From the Daily Lectionary for Tuesday in the Second Week of Advent
Luke 21:29-38
Then he told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
“Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day does not catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.”
Every day he was teaching in the temple, and at night he would go out and spend the night on the Mount of Olives, as it was called. And all the people would get up early in the morning to listen to him in the temple.
Reality requires imagination. The textbook on Luke says that this Gospel is very much concerned with prayer as the principal virtue of the practice of faith. Jesus doesn’t do anything in Luke’s narrative until he has prayed first. As I have said many times, and it still seems apt to me… Prayer is the art of paying attention.
Paying attention requires critical thinking; it requires honest observation, empathy, sensitivity… and sometimes courage. Prayer is an act of sacrifice, an act of love in that we have to look out beyond ourselves and engage with a greater good. Jesus tells his disciples to avoid being weighed down with “dissipation.” I looked up the word: It means self-indulgence. To be in prayer, to pay attention, requires first our coming to terms with our own ego-centrism. For our culture that is a daunting task. It requires consciousness, and maturity.
I want to suggest that prayer, at its heart, is an act of the imagination. Jesus, after all, begins this teaching with yet another metaphor which demands an engaged imagination. To read the signs of our world still being created; to trust ambiguity; to apprehend the patterns of mystery… all require our highest skill, our most precious gift, which I want to say is the imagination, that which separates us from all other species on this planet.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge considered the human imagination one and the same as the Holy Spirit. When we pray imaginatively we begin a conversation between God and our own innate divinity. The fruits of such conversation I believe ramify beyond human reckoning. Prayer may be asking God for something, but more than that it is a means into the truth, a portal to knowledge and revelation, an awakening to possibility, and empowerment for action.
Pray without ceasing, brothers and sisters. The world needs our well-wrought prayers for the way ahead. The imagination is artist; the world her creation. Imagine a world restored as God imagines it. Imagine, dream of a world ruled by love, and perhaps one day we will wake and find the dream true.
A Prayer for the Answering of Prayer (BCP p. 834)
O God, who has promised to hear the petitions of those who ask in your Son’s Name. We ask you mercifully to incline your ear to us who have now made our prayers and supplications to you; and grant those things which we have faithfully asked according to your will, may effectually be obtained, to the relief of our necessity, and to the setting forth of your glory; through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
