Emotional prayer

The Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, notes that conversations with God characterise the relationships of those closest to him:

“Abraham says: God, why did you abandon the world? God says to Abraham: Why did you abandon Me? And there then begins that dialogue between Heaven and Earth which has not ceased in 4,000 years. That dialogue in which God and Man find one another.”

“Only thus,” Sacks says, “can we understand the great dialogues between God and Abraham and Moses and Jeremiah and Job.”

Many of the great figures in the Bible – Jacob, Samuel, Job, Jeremiah, Jonah, Habakkuk, Jesus, and Paul - seem to have viewed prayer as being more like a constant conversation with God than they did a scheduled time for making requests. But the Psalms are where most of the conversations between people and God are recorded.

Virtually all the Psalms are conversations where it is assumed that the hearer is either God or the people of Israel. Some of the Psalms are actually written as conversations e.g. Psalm 12. In verses 1-4 the Psalmist cries out to God for help, in verses 5-6 God answers and in verses 7-8 the Psalmist responds by expressing confidence in God. Psalm 77 is the record of a similar conversation with God. In verses 1-6 the Psalmist tells us how he cried out to God, in verses 7-9 he tells what he cried out, in verses 10-12 he tells us how God answered his cry, and in verses 13-20 he tells us of his response to God’s answer.

God wants us to be in conversation, in dialogue, in debate, in arguments with him so that we can find him for ourselves and actually embody his characteristics and interests ourselves. The conversations with God that are recorded for us in the Psalms are one’s that involve a whole range of different emotions. That can include complaint and protest as in Psalm 39.

We are often quite restrained in our relationship with God and in our praying. Therefore, we often praise God and say that we will obey or follow him but we rarely argue, protest, complain or question him, at least not publicly. But this approach to prayer is one that a number of Christian poets have picked up and used over the centuries, as in the poems that follow. As you read them you might like to pray the emotions of the poems.

Bitter-sweet

Ah my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve:
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament, and love.

George Herbert

Thou art indeed just, Lord

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? And why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now, leavèd how think! Lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Love (III)

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked anything.

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.

George Herbert

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Kenneth Leighton- Let All The World In Every Corner Sing.