Teach us to pray

Luke 11 - Lord, teach us to pray.

The great gift of silence - Be still and know that I am God

God's imprint on our life is far deeper in silence - hard for the "still small voice" to get through the noise of everyday life.

Who do we believe in?  Look again at the Creed.

The desire for the deeper relationship with God.

The life of prayer - our wish in faith to be with You.
The only sure thing we can say about prayer is - turn up and turn up regularly!

Learning from Jesus how to pray - how to look with fresh eyes at the learned art of prayer.
The four essentials of friendship - time, self disclosure, listening and affection.

Time can also be thought of as presence - being there.  How much time did Christ spend in prayer?  He didn't pray as an example, He prayed because he needed that lifeline to His Father.

Prayer needs a willingness to be generous with time.  Prayer requires courage, steadfastness, fidelity.
The Agony in the Garden - "being in agony He prayed the longer"

Pope John Paul 2 said "beware of spending too much time on the work of the Lord and not enough time with the Lord of the work."

Prayer changes us - even how we look, it softens how we look and how we look at other people.  

An enduring sense of the reality of God is essential to prayer - and a consequence of prayer.

Self disclosure - if you never take the risk with a friend of revealing yourself, the friendship never goes deeper.  That sort of friendship is a risk, especially if one has been hurt before. 

The story of the Road to Emmaus is a paradigm of this sort of disclosure - Christ initially as the unknown stranger, then the pleasant acquaintance and then revealed as the dearly loved Friend.

This is the journey from third to second person.  "He is my God" becomes "you are my God"

Be yourself in prayer - all of you, even the bits you would rather set aside and not look at.

Share everything - the joys and the worries.

T s Eliot in the Four quartets speaking of prayer. " For us there is only the trying.  The rest is not our business."