“There comes a level of prayer where it is no longer a question of ‘are you seeing something?’ but ‘are you aware of being seen?’ – if you like, sitting in the light and of just being and becoming who you really are.”

This talk about prayer comes from Rowan Williams who has just been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, the most important position in the Anglican Church. He made these remarks in an interview first appearing in an Australian church publication, and later reprinted in The Tablet, a Catholic weekly from London.

To hear an archbishop talk about prayer is, strangely enough, unusual. Most prelates of that rank, it seems, focus in their public statements more on issues of public policy than on the spiritual life. But this Welshman, who will soon bear responsibility for the Church of England as its chief bishop, gives top priority to his own relationship to God and his search for the spirit in all that he does.

Rowan Williams, in addition to his spiritual orientation, is a practical man with domestic responsibilities. As a married man with young children, he is concerned each morning about getting them ready for school and giving them some personal time. But he still manages to fit in about a half an hour of prayer each morning using a formula popular among Eastern Orthodox Christians.

This is the so-called Jesus Prayer that goes: “O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” The archbishop uses a prayer rope favored by Eastern monks and featuring 100 knots at each one of which a person says this prayer.

Rowan Williams describes the effect of this prayer as follows: “By repeating the Jesus Prayer the mind is stilled and the heartbeat and the breath slow down, and you become more present to the place you are in. It’s really an anchorage in time.” So he experiences the effect of that ritual on both his soul and also his body.

This kind of prayer is obviously active as one recites the same formula over and over. However, it also has the power to transport a person into a new awareness of the divine presence. Much like the rosary, it fixes the mind on holy persons and events while allowing a freedom to just be present.

Archbishop Williams loves the writings of St. John of the Cross and finds much inspiration in them. Following this Spanish mystic, he takes pains to distinguish between prayer and feelings, in words that many people who want to pray may find helpful:

“You may be feeling terrible and God may be active; you maybe feeling nothing in particular, but God may be very active; you maybe feeling wonderful, and that may have nothing at all to do with God’s doing.”

The archbishop also favors a simple rule for prayer that he quotes from a former abbot of the English monastery, Downside: “Pray as you can and don’t try to pray as you can’t.” Keeping to this advice could save some people a lot of frustration. It’s almost like saying: all you have to do is follow your own instincts.

This man of prayer wants to avoid complication. Instead he favors simplification of the heart whereby “we simply become what we are and just sit there being a creature in the hand of God.” Just dwelling on God having us in his hand could be enough to sustain a beautifully simple prayer that might carry us through a entire period set aside for spiritual quiet.

It’s not about me, it’s about God: this is a sentiment about prayer that the archbishop might approve. If you feel lost when praying, that’s something probably shared by many other people. As the archbishop says, “Being out of your depth seems to be very basic to what’s going on in the sense that in prayer you cannot contain what is given.”

It sounds easy enough, simplicity in prayer, but it takes a kind of spiritual maturity to put this approach into practice. “Don’t just do something, stand there,” was ironic advice popular in the 1960’s. In the light of  Archbishop Williams’ habits of prayer, standing there (or sitting or kneeling) becomes a way of being in contact with God and growing in the life of the spirit.

Richard Griffin