Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe." — John 20:29

As we heard on Sunday, the resurrected Christ does not question Thomas’ need to put his hand in his wounds. God knows we need earthly experiences to approach heavenly ones. We need a point of contact by which our senses are grounded in order to transcend ourselves, even if we affirm our senses by denying them for a time, such as by practicing silence or by fasting during Lent so that we might feel the joy of the resurrection.

Perhaps as a way of touching Christ’s wounds myself, I write the obvious in this post—about how daunting it can be to try to make words through which to see God. Since the resurrection, we, the Church, are the earthly body of Christ, and so the best way to try to see God is to approach God together.

I look forward to Tuesdays on Zoom, starting on April 26, when my colleagues and I will each discuss a category of prayer and offer a survey of Christian practice. These will be Silent Prayer/ Christian Meditation (tomorrow), The Book of Common Prayer–Daily Office, The Book of Common Prayer–Collects, Lectio & Visio Divina, and Praying the Rosary.

In preparing for this I ask myself, how do we pray taking into consideration both the immanence of God–how God is perceptible and graspable, as in Christ in the flesh, in scripture, sacraments, liturgy and sacred arts–and the transcendence of God–how God is limitless, ineffable, unknowable, and indescribable?

It seems to me that to discuss spirituality or art is to have to use imperfect categories, and to try to construct them transparently enough so one might move through them and progress rather than trip over them or feel barricaded and stranded by them. The hope that God puts in the heart–Emily Dickinson’s “thing with feathers that perches in the soul”–must not be caged or silenced by our human, finite attempts to describe the infinitude of God which hope boundlessly seeks.

So we will use categories the Church in its wisdom has made for prayer, knowing that any category we make by which we claim to approach God, and any name we apply to God will be, as one ancient mystic noted, like favoring a portrait over the person whom it resembles.

When I teach portraiture to children, after giving them turns to model, I sit for them so they all get to work. My silent prayer becomes imagining what God sees as I watch as many versions of myself emerge as those who make them. Each one looks somewhat like me while as different from each other as their makers are different. That the artists have made me in their own image makes me none other than who I am, nor does it negate their creative responses to me. And so it is with our prayers to God.

Through studying forms of prayer we receive a palette for a creative life with God–the One who perpetually draws us by the hope breathed into us at the beginning of Creation. A particular way of prayer will call to you to use it, others will not. As if to paint in blue monochrome, as blue is Mary’s color, you might want to learn to pray the Rosary. Or you might be drawn to the red of the Book of Common Prayer, or the red-letter sayings of Jesus in the Bible for a practice of Lectio Divina. 

What has been referred to as the “middle way” of Anglicanism welcomes a broad view of Christian prayer and spiritual development which includes the thought and practice of the ancient Church before East/ West division into the Early Modern masterwork of our tradition, the Book of Common Prayer, and its more recent revisions. We will explore and ask questions such as, Is God’s first language silence? (I have never been so sure about that, but we will talk about silent prayer in the first class. For an interesting recent article on that look HERE.)

We will learn ways of sanctifying (setting aside for God) our time with the blessing of doing this together, knowing that our efforts are for the sake of union with the One who initiated our longing, curiosity, and creative efforts, expecting to find them very good.

“God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good…..” — Genesis 1:31