Shush - God's praying

They said Beethoven was mad.

They said Mozart was mad.

They said Fred was mad.  Who was Fred? He was my uncle: he was mad.

Every so often it’s good to dust off an ancient joke.

As it happens, I really did have an Uncle Fred who was pretty sane as I recall. However, he had a sister – my aunt – who was mildly eccentric. Every family needs someone like auntie. An example of her eccentricity was that when I took my intended wife to meet auntie, she served up for dinner a plateful of lambs’ tongues swimming in a clear gravy that resembled saliva.  (Auntie was a doughty figure and so I meekly ate the lambs’ tongues with great wodges of mashed potato.)

In her final years, auntie had two major life events. She took up with an Eastern religion and she developed dementia. Although dementia can be frightful, it sometimes takes the form of a deep-seated contentment and sense of well-being and this is what happened with auntie, which was a great relief to her family and friends. When she was eventually gathered up by the angels (or maybe it was the djinn in her case?) we went to her funeral which was held according to the rites of faith that she had embraced. This involved something that the service leader entitled “the obligatory long prayer for the dead.”

Well he wasn’t kidding. After an opening section of the prayer, there was a statement about God in Persian which was repeated six times, followed by six phrases which were each repeated 19 times. Yes, 19 times. By my count that’s 120 repetitions. Auntie would have taken a dim view of my boredom, yet I found myself counting the number of windowpanes as well as working out the number of the repeating pattern in the wood panelling. Funnily enough, upon completion of the 120 prayers, I discovered my sister had been engaged in precisely the same activity…

Now I know enough about my own expression of faith to appreciate that it would be dead easy for an outsider to pick holes in some of the things we do on a Sunday morning. And, as a nonconformist, I would want to defend absolutely the right of anyone to liberty of conscience and freedom of religious expression. But 120 times?

I was reminded of this on Sunday morning, when we looked at Jesus teaching his followers a pattern for their prayers. “And when you pray, do not keep on babbling… For people think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.”

I don’t know why our prayers sometimes seem to go unanswered. But I strongly suspect that they wouldn’t be any more effective if they were long and repetitive.  Our prayers can be brief and to the point because God knows ready the things that we need before we ask. Time spent prattling means a lost opportunity to spend that time listening to anything God might want to say back.