Writings on the Spiritual Life: A School of Prayer with a Second School of Prayer and Letters to Anna

By William Flewelling

Abbot Andre Louf said that, when a person decides to get serious about the spiritual life, s/he should acquire a spiritual director. Wayne Proudfoot argued that the form of religious experience depends upon the tradition in which it is perceived. Georges Bataille searched out the meaning of his own intense inner experience in non-traditional ways. This book seeks to follow the meaning of traditional measures of the spiritual life learned through the experience of the author once his spiritual life decided to choose him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665567961

William Flewelling

I am a retired minister from the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) living in central Illinois. Led by a request from Mildred Corwin of Manua OH when I arrived there in 1976, I long developed and led a series of bible studies there and in LaPorte IN and New Martinsville WV. These studies proved to be very feeding to me in my pastoral work and won a certain degree of following in my congregations. My first study was on 1 Peter, chosen because I knew almost nothing about the book. I now live quietly in retirement with my wife of 54 years, a pair of dogs and several cats.

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© 2022 William Flewelling. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 08/08/2022

ISBN: 978-1-6655-6797-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-6796-1 (e)

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Foreword

A School Of Prayer

I. A Beginning

II. Practicing The Presence

III. Meditative Reading of Scripture

IV. Silence

V. Gethsemane and Golgotha

VI. Prayer And Results

A Second School Of Prayer

I. The Attitude Of Prayer

II. What Does It Mean To Pray Always?

III. Solitude – Daring To Be Alone With God

IV. What Does It Mean To Be Together In Prayer?

V. Rhythms In Prayer

VI. Wrestling With God

VII. In The Way Of Unknowing

Letters To Anna

I. On Discipline

II. On Humility

III. On Dignity

IV. On Gentleness

V. On Simplicity

VI. On Faithfulness

VII. On Constancy

VIII. On Hospitality

IX. On Solitude

X. On Vocation

XI. On Suffering

XII. On Reading the Scripture

XIII. On Prayer

XIV. On Love

XV. On Ministry

XVI. On The Church

XVII. On The Trinity

XVIII. On The Incarnation

XIX. On The Atonement

About the Author

FOREWORD

In the mid 1980s, as a program idea for the church I was serving then, First Christian Church of LaPorte, IN, I developed what I called A School of Prayer. We gathered on a Sunday evening and talked our way through one of the six sessions that had been prepared. Another year, a Second School of Prayer was offered, this time with a sequence of seven sessions.

These study sessions were later published by Kelby Cotton in a newsletter on the spiritual life he circulated out of the congregation he served in the Denver, CO area. I do not have the newsletters in hand anymore and I do not recall the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) congregation he served there nor the name he gave the newsletter. I do recall meeting a reader of those newsletters and having him note that I was the author of them. I suppose that memory encourages me to revisit these School of Prayer offerings and put them together in this format.

I include as well my Letters to Anna, newly re-edited. They are letters composed to an imagined young girl, likely a tween or early teen, named Anna and written by someone who signed the letters AB. These letters were published in my Directions Of A Pastoral Lifetime, Part I, published through AuthorHouse.com, as the middle section of the book. They address matters of concern to the spiritual life as I see it and include discussions of Ministry, Church, Incarnation, Trinity, and Atonement. As such, it appears to me apt to be included with the Schools of Prayer in this setting.

I find that the works drew on other readings, mostly indirectly, but that those works were handiest in naming the happenings in my own experience with God in prayer. That is to say, the work as developed appears to me to come from what was first of all experience. In a personal retreat I attended about a decade after these were written, I inquired of my director, Sister Cornelia, of a passage I had read in a side book I had with me, one by Andre Louf in which the Abbot says that if you decide to get serious about the spiritual life, you should ger a spiritual director first. My question was what do you do if the spiritual life decides to get serious with you? She replied that the true Spiritual Director is the Holy Spirit; her job was to point out what the Spirit was doing. I take my task here as pointing out what the Spirit has been doing, at least with me.

I hope you find the collection of interest and value in your own life in the Spirit.

William Flewelling

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A SCHOOL OF PRAYER

I

A BEGINNING

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Whyever would we want a school of prayer? After all, we are far more accustomed to exercise in praying; and that is good to do. And, we are aware of prayer groups; and they are usually well worthwhile.

Well, we need a school of prayer because we are commonly so unaware of some basic facts.

First of all, we have always thought of praying as something we do. We are wrong. The first fact, as William McNamara points out in Earthy Mysticism, Crossword, NY, 1983) is: We cannot pray. Don’t despair: that is a very good lesson for us. The Apostle Paul says we do not know how to pray as we ought. And so, the Holy Spirit prays in us, with groans too deep for words. Praying is a divine activity. And we take part in it by giving ourselves to God.

Secondly, we have always been told that praying is nice, giving a warm feeling inside. But what happens when someone begins to pray is that s/he meets God, a consuming fire. And that is precisely the reason we pray: to meet God, to engage God passionately, to be engaged by God totally.

People who have prayed deeply agree, over many centuries, over many places, that the hope is to be united with God. Symeon the New Theologian repeatedly speaks of himself as iron placed into the furnace of God. Like iron in a blacksmith’s forge, he takes on the character of fire while yet remaining iron. He uses that of union with God, the very sort of thing that prayer is about.

I suppose we could restate these as saying that prayer is God’s activity in us, searching us with Holy Spirit in order to draw us to God.

That leaves us feeling pretty much out of it, so far as praying is concerned. And we may begin to wonder why we would have a school of prayer I first place! There is good reason. For God is so very respectful. God waits for us. God invites and offers and waits. We have to choose to love God. We have to choose to approach God, the God who has already approached us.

People fall in love in many different ways. There is a season for polite chit-chat over tea and cakes, or gentle parties to explore one another’s company safely. There is a season for being deeply, warmly present to one another. At times that presence is passionate and unreserved. At times that passion takes the form of physical union. Always, there is a sense of being deeply together, more myself because of my beloved with whom I am one than could ever be possible otherwise.

When we come to prayer, it is the same, only more so. Our first step in prayer and in praying is to become passionately in love with God. Our second step in prayer is to realize there are some difficulties – sin. And something needs to be done about it. It would be handy and easy if we could say sin is nothing more than breaking the rules. Then we worry about getting caught, feel guilty and find some way to ease our guilt. But that is not sin.

Sin is what separates us from God, from others, even from ourselves. Sin, and knowing sin, is, in Thomas Merton’s words, the sense of having been deeply and deliberately false to my inmost reality, my likeness to God. Sin is what kills us inside, making us hollow shells like one finds on the shore.

We come to prayer knowing sin, our own and that about us in life. We come carrying that sin, looking for God, remembering the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. We do not throw sin away; we cannot. Rather, we acknowledge sin and stand before God, loving God anyway. We stand and seek our Beloved.

Whatever we do, we do not play coyly with God. Nor do we pick up our demands, our honey-do lists. The funny thing about people of any age falling in love, is that at the same time they worry about their presence, they are forgetting themselves. Everything is considered in the light of the beloved. Sometimes, we do strange things, with seemingly bizarre perceptions of the beloved. Often, we are negligent of what is said but sharply attentive to the deeper interactions of love. But always, it is the view of the beloved that captures center stage in us.

Although it is said that many financially successful people are driven by their work, and approach courtship and marriage much as they approach a business deal, lovers do not work that way. It is the person deep inside the other which attracts us. To that special one we want to give what we have – ourselves.

Prayer is doing precisely the same thing at even deeper levels of heart, at ever more complete degrees of fulness. We give ourselves over unto God. We pry aside our fears and our anxieties for ourselves, and we love God. That is where we begin. And in God’s coming to us, loving us, fusing us in Holy Spirit we find ourselves loving passionately, with everything we are.

Luke’s Gospel tells of Mary, the girl greeted by Gabriel, as responding: Let it be to me according to your word. This innocence enters the Garden and ignores the tree of self, giving her love to God who greeted her.

Not merely sweet and neat, prayer has some intensity, too. Jacob, on the way back to the Promised Land from Haran, wrestled all night with a man at Penuel, demanding a blessing. He was lamed for the effort but won the blessing from the angel of God. Jacob prayed. It is hard work.

Praying taxes us and stretches us and strains us and demands us. Praying is not sweet in any saccharin (or nutri-sweet) sense. When we go to pray, we go to work. Even though it is God working in us, praying is exhausting because God asks for all we are; nothing less than everything is the cost of prayer. Praying assumes full-blooded humanness. Ours are hearts which are ready to stretch as wide as creation and as deep as the imagination of God. Ours are hearts ready and willing to be inflated with Holy Spirit in order to hold what God gives us – that is, God, and nothing less.

Praying is passionate; we are abandoned by ourselves to God – but with gusto. We surrender to God passionately, with heat: that furnace of God once more.

We go to pray, and all this is in our minds – and it should not be there. Only God is in our minds at prayer. And then, before God, we realize that another is held there, too, because we love. Loving God tears open our hearts to embrace another for the sake of God’s love. So, we stand, loving God, and holding in tenderness the need, the hurt, the hope, the person of another. We call it intercession – praying for someone, but not just any some one, but for one on whose behalf we are ready to carry their pain, their sorrow, their sin as our own to a cross, to abandonment, to the absence of God.

We call it intercession because it is our standing for them between God and their grief with the burden of love, trusting that the love we give God, even when God feels absent, painfully absent – that love is there anyway, waiting, searching for God. For I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living (Psalm 27:13).

