Prayer
The Rev’d Devin McLachlan
Luke 11.1–13
The 6th Sunday after Trinity, 27 July 2025
When I speak to people about St Bene't's, I talk about what it feels like to be in a building where a thousand years of prayers have soaked into the stones.
You can feel it when you descend from street level and enter this space: the palpable peace that comes from generations upon generations in this sanctuary coming to ask God for help, to ask God for peace, to ask God to fulfil their desires, to forgive their sins, to set right what has been broken, to break what should not have been and set them free.
They have offered up prayers delivered by rote, but no less sincere for having been said again and again over a lifetime.
They have offered up prayers that were stumbling and hesitant, punctuated with tears and sighs too deep for words.
Prayers eloquent and poetic, rambling or straight to the point.
They have also offered up insincere prayers, prayers not of the heart but of what they thought ought to be said, hiding away their true selves beneath carbuncles of insecurity, shame, abuse, or mere confusion.
By the Saint Anne’s altar, near the icons and the pricket stand, we have our prayer station. There are scraps of paper, pencils and pins. Visitors from around the world write their prayers, in a variety of languages, and post them to the cork board.
Prayers for healing. Prayers for friends. Prayers in memories of loved ones lost or gone before.
Small heartfelt outbursts of faith and hope and longing:
I love my friend Skylar so much Please keep my boys safe and bring them home to me. On this scrap of paper is the hope for all the world. I pray God is happy all the time. Some prayers are misspelled — a prayer for pease is, I assume, a prayer for peace.
(And if you’ve every seen my handwriting, you know that God knows the secrets of our hearts and give thanks he doesn’t have to decipher my scratchings. )
Sometimes the prayers are included in our 6 o'clock evening prayer.
Sometimes one of us will clear the board, praying over all those posted prayers before returning them to recycling.
Sometimes I’ll take a prayer down early, if it will cause distress to others; you get the odd homophobic slur or hurtful jibe.
And then there was this one: Pls pray that Id meet a Kings grad 4 casual sex.
It made me laugh. But it also made me realise that it was exactly the kind of prayer which Jesus was preaching about in today's gospel passage.
Among my ministries in the Diocese of Massachusetts, I served for a year as bishop’s chaplain to the Right Reverend Marvil Thomas Shaw, SSJE. Bishop Tom had for many years been the Superior for the Cowley Fathers, more formally known as the Society of Saint John the Evangelist.
He was an Anglican monk, wearing a black habit and living in a community of brothers who had taken Benedictine vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity. In his spare time he was a potter; he spent time with poets and was close friends with Mary Oliver.
And every morning, usually before dawn, he spent at least an hour in prayer and meditation. Spending time with Bishop Tom, was like walking into St Bene’t's. You could feel the deep practice of prayer soaked into the very essence of his being.
And so you can imagine the looks on the faces of the congregation, when Bishop Tom would come on an episcopal visitation and preach about prayer.
He would tell middle class Episcopalians in suburban Massachusetts that if what they really wanted was to have an affair with their neighbours wife, then that's what they should ask of God in their prayer. Pls pray that Id meet a Kings grad 4 casual sex.
Now Bp Tom would go onto point out that God would not grant such a request, no more than a father would give the scorpion to a child. But, he would say, at least you are now being honest with God about what you want.
How can we love God and bare ourselves to receive his grace, if we deceive ourselves about the devices and desires of our own hearts.
Ask God what it is you desire, and then listen for God's answer.
All too often we pre-emptively decide what God's answer is going to be, and then shape our prayer to meet it — as if we are trying to pass some spiritual exam board.
Friends, we cannot pass that spiritual exam board.
Miserable offenders that we are, there is no health within us.
But we believe in a just, merciful, and above all loving God, who opens the door when we knock, who shows us what we seek, and gives us what is best.
If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!
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When the stones of St Bene’t's were first raised in the 11th century, the priest’s missal would have included a Latin prayer to be said by the president before the Eucharist.
A version of that prayer, translated into Middle English, appears in the 14th Century Cloud of Unknowing, one of the great medieval English works on contemplative prayer.
Cranmer’s translation of this prayer then found its way into the Prayer Book, where it has remained ever since.
Our Common Worship translation has it thus:
Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known,and from whom no secrets are hid(den):cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit,that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy name;through Christ our Lord. Amen.
May the Holy Spirit ever cleanse the thoughts of our hearts,that we may bring our truest selves into prayer.May we bring to God all our desires, for he knows them all already,and in so doing discover what we most truly need — Our daily bread. Forgiveness. Deliverance from judgement,and, above all, the grace to worthily hallow and magnify God’s Holy Name. Amen.