Why a Call to Prayer? Diocesan Synod Address – November 2007
I want to talk to you this morning about the teaching of Richard Hooker, who appears in the Calendar for today, and who died on November 3rd 1600. For reasons that will become obvious, he will help me to answer the question, ‘why a call to prayer?’, the title of this address. But first, a few words about his life. He was born around the year 1554 near Exeter, studied at Corpus Christi, Oxford, and went on in 1585 to become Master of the Temple Church, in London, a prominent royal appointment that brought him into contact with the legal profession. Here he came into conflict with a more Reformed colleague, called Walter Travers, who represented the Puritan party, then in the ascendant in the late Elizabethan Church. He decided to shun the limelight, moving back into parish life in 1591, first at Boscombe, Wiltshire, then Bishopbourne, near Canterbury. It was during this time that he wrote a work, that is still read today, called the ‘The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity’. Hardly a best seller (the Puritans made the headway there), its style is finely tuned, heavy, and at times obscure. But there are some gloriously purple bits, that show his determination to work out a defence of the Church of England that sets her in continuity with historic Christianity and at the same time as part of the Reformation.
So much for his life – what of his teaching? As we start the month of November with my ‘Call to Prayer’, two particular aspects of his teaching ring out across the centuries. The first concerns the notion of ‘Law’, with its inbuilt sense that there is – after all – a coherence about why we are on this earth. For Hooker, there is the eternal Law of God, which is what we and our world are destined for, intended to become, in his good purposes. Then there is the law of nature, which we can observe day by day: this is about how things are, from male and female, to the changing seasons, and the law of gravity. But there is another, which is about bridging the gap between eternal Law and natural law, and this is what he calls ‘revealed law’: fallible human beings, working within the framework of what God has given us in Christ through the Spirit - in the Scriptures, in Reason, and in Tradition – all three of them in a subtle interaction, forming us and shaping us in discipleship. A strong taste of this, for example, was experienced recently at the Diocesan Conference, helping to make us broader, leaner and deeper.
So there is no wooden, divine ‘plan’ that we must strive anxiously to fit into. There is instead the life of faith, where we use our faculties as best we can, recognising the incompleteness of life as we know it – the distance, if you like, between the eternal Law of God and the law of nature. In all the muddle and inner strife that this must necessarily involve (and we have a good deal of that in the Church!), Hooker has a healthy suspicion of individual judgement, because he has a strong sense of the need for community – the corporate character of the People of God, rather than individuals who may feel called to do their own thing, with scant regard for everyone else.
That leads me on, secondly, to what Hooker has to say about prayer, which he roots in the prayer of Jesus, echoed, albeit inadequately, in the prayer of Christians. While he does believe in private prayer, his corporate sense of the Church means that common prayer is of far greater significance, when we are together, being that community of faith on earth, in communion with all the saints, and aided by the angels. He therefore defends the set forms of prayer provided for us: they are the possession of the whole Church, and not to be messed around. Sometimes this leads him to a bit of strain – such as when he tries to answer the Puritan complaint about five Lord’s Prayers in the Prayer Book on Sacrament Sunday - two at Morning Prayer, one at the Litany, and one at the beginning of the eucharist with another immediately after Communion!
For Hooker, prayer is the over-arching bond of the Church, which rightly takes many different forms, for different occasions, needs and times of the year. This led him to suspect those who would do their own thing, and cast away the riches of what is given, in favour of something ephemeral and lacking in depth. Prayer takes priority over everything else – which is why he would put it before the theological and the organizational aspects of Church life. Speaking for myself, I have been struck by his teaching about revealed Law, and what he has to say about prayer, during my present illness. It has taught me that, whatever happens to me in the short or the long term, I am still part of the community that tries to live out those ‘revealed laws’ in countless different ways, some noticeable, others less so. We’re not part of some Dawkins-style world determined by the selfish gene and from which God is banished. The same goes for prayer. I have been part of the corporate, not just the individual, life of the praying Church, bound together in the sacrifice of intercession, not some functionalistic activity in which results are always being looked for; believe you me, in the darker moments, this has meant a great deal.
Let me conclude this address in two ways.
The first concerns my November Call to Prayer, which is intended both to nourish and to challenge us. Some people, I know, are vision- and strategy-fatigued, because they have to live with visions, strategies, mission-statements, targets and appraisals for breakfast, lunch and dinner practically every day! Vision, a word with religious origins, is what we want to do. Strategy, a military-derived word, is how we get there. And neither is straightforward or easy. History is full of examples of great visionaries, who changed the world, like William Wilberforce and the Slave Trade. Most of the time, however, vision is about the transformation of the ordinary, like the words of Scripture read in the context of worship and prayer, and the bread and wine of Holy Communion. If we have this collective pause in the KAIROS process, and soak ourselves in the Scripture passages for the November Sunday Gospels, I believe that a sense of coherence bred from common purpose and common concern will emerge – and the vital thing is that we do it together. I’m not for one moment expecting everyone who engages with this time of prayer to arrive at the same view of things! But such prayer will help us to see vision and strategy built on faith, rather than fed on a common caricature, which is that we spend so much of our time worrying - and talking - about money.
And then I want to quote a prayer written by Bishop Westcott of Durham (1825-1901) that I used a great deal at Evensong when I was a Curate. It really sums up all that I want to say to you this morning.
O Lord God, in whom we live and move and have our being, opens our eyes that we may behold thy fatherly presence ever about us. Draw our hearts to thee by the power of thy love. Teach us to be anxious for nothing, and when we have done what thou hast given us to do, help us, O God our Saviour, to leave the issue to thy wisdom. Take from us all doubt and mistrust. Lift our thoughts up to thee in heaven; and make us to know that all things are possible to us through thy Son, our Redeemer Jesus Christ. Amen.
+ Kenneth Portsmouth:
