Greetings in the Name of the Lord, 

We find ourselves in the midst of Holy Week, heading into Christianity’s most Holy days: Good Friday and Easter Sunday. It is a time to feel what the disciples felt, to experience what it meant to watch one’s savior put to death, to imagine all hope was lost, only to then experience the resurrection, and new hope, new creation, new ways into the future, unimagined ways.

In the midst of the darkness of Good Friday and Holy Saturday, one of the most important tasks a Christian can take up is prayer. Over the last year we have had a few discussions about prayer. Many of us have anxiety around praying “the right way”. As we think about prayer, and what it means to the church, I think it makes sense to look back and explore what the early Church Fathers had to say about it.

Most Christians have never heard of the theologian Origen of Alexandria, who lived from roughly 180 CE- 254 CE, yet he is easily one of the most important theologians of Christendom, ranking right up there with Paul, Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Aquinas, Luther and Calvin. Origen wrote extensively on a multitude of subjects. He is often also included within the class of early Mystics.

I read some of his commentary on prayer this week and wanted to share some of his thoughts. Scholar Bernard McGinn points out that Origen believed that prayer was not about petitioning God for some kind of influence, the way one might petition a politician, but rather that prayer was about enabling the Holy Spirit to help unite us with God.[1] Even more than that, Origen stated that “I myself make no claim whatever of being able to pray”.[2] Think of it, a father of the church, one of the most important figures of Christian Theology saying he has no idea how to pray!

What does that mean for us, and our own anxiety around prayer? It means that we should be comfortable with the fact that we are unsure of how to pray. If Origen didn’t know how to pray, why should we expect that we can do it. 

So how did Origen pray if he didn’t know how? He makes it clear that for him, the most important step was to call upon the Holy Spirit. This can sound a little weird to us today, but before Jesus came onto the scene it was the priests that prayed to God. Everyone else had to pray through the priests, bringing offerings to the temple. But what Origen believed was that in the resurrection, Jesus became the High Priest and that all of our prayers now went through him. Since Jesus is not here in flesh and blood sitting in a confessional booth for us to go and visit, it becomes the job of the Holy Spirit, the advocate, to help us pray.

In other words, to begin our prayer, we invoke the Holy Spirit, who then kind of takes over for us. For Origen it was not the words of the prayer itself that was the most important part of prayer but rather our ability to call upon the Holy Spirit and Christ. Once we do that, in essence our prayer can not be “wrong” because at that point, we are encountering the Divine and allowing for God’s transformation to work within us. As Origen put it: “The soul is disposing itself to please God as being present and looking on and anticipating every thought, ‘the searcher of hearts and reins’(Ps 7:10)”.[3]

Prayer then is about creating space for God to work on us, not for us to work on God and try to get something. As we enter Good Friday and Holy Saturday, and we see our own periods of mourning and loss reflected in the accounts of Jesus and his followers, we can bring those burdens to God, we can give them to God in prayer, as we invoke the Holy Spirit, asking for the advocacy of the Spirit, to make God present to us, and us present to God. It is there that our sorrow and the weights on our souls can be transformed, as the death of Christ was transformed into new life and new creation.

Let us make space for the God of Love to transform us and the world around us, so that God’s peaceable kingdom may thrive in our communities, that God’s limitless love may persist in abundance.

[1] McGinn, B. ed. The Essentials of Christian Mysticism. Modern Library Classics, 2006. P 81

[2] Ibid. p 82

[3] Ibid. p 83