alex our son, who was about 16 at the time, carried the heavy cases up all the steps into the cottage. We walked in, Ian glanced into the first bedroom, said "This is lovely! We'll enjoy it here," and collapsed on the floor. Since he's six foot four and built to match, you can imagine our horror.

The nightmare continued. To cut a very long story short, Ian was rushed into hospital where he remained for the week. Each time I visited the news was worse. From being told initially that he had a severe migraine, to eventually being informed he had a brain tumour and needed immediate operation.

It was not a good holiday! And it was terrible being away from home at such a time, for we knew nobody in the entire area except the couple who owned the cottage, whom we'd just met and who were absolutely marvellous.

Our fortnight's holiday ended after a week, with me driving Ian the long journey back from Wales to Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridgeshire, where they discovered it wasn't a brain tumour at all but a mild stroke. And he made a complete recovery.

The strange thing was, that in all this terror and confusion and dreadful anxiety, I was unable to pray. I couldn't get my mind past the horrors of the moment. I couldn't begin to think beyond Ian and the family and what might happen. I wanted to pray, I desperately wanted to pray, but I couldn't. So I rang up my vicar back home and asked for the prayers of the congregation. And I very soon felt surrounded and upheld and strengthened by the prayers of friends and family.

In the light of that experience, I find it astonishing that Jesus could not only pray, but pray so deeply and so earnestly for his friends at a time of huge stress to himself. It was after the Last Supper when Jesus was so very aware of the storm clouds gathering and kept telling his friends that the hour was coming.

Judas Iscariot had already left to betray Jesus, and from Jesus' words at the last Supper, "What you are going to do, do quickly," it would seem he was aware even at that stage of Judas' intentions.

The whole group of disciples went out into the garden where most of them fell asleep, but Jesus spent the night in prayer. In John's version of the prayer Jesus doesn't even ask for the forthcoming Cup of suffering to be taken from him. His only concerns are that he glorifies God and that his friends are properly cared for.

How do you reach such a stage in your prayer life that even when the chips are down and you're in dire straits, you're able to pray not just, "Help me God!" but to pray deeply and earnestly for other people?

How do you get your mind beyond the present desperate and anxious and worrying situation into the depths of real prayer?

Throughout the Gospels we're told how Jesus regularly and constantly withdrew from the crowds into his own space. He often climbed the mountains, or went out sailing in the boat or wandered into the wilderness by himself. There he would relax into God's presence, absorbing God's love for him, discovering God's plans for him, accepting and enjoying God's refreshment.

He spent himself for other people, he poured himself out for them, he poured his energy and power into them, and he needed to replenish his own batteries somehow.

We live in a much more frantic and frenetic world than the world in which Jesus lived. We are bombarded by sights and sounds not only from our own small world, but from the world at large. Wars and famines, drought and floods from throughout the world become very real to us through the medium of television. Day after day our attention is demanded by world events.

And we are besieged incessantly by advertising. Not only from the television, but from hoardings, newspapers, magazines, radio and so on. So our senses receive a constant barrage from the world about us.

Working practices too are quite different. For most people life is governed by the clock. Our days are mostly split up into chunks of a couple of hours at a time, we are obliged to be at different places on time, and we tend to be very conscious of the exact minute. All of this, coupled with the demands of work and family, means our need for space is perhaps even more pronounced now than it was in Jesus' day.

Yet for many of us, relaxation means reading the paper or sitting in front of the television absorbing the entertainment which is offered. So that far from getting away from it all, we're actually turning towards that which bombards us.

I suspect that many people today yearn to know how to pray. I suspect that the liturgical prayers offered in Church go only part way towards fulfilling this yearning. Because we live in such a noisy and active world, many people are afraid of silence, and have never been able to explore its depths. Yet God is to be found within the depths of silence in a new way.

The Retreat movement, which offers anything from a day to a month away in a quiet or sometimes totally silent setting, is growing rapidly as people respond to their inner need for God and refreshment. A retreat once a year is wonderful, but perhaps we all need to be able to retreat much more frequently than that. Perhaps we need to be able to relax into God's presence regularly.

Perhaps we Christians within the churches are called to teach people how to pray. For if we knew how to pray as Jesus prayed, then like him we could go beyond stress and into the peace that passes all understanding. And then we'd really begin to experience eternal life here and now, for our lives would be utterly transformed.