Come Holy Spirit, Spirit of Love, Spirit of Discipline,
In the silence
Come to us and bring us your peace;
Rest in us that we may be tranquil and still;
Speak to us as each heart needs to hear;
Reveal to us things hidden and things longed for;
Rejoice in us that we may praise and be glad;
Pray in us that we may be at one with you and with each other;
Refresh and renew us from your living springs of water;
Dwell in us now and always, Amen.
The prayer is by Father Robert Llewelyn one of the accomplished recent interpreters of Julian of Norwich, and it's taken from his book With Pity Not with Blame. From a well stocked shelf of studies on Julian, this slim book remains a favourite, especially as a guide to ways of praying that have less to do with words and more to do with inner orientation; acknowledging Presence, practising stillness, listening with the heart, gazing with the eyes of imaginagtive faith, and learning the necessary tensions between the mind thinking, the heart feeling and the will responding.
The other day I spoke with our College librarian, Dr Edward Burrows, about George Herbert and my fascination with three chosen people of genius – Julian, Herbert and Charles Wesley. Amongst their many gifts, I value their capacity to invest words with more than meaning, but with the power to communicate spiritual experiences with such penetrating integrity that they radically transform by sometimes evoking the very experiences they describe and expound. None of them use the idiom of contemporary-speak, and I guess it now requires an investment of time to learn their way with words, but to those who take the time, they may well discover the spiritual equivalent of treasure maps and the call to seek till they find.
There are others in my canon of spiritual geniuses – but those three – Julian, Herbert and Wesley, touch on a form of spirituality that for all their diversity, carries with it what C S Lewis called the scent of the far country.
As a matter of irrelevant coincidence (or unpremeditated purpose) I typed out the above prayer while listening to Albinoni's Adagio in G Major – and some of what the prayer asked just sort of happened, as if Someone meant it……
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