Mother Teresa

It was sometime in 1980 that CBS anchor Dan Rather interviewed Mother Teresa. By this point in her life, Mother Teresa had already spent three decades living in and serving the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta, India. Certainly she had some spiritual insight to share and while there are many aspects of that interview that are worth considering, perhaps the most famous is what Mother Teresa said about prayer. When Dan Rather asked her, “When you pray, what do you say to God?” Mother Teresa responded with, “I don’t say anything, I listen.” Still trying to advance the interview Dan Rather follows with, “Well okay … when God speaks to you, then, what does he say?” To which Mother Teresa concludes, “He doesn’t say anything. He listens. … And if you don’t understand that, I can’t explain it to you.”

This Sunday we are starting a three week series on prayer. As we work through our Dawnings process to discern God’s calling for our church’s next steps forward, we want to surround ourselves with and submerge ourselves in prayer. Prayer is a bit of a strange thing. There are examples in scripture of people interceding with God on behalf of other people and God changing his mind about a fate he had decided, like when Moses urges God not to destroy the Israelites. There is Jesus telling us that God knows how to give good gifts when we ask for them and James tells us that the prayer of a righteous person can bring healing. There also is the example of Jesus praying desperately in the Garden of Gethsemane for God to find a different path besides the cross and yet submitting to God’s will and not his own. The common parlance is that God answers every prayer, just sometimes the answer is ‘no.’

Truly I don’t really understand how prayer ‘works.’ Perhaps with a Masters of Divinity I should, but I can affirm that prayer matters. There is something about it that connects us to God. Perhaps the words we use in that time matter. Perhaps the words we hear from God matter too. But more than either, I think choosing to intentionally direct our thoughts and affections towards God and sit in the awareness of God’s affection for us, perhaps matters the most. For in this time we are being with Jesus and becoming a bit more like Jesus and just maybe learning how to do what Jesus did. That may be an answer to prayer.