More than Me and Ted

Of all the various components that might make up a prayer (adoration, praise, thanksgiving, confession etc.), I think I find the element of intercession most difficult.

I find it difficult because it's the most easy to forget. Intercessory prayer shows me my self-centredness. It's a time when I realise that my worldview is so narrow, air-less and cramped. My attention, for the most part, is directed inwards, at my thoughts, my preoccupations, my concerns. I bring myself before God, and fill his vision with all my anxieties, my wants, my feelings.

In one sense I think this is right. I am the child, who artlessly comes before my papa, clutching my worn-out and dirty, but well-loved teddy. I sit upon my father's knee and tell him about the day I've had with my bear - our adventures, our joys, our hurts and scrapes. Never mind the greater world out there, with its larger doings and going-ons. My pervue is only for me and my bear.

Intercessory prayer takes me out of my myopic vision, to ask: what are the needs of those around me. It require me first to know the needs of those around me - and therefore to climb out of my own head and preoccupations. It then requires energetic partnership with God: How can I work, through prayer, for them? For, despite it feeling like mere thinking, or words into air, prayer is labour, and as Christians, we know it works. As one friend once wisely said: "If people are thinking, then they might be acting. But thoughts alone won't help anyone. Whereas prayers are actions in themselves."

Here's Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the transformative nature of intercessory prayers:

All Christians have their own circle of those who have requested them to intercede on their behalf, or people for whom for various reasons they know they have been called upon to pray. First of all, the circle will include those with whom they must live every day. With this we have advanced to the point at which we hear the heartbeat of all Christian life together. A Christian community either lives by the intercessory prayers of its members for one another or the community will be destroyed. I can no longer condemn or hate other Christians for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble they cause me. In intercessory prayer the face that may have been strange and intolerable to me is transformed into the face of one for whom Christ died, the face of a pardoned sinner. That is the blessed discovery for the Christian who is beginning to offer intercessory prayer for others. As far as we are concerned, there is no dislike, no personal tension, no disunity or strife, that cannot be overcome by intecessory prayer. Intercessory prayer is the purified bath into which the individual and the community must enter each day.

Life Together, page 89.