Last week I enjoyed a lovely, if rather wet, holiday in Scotland, with some members of my family. They do say that every cloud has a silver lining, and the silver lining of some rather rain-filled and cloudy weather was that it allowed me time to catch up on some reading.
I
managed to finish a book which I had started some time earlier, Pete Greig’s “God on Mute”, subtitled “Engaging the Silence of Unanswered Prayer.” It is a well-written and thought
provoking book, in which the author wrestles with some of the thorny questions
relating to the subject of prayer, drawing on some of his own personal and
family experiences. Sometimes there are
no easy answers to difficult questions, but I found Pete Greig’s book
particularly helpful. There are lots of
snippets in there which I will go back to.
Another
book which I read last weeks was the autobiography of Scottish singer/songwriter/actress
Barbara Dickson. Towards the end of the
book she writes, “In spite of being
brought up in a non-religious family, the Church, in one form or another, has
been part of the backdrop to my life.
When I was younger I would have been embarrassed to call myself a
Christian and even now my faith is very personal to me, but it has become the
cornerstone of my life.”
The
final book I read was “Moving On”, by
Reuben Holroyd. It tells of Holroyd’s
experience of National Service between the years 1952-54, consisting of the
letters which he wrote home to his family, each of which his mother kept. His experience with organised religion in one
specific case was not a happy one: “This
morning we had a church parade … it was a dead loss. We had to stand in ranks wearing shirts under
a blazing sun, it was very hot and most uncomfortable. The padre droned on and we were bored to
death but nobody dared move in case the R.S.M. took his name for not paying
attention. The padre tried to get us to
sing a hymn which we did not know, it petered out after the first verse and he
had to give it, and us, up as a bad job.”
How NOT to win friends and influence people!
Holroyd
spend much of his national service in Korea, and seems to have had a very
difficult time in many ways, not least through being deprived of many of the
normal “creature comforts.” One thing
which becomes clear in the book is that in many cases the ordinary soldiers had
little or no understanding of how what they were being asked to do fitted into
the overall plan of the British and Allied forces. They were not able to see or understand “the
big picture”, nor their part in it. This
thought draws me back to Pete Greig’s book, “God
on Mute.” Perhaps one of the reasons
that our prayers are sometimes apparently not answered is that we cannot at the time see
the big picture of God’s plans and purposes.
Greig quotes a prayer of St. Ignatius of Loyola, a call to trust God even
when we don’t understand:
When all is darkness
And we feel our weakness and helplessness,
Give us the sense of Your Presence,
Your Love and Your Strength.
Help us to have perfect trust
In Your protecting love
And strengthening power,
So that nothing may frighten or worry us,
For, living close to You,
We shall see Your Hand,
Your Purpose, Your Will through all things
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