"Multisensory prayer"
Sue Wallace : Visions, York UK
[06.05]

Sometimes I feel a terrible fraud for writing a prayerbook. Isn’t it people that are good at prayer that write prayerbooks? In my imagination I always used to picture people who write prayerbooks as being “super-pray-ers” who have sussed the art of living life totally-connected to God. Yet my prayerbook came out of our struggles within the Visions group and our realisation that we were actually pretty bad at prayer really.

We desperately needed to search out new ways of praying, because the ways that we usually used, weren’t really enabling us to connect with God on a deep level. They felt shallow, like somehow we were short-changing both God and ourselves. So we explored different ways of doing prayer...Its so easy sometimes for prayer to become that quick-fix shopping list sent up the heavenly firewire and because life is so busy, we don’t make the time to pause and see if there is any info coming back. Somehow there seemed to be more to prayer than shopping lists, hastily worded requests sent heavenwords by a bunch of people sitting in a circle once a week.

So we went on a sort of pilgrimage and scavenger hunt. We looked at all the different Christian traditions and how they prayed, collecting things that worked for us. Because, strangely enough, it wasn’t just one thing because there is no quick-fix. Different things suited us at different times and in the midst of our journey we collected various ways of praying that we could swap between.

Some of the things that really impressed us came out of the contemplative traditions. We discovered new ways of praying with the bible that made bible study less of an academic exercise and more of a window into Heaven. I personally have found the approach pioneered by Ignatius of Loyola particularly inspiring. One of the techniques he uses is to take an incident in the bible, a gospel incident for example, and to place yourself within the action, as one of the characters. It could be a major character, or a minor one. It doesn’t even have to be a gospel incident.

The other week was Pentecost and this made me wonder. “What must it have been like to have lived across the room from all that action? What did the neighbours think? What did they see throughout the whole Easter week?” There must have been an awful lot of strange comings and goings. A “prophet” sneaking out of the house to go to a garden every night to commune with his Creator. A bunch of terrified pilgrims running back to a house to bolt the doors after their leader’s arrest. Then, three days later, those same pilgrims left the house with smiles on their faces. Did the neighbours think they were callous for looking happy after all that. Fourty days after that,All-Heaven was breaking loose with plenty of strange goings on. And as we sit with a bible on our lap and close our eyes we too can be-there. We can see the whole thing for the first time with new eyes. For this is one of the types of prayer when actually it is God who is speaking to us, not the other way around.

Another of the things that we found helpful were the unspoken ways of praying. Kneeling on the floor spattering paint upon a huge piece of paper in a wordless cry for help for a suffering friend, lighting a candle and asking God to shine light on a dark and hopeless situation, bowing in devotion as the Orthodox do, or stretching arms to Heaven in a prayer that was more about posture than poetry or simply sitting at the foot of the cross and *listening*. All these things have been valuable to us. And I think, because of now having so many tools at our disposal I’m sure we pray more than we used to. We haven’t thrown out the sitting in a circle, and simply “talking to God” completely, yet we don’t have to be confined to that way of praying anymore. There is so so much more we can do. When we run out of words we don’t simply have to stop. We can offer up our silence, or our art, or ourselves.

So, even though we’re still not super-saints, who pray all the time, maybe we are a little closer to God than we were before. I hope so.

Sue Wallace is worship coordinator and composer for the 'Visions' community. She is the author of two books on multisensory prayer (published in UK by Scripture Union) and several albums available from the Visions website: www.visions-york.org