St. Botolph’s Parish, Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas, 28 February 2010

I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me. (John 10.14)

‘I shot an arrow into the air / It fell to earth …… in Leicester Square!’ If only it were that simple. In fact, the poet doesn’t know where the arrow fell. Shoot an arrow high enough into the air and you’ve lost it. It could end up anywhere. What’s the use of shooting an arrow in no particular direction, shooting it beyond your sight? Prayer is like shooting an arrow. What happens when you pray? Where does your prayer go? Up to God? Or just into the ether? Prayer comes from a place in you where you are really you. But how can it reach God? A God you can’t see or hear, touch or smell or taste? What makes you so sure that he’s there? ‘I shot an arrow into the air / It fell to earth……  I knew not where’. Most people in this country don’t know either. Earlier this week, I got a letter from a teenage atheist, in the typically rude, impudent style of a Cambridge undergraduate. ‘What makes you think that atheists hate God?’ he wrote. ‘Most of us atheists don’t think about God’. He’s right. The vast majority of people in this part of the world don’t pray. They don’t think about God at all. Fewer people in the UK– or Sweden, or France, or Germany today – think about God than anywhere on earth. Why shoot an arrow in the air? Why pray a God you can’t prove? A God who has nothing to do with your life? A God who won’t even buy you a pint at the pub? We live in a secular culture: a culture that thinks it has outgrown God. Churches are empty, universities are full. Why not close down shop altogether?

Praying to God in the twenty-first century makes as much sense as shooting an arrow in the air, at nothing in particular. Why pray to a feeling? Why pray to an abstract idea called ‘God’? ‘I shot an arrow into the air…’ But what if you were the arrow? What if prayer were not something you do – but someone you are?

Four decades have passed since 1968, since the ‘Secular Sixties’. The ruling atheists in this country grin at the sight of empty churches and snotty undergrads – the politicians of tomorrow. They cringe at newcomers from Barbados and Jamaica, from Ghana and Nigeria who still crowd into little chapels and believe in the power of the Holy Spirit. The ruling atheists say: ‘Let them shoot their arrows. They’ll find out, prayer goes nowhere’. Then, along comes the minister of a mainline church. She looks over those empty pews. She hears the smirks from Downing Street or the student common room of an Oxbridge college, and thinks: ‘My word, we’re behind the times. Let’s demystify our worship. Let’s update our doctrines. Church? It’s not about mysteries, but morals. Prayer? It’s not God but feelings. God is an idea. Maybe, secular people will buy that’. Public morals, private feeling: that’s all that’s left of the Gospel, tailored to a secular age. In a secular age, you don’t kill faith; you starve it to death. You don’t outlaw God; you ignore him, you deny him authority on earth.

But what if you are the arrow? What if your prayer wells up straight from the core of who you are? What if you find yourself praying when you least expect to? What if your whole soul, your whole mind reaches out to God: a God you can’t see or hear, touch or taste? What are you to do with that hunger to pray? Turn it into a feeling, an idea – a delusion? Seven centuries ago, a scholar named Barlaam tried to do so. ‘Why waste your time at prayer?’ he told the monks of Mount Athos. ‘The light you see inside, it’s the light of your own mind. Study philosophy and science instead’. Demystify your worship, update your doctrines. Church? It’s not about mysteries, but morals. Prayer? It’s not about God but your feelings. God is an idea. One learned monk said: ‘No. I don’t pray to an idea; I pray to the Living God. I don’t stare at the light of my mind; I enter the Uncreated Light, the Light that is God himself. I don’t shoot an arrow into the air. I AM the arrow; and that arrow enters the very being of God’. That monk, the Archbishop of Thessalonica, was named Gregory Palamas.

When you truly pray, Saint Gregory taught, you are your prayer; and, by the grace of an invisible, incomprehensible God, you become the God to whom you pray. You become by grace everything that God is by nature. Is that difficult to understand? Of course – if you’ve never prayed, it’s impossible to understand. If you’ve never prayed, church is about morals, not mystery; prayer is about feelings, not God. If you have never tasted true worship, you will flee the might of a secular age and forsake the flock. ‘He who is a hireling and not a shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf snatches and scatters them’. A hireling leaves the flock paralysed, helpless before the wolf – the Secular Wolf. The good shepherd confronts the Wolf; denounces the Wolf; and, if necessary, lays his life down for the flock. Imprisoned. Tortured. Held for ransom. Saint Gregory paid dearly for teaching one truth: your prayer is real, not an illusion. Your prayer is you; and each of you has the potential to become infinitely more than what you are. To become God.

Brothers and Sisters in Christ: the scribes – the academic scholars of the day – thought, ‘How pointless, how blasphemous, to forgive a paralysed man!’ Faith, they figured, was about morals; prayer was a feeling, an idea – not an arrow that carries you into the very being of God. ‘Which is easier for you to grasp?’ Jesus asks. ‘That I make a paralytic walk, or have authority on this earth? Behold, then, I raise the paralysed man from his pallet. I carry the arrow of your prayer into the heart of my Father in the heavens. I – am the God you can see in the holy icons, hear in the chanting of the prayers, smell in the incense, touch in wood and paint and brocade, and taste in the Mysteries of my Precious Body and Divine Blood’. The unbeliever has no eyes to see, no ears to hear. So long as he is too arrogant to see and hear, he never will. ‘But I am still the Good Shepherd’, says Christ. ‘I know my own and they know me’.

At the prayers of the holy hierarch, Gregory Palamas, we shoot an arrow into the air and follow it … all the way, into eternal life.