THE GOSPEL OF St Matthew confronts us almost from the beginning with the very essence of prayer. The Magi saw the long-expected star; they set out without delay to find the king; they arrived at the manger, they knelt, they worshipped and they presented their gifts: they expressed prayer in its perfection, which is contemplation and adoration.
Often, in more or less popular literature about prayer, we are told that prayer is an enthralling adventure. It is a commonplace to hear: ‘Come on, learn to pray; prayer is so interesting, so thrilling, it is the discovery of a new world; you will meet God, you will find the way to a spiritual life.’ In a sense of course this is true; but something very much more far-reaching is being forgotten when such statements are made: it is that prayer is a dangerous adventure and that we cannot enter upon it without risk. As St Paul says, it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God (Heb 10:31). Therefore to set out deliberately to confront the living God is a dread adventure: every meeting with God is, in a certain sense, a last judgement.
Whenever we come into the presence of God, whether in the sacraments or in prayer, we are doing something which is full of danger because, according to the words of scripture, God is a fire. Unless we are ready to surrender ourselves without reservation to the divine fire and to become that burning bush of the desert, which burned but was never consumed, we shall be scorched, because the experience of prayer can only be known from the inside, and is not to be dallied with.
Coming nearer to God is always a discovery both of the beauty of God and of the distance there is between him and us. ‘Distance’ is an inadequate word, because it is not determined by the fact that God is holy and that we are sinful. Distance is determined by the attitude of the sinner to God. We can approach God only if we do so with a sense of coming to judgement. If we come having condemned ourselves; if we come because we love him in spite of the fact that we are unfaithful, if we come to him, loving him more than a godless security, then we are open to him and he is open to us, and there is no distance; the Lord comes close to us in an act of compassionate love. But if we stand before God wrapped in our pride, in our assertiveness, if we stand before him as though we had a right to stand there, if we stand and question him, the distance that separates the creature and the creator becomes infinite. There is a passage in the Screw tape Letters in which C. S. Lewis suggests that distance.., in this sense, is a relative thing: when the great archangel came before God to question him, the moment he asked his question, not in order to understand in humility but in order to compel God to give account, he found himself at an infinite distance from God. God had not moved, nor had Satan, and yet without any motion, they were infinitely far apart (Letter XIX).
Whenever we approach God the contrast that exists between what he is and what we are becomes dreadfully clear. We may not be aware of this as long as we live at a distance from God, so to speak, as long as his presence or his image is dimmed in our thoughts and in our perceptions; but the nearer we come to God, the sharper the contrast appears. It is not the constant thought of their sins, but the vision of the holiness of God that makes the saints aware of their own sinfulness. When we consider ourselves without the fragrant background of God’s presence, sins and virtues become small and somewhat irrelevant matters; it is against the background of the divine presence that they stand out in full relief and acquire their depth and tragedy.
~ Adapted from Archbishop Anthony Bloom, Living Prayer
