LET US K.I.S.S: Feral thoughts on the business of public prayer

LET US K.I.S.S. - Blunt thoughts on the business of public prayer
A popular acronym in organisations is KISS: ‘keep it simple, stupid’.  It’s a helpful corrective to a common human tendency.  It is especially helpful in our use of language. Politicians now receive training is how not to reply directly to any question and as part if that it would seem that a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ (or a liberating ‘I don’t know’) is forbidden.  Instead they produce a torrent of words.  Too many of us are following suit.
 
I have an interest in these matters as they apply to public prayer and to the liturgy of the church. Some years ago I produced advice notes for those who prepared and offered the ‘intercessions’, the public prayers, which form part of the weekly celebration of Holy Communion.  They began with the ‘Three Special Rules’:
 
Rule 1: The intercessions must last no longer than four minutes!
Rule 2: Love God and do (say) what you like (St Augustine)
Rule 3: The intercessions must last no longer than four minutes!
 
Rules 1 and 3 were almost always ignored. Having listened to countless examples of Christian liturgical prayer, here’s what I think. Too much public prayer is facile. That is so whether offered by clergy or laity. It is not just that it nearly always involves too many words and a tendency to mention every conceivable topic, person, group, country, issue and outcome, but that it is too rarely anything close to what we know prayer is and ought to be. It is frequently sentimental and assumes that God is a uniquely competent CEO who is busy attending to the micro as well as macro management of the cosmos. William Stringfellow is a special and fresh voice on such things.  This is what he says about prayer.

And when I mention that I needed to pray, I am referring to prayer in what I understand to be its most essential, simple and rudimentary reality, as a relationship in which the authentic (or, one could say, original) identity of a person is affirmed by the Word of God by the Word of God.  Prayer, as I mean it, has its integrity in recall of the event of one's own creation in the Word of God.
 
Prayer, in this significance, is distinguished from the vulgar or profane connotations that have, unhappily, accrued to the term.  prayer, for instance, has nothing, as such, to do with utterance, language, posture, ceremony or pharisaical style and tradition.  Prayer is not 'talking' with God, to God, or about God.  It is not asking God for anything whatsoever.  It is not bargaining with God.  It has no similarity to conjuring, fantasizing, sentimental indulgence, or superstitious practice.  It is not motivational therapy...
 
More definitely, prayer is not personal in the sense of a private transaction occurring in a void, disconnected with everyone and everything else, but it is so personal that it reveals (I have chosen this verb conscientiously) every connection with everyone and everything else in the whole of Creation throughout time.  A person in the estate of prayer is identified in relation to Alpha and Omega to the inception of everything and to the fulfilment of everything (cf Romans 1:20, 1 Corinthians 12:12-13, Revelation 22:12).  In prayer, the initiative belongs to the Word of God, acting to identify, or to reiterate the identity of, the one who prays.
 
...Prayer, in quintessence, therefore, is a political action - an audacious one, at that - bridging the gap between immediate realities and ultimate hope, between ethics and eschatology, between the world as it is and the Kingdom which is vouchsafed. (A Simplicity of Faith: My Experience in Mourning, William Stringfellow, 1982, p67,68)

It has been my discovery that prayer moves away from nonsense when it begins with its nose firmly rubbed in my own hapless complicity in the misfortunes, agonies and muddles of our troubled and troubling world. Spare me the generalities, the indiscriminate balm, the soporific sonorities of the sentimental delivery. Let public intercessions become a little feral, and instead sing a song of greater authenticity.    Hugh Valentine