We could feel so heroic. And so, it is best to remember the humble words of one old many of prayer when asked what he does: usually, I kneel down and hope for the best. He waits upon God in hope, in faith, in love – deeply, passionately in love. He gives time, idle and enjoyment time, with the Beloved.

II

PRACTICING THE PRESENCE

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When we set out to pray, we are consciously coming into the presence of God. That does not sound so strange, when we think about it. Before they invented the telephone, a person had to go to another if they wanted to talk. Communication, first of all, presumed presence.

And then we learned to write; then we let our letter or message-carrier be our proxy, carry the presence of ourselves which we committed to paper to the one with whom we wanted to communicate. Telephones and telegraphs and radios and all our other media for communication bring our presence in a sense to the other, to whom or with whom we wish to talk.

There is a certain difference when we go to talk with someone who is not here. Whether we use pen and ink and paper, or radio or telephone or something else, we send our message and a sort of presence which indicates our absence – a sort of presence of an absence The people who greet us or hear us or read our words are aware of us, and are aware that we are not there.

When we pray, we are entering a communication with God, a sharing in common that we are with God. We make ourselves available to our God. We are present to God and seek the presence of God. At times, some say, there is a dryness, an absence, but God remains for us a presence, an intensity even when a presence of an absence.

Taking up a presence with God is something we do. It is a practical action – something we do in practice. Ever since a simple lay brother of the seventeenth century labeled his spiritual labors as ‘The Practice of the Presence of God’, this practical action has taken a place in our midst. I would like to introduce you to him.

Somewhere between 1606 and 1614, a boy was born in Herimesnil, Lorraine, France. He was given the name Nicholas; and his family’s name was Herman. He was raised as a religiously-minded lad. He fought and was wounded during the Thirty-Years’ War. That war, as all wars, was brutal and nasty. (People have never fought politely!) After his recovery, he served as a footman and is known to have considered himself a clumsy lummox who broke everything.

Nicholas left that work and tried being a hermit, but only became confused. He then became a lay brother at a monastery, spending years in the kitchen and later in the shoe-repair shop. His Religious name, his name of fame is Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection.

Brother Lawrence tells of an early experience, at about the age of eighteen. He was looking at a wintering tree, naked and barren, when the thought occurred to him that soon that tree would bud, grow new leaves, flower and produce fruit. That seems a rather simple think to think. Yet, for Br. Lawrence, it was very important, for he perceived in that tree, barren and as if dead, the providence and power of God.

As Julian of Norwich saw a hazel nut and realized that God loved that nut, and thus it held the whole world in itself, Brother Lawrence recognized by grace (I suppose) that God was present and filling up the common world. He thereafter did his work as if he were doing holy things in the presence of God, with as much care and attention as if he were in the courts of heaven.

He called it ‘practicing the presence of God’. This practicing of the presence of God may sound as if it is pretending; it is not pretending … but attending – paying attention to the underlying and subtle, even hidden spiritual tones which lie waiting for our attentiveness inside every moment.

Brother Lawrence’s genius – felt by those who met him, a clumsy oaf – was to attend to the rich latency of God in all things. He never says God is the tree which stood in winter barrenness. But that tree revealed God to him. In the standing of that tree with all its hidden life, waiting for God’s bidding by Spring to spring forth fruitfully, with all its quiet latency, Brother Lawrence found the opening to the awareness of God.

In his opened eyes – the eyes of the soul – Brother Lawrence saw, for us as much as for himself, God coming near through so many things and persons and events.

The letter we mentioned before carries the sender to the recipient. Love letters at times are doused with a favorite perfume in order to enhance the awareness of the presence of the beloved inside the letter. We become quickly practiced in enjoying the presence of a friend or a lover through a letter. The perfume simply adds the memory of scent to the stimulus of presence. We can go back and re-read (or re-smell) the letter many times and always find something of the sender come to us.

Well, in much the same way, the tree for Brother Lawrence – and other events, things, persons for us – bring to us the presence of God. God is opened up in our noticing, and appreciated in our attending – our practicing the presence of God.

We must understand that this aspect of prayer is quite conscious: we are aware of what we are doing, and we are going about the process of ingraining our habits with the attitude of attendance upon God. We are establishing within ourselves a certain definite givenness to God, a reliance or a dependence which has stirred in us, which has stirred us in heart.

Not only is this a conscious act, however, but it is also a continuous act – a fundamental attitude coloring every aspect of our living, our working, our loving. Practicing the presence of God is one way, a demanding way, of answering our Lord’s inunction to pray always. Not only are we in God’s presence, but we know we are in God’s presence experientially … not just in theory. For it is one thing to say ‘God is always present. Isn’t that neat?’ And it is quite another to remember the utter holiness of God’s Presence. Moses was told to