For the past few months I and the members of the Parish Pastoral Council have been on a journey, exploring ways of making our parish a place where people can encounter Christ and be transformed into His missionary disciples. We want to deepen the engagement and commitment of all our parishioners, and we want to make our Sunday experience a truly awesome one.
We are not there yet and this fills us with a holy discontent.
Still, we have begun the journey, and as we grow in leadership, we develop new capacities to tolerate the countless realities that are not where we want them to be. In this early stage of our journey of renewal it can feel as though we don’t have enough hands to do all that needs to be done. The journey of renewal can seem daunting and we may even experience moments of regret. One of our temptations is think that this is our work, and that we have to rely on our strength alone. If we give in to this temptation our efforts are doomed to failure, for this is not our work but God’s work and we need His strength to make our efforts succeed.
Unless the journey of renewal is rooted in prayer, it will not succeed. This is why Missional Prayer is so important. Missional prayer is aligning our desires with, coming into communal agreement with, and purposefully interceding for the Holy Spirit’s work in transforming the hearts of people in our parish and neighbourhood.
The first paragraph of this pastor’s corner can be seen as something of a “mission statement”, a vision that we have of and for our parish. In order to achieve this vision it needs to be brought to God in our prayers, asking God to show us where it is that He is leading us and how He wants us to get there and what gifts we need to be praying for in particular to help us get there.
As we continue on our journey of renewal it is important that we all have a sense of what our mission is as a community, all of us together, and spend time praying for it. Prayer is not a rival to the work, mission and ministry that needs to happen in our parish, but the foundation. Prayer is the engine behind the mission of our parish and renewing our parish with no prayer is like trying to drive a car with no engine.
Prayer comes in many forms. Every time we gather for mass we are gathered in the great prayer of thanksgiving, the Eucharist. There are spiritual devotions such as rosaries and novenas. We spend lots of time storming heaven with intercessory prayer. I think we all do the above prayers quite often, but there are other forms of prayer that are also helpful in developing a deep, personal and intimate relationship with God. Prayers such as the lexio divinia, lexio visio, imaginative contemplation, centering prayer, and the examination of consciousness. During the course of this year I hope to start a ”School of Prayer” where once every month or so we come together for a morning of prayer, focused on one of the different forms of prayer.
Through our prayer we realise that our relationship with God is that of a beloved son or daughter. It is a relationship of one whose identity in God is secure: we are loved, seen and known by God independent of our performance or achievement. It is the relationship of abiding in the Father’s gaze and being transformed in his presence. Under his gaze we allow him to change us. We allow him to see the dark places in our hearts – the wounds, the fears, the unredeemed places of pain.
It is a relationship in which healing takes place, in which our hearts are reformed through experiencing immense and unconditional love, in which ego, self-seeking and self-protection are increasingly burnt away.
Finally, it is a relationship with the Holy Spirit. As we begin the journey of renewal we know that it cannot be done alone or without the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The ancient prayer below is an invitation, a begging for the Holy Spirit. Pray it often, pray it with all your hearts.
Pray that we may be transformed, so that we can transform our parish.
