By Mark Argent
One declaration I rarely hear used in URC circles is ‘Let’s have a week of guided prayer’. We sometimes talk about quiet days and either individual or group retreats, but structured time, set aside for guided prayer don’t figure so prominently in our spiritual conversations.
On an individually-guided retreat, a person tends to go to a retreat centre or special venue, leaving their usual context and situation. Here, they spend much of the time either praying or relaxing, meeting daily with a guide who accompanies them on the journey of the retreat, often by being a sounding-board, offering suggestions for prayer and ways of praying.
For a week of guided prayer, a person stays at home, but meets daily with a prayer guide. The dynamic is not quite the same as that of a retreat because people don’t withdraw to the same extent from their normal activities, but the anticipation is that a little more prayer happens than usual and that there is a chance to explore new ways of praying. For many people this is their first experience of having someone to talk with about their prayer life in such a structured way.
There’s a disarmingly honest moment in John Robinson’s Honest to God where he recalls the way the subject of prayer came up at theological college, not as something formally taught, but more as the subject of awkward late-night conversations between students nervously admitting their sense of inadequacy. My sense is that, in the same way, we rarely talk about private prayer. The opportunity for a number of conversations over a focussed period of time offers a chance to do that.
There are many people who, with the best will in the world, simply can’t go away for a week on retreat. Effectively taking the retreat to them makes some of the experience possible. This doesn’t reduce the value of the retreat. In fact, it can increase its relevance by helping people recognise the importance and power of prayer in everyday life. The call is to ‘pray as you can, not as you can’t’. God is in the realities of life and this is an invitation to meet God where one is. If someone does something, genuinely seeking to have an experience of God, that desire itself makes the experience more likely to happen.
In spirituality, there is never a sense that ‘one size fits all’, so it is important to tailor the week of guided prayer to the context where it will happen.
When offering this experience to others, it is usually wise to offer it somewhere different to the church where one is in membership, as this makes it easier to be objective. It also makes it easier for confidences to be respected and seen to be respected, both during the week and afterwards.
It’s essential to have the support of the leadership and to give all the congregation the choice to take part, though recognising that there is a limit to the number of people any one prayer guide is wise to take on. Given the smallness of the URC, it is more or less inevitable that prayer guides will include people from a variety of traditions, but they should have some experience of spiritual direction.
People’s daily routines vary, so agreements need to be made about times during the day and evening when direction can be offered. Although it’s normal to talk of a ‘week of guided prayer’, this is not set in stone. There should be flexibility about the actual number of days.
For prayer guides, there does need to be adequate supervision as well as team meetings where appropriate concerns and issues can be shared and dealt with.
The week of guided prayer is not right for all circumstances, but can be a helpful way of enriching the prayer life of a range of people within one congregation (or several neighbouring ones).
