Monthly Message (February 2012) - Imagining the experience of others

Dear Friends,

When asked about his ‘spiritual discipline’, Revd. John Cobb admitted that he did not get up early to pray every day … or do anything that one could call regular, holy or exemplary! “So,” he went on, “I guess I’d have to say that ‘telling the truth’ is a good ‘spiritual discipline’ to start with.”

He continued, saying, that “trying to imagine and understand the experience of the other person when you pray for them” was, he had discovered, a ‘discipline’ that meant prayer is alive and about making a difference to our living.

… imagining what it is like to be the other person when you pray for them … the more I think about it the more I am challenged by this simple thought. Prayer that reaches out to another person while searching for the way God would have us live in the world sounds like a recipe for prayer that engages us in the depths of who we are and makes a difference to what we do.

Lent, the weeks from Ash Wednesday (February 22nd) until Easter, are a time for a focus on the ways in which our spiritual practice shapes our lives. Many will have memories of the traditions of ‘giving something up for lent’ … a practice that was, in days gone by, meant to encourage freedom from excesses and focus prayers and life on drawing closer to God. More recently the emphasis has changed from giving up for lent to taking up …. and the challenge of doing something creative, positive and progressive with the hope of drawing closer to God and making a difference in the world.

This year some of the aid organizations are encouraging us, to make the weeks of Lent a time of prayer and change in our practical action in relation to the earth and environment. In many ways the big environmental issues of climate change have slipped from the news agendas …. but in reality they have not gone away. A particularly mild and quite chaotic winter here in the UK might not worry us too much …. But changes in the predictability of weather patterns is a life changing and frightening phenomenon for others, usually the poor, in the world.

Poor farmers are renowned for their ability to adapt and survive, but, as Florence Madamu, a farmer in Uganda told Oxfam, unpredictable weather patterns due to climate change have made a big difference. She said, “We’ve stopped even adopting seasonal planting, because it is so useless. Now we just try all the time. We used to plant in March and that would be it. Now we plant and plant again. We waste a lot of seed that way, and our time end energy. We regret it so often …. Sometimes you just feel like crying.”

Imagine what it feels like to be Florence, or the many poor farmers who struggle with the elements, when you pray, and my guess is that you’ll be able to pray about the way you eat, use energy, care for the earth … in a more connected and searching way.

The weeks of Lent begin this month … I hope that they will be, for us all, a time of reflection upon the way we pray and live in ever closer relationship with God and the world. May it be a time of renewal.

Yours,

Tracey.