Prayer and Worcester Sauce

Could you not keep watch with me for one hour? .. Take heed, watch and pray ... Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself ... My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning ... He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty ... They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.

What are the ingredients of prayer? On the back of a packet of anything, unless it is something as simple as honey, vinegar or milk, you find a list of them. Very intimidating, too, at times. What, for example, will potassium sorbate or pantothenic acid do to me?

Sometimes, like Marcus, you just taste something that is sooo good that you want to know the ingredients in order to make it for yourself. In the days when Bombay was Bombay, Marcus Sandys (we should properly call him Lord Marcus) sat in the sunshine and tasted something sooo wonderful he knew that on finishing his time as Governor of Bengal he must take the recipe back to England. On arrival here he gave the recipe to his local chemists, Mr Perrins and Mr Lea (all right, Lea and Perrins if you prefer). They dutifully and expertly concocted the brew.

The result was awful. Marcus himself declared that the result tasted "filthy". The grim broth was consigned to the depths of the chemists' store.

And that would have been that if it were true that all ingredients are the kind of things that can be listed on a packet. But, unbeknown to Messrs Lea, Perrins and Sandys, there was a missing ingredient.

Liturgies, closed eyes, Amens, bowed heads, bedtimes and chapels. And maybe many other things.  In fact the ingredients may stack up to quite a long and daunting list. Yet perhaps still our prayer life, if not awful, is at least tasteless. Anyway, back to Worcester and the rear comer of the chemists' storeroom.

It was months later that, during a clearout, the two chemists happened upon Marcus Sandys' revolting brew. They intended to dispatch it down the drain but decided first to have one more taste. In that moment Lea and Perrins' Worcester Sauce was born. 

The missing ingredient had been time. Worcester Sauce, like even the simple things - honey, vinegar, milk, fresh fruit or vegetables - needs the added ingredient of time.  

And prayer needs time.

Good and Bad

This has been a challenging week in London with the Westminster Bridge terrorist attack, an attack perpetrated by a man who we now seem to know more about than we do about members of our own family.  A little late though.

It was also the week when Martin McGuiness, former IRA Commander yet peacemaker was laid to rest - a man who died as an awkward kind of hero, a key to the Peace process that he had earlier been a key figure in making necessary.

These two men who died challenge our assessment of human goodness and badness. 

It is clear that those who knew Adey the youngster often (but not always) regarded him as incapable of anything like what he did on Wednesday.   Somewhere he seemed to have gone bad.  Yet even that doesn't quite work as the hotel he stayed in the night before the atrocity found him to be a very pleasant guest.

As a youngish man Martin McGuiness was certainly marked out by many outside his immediate community as a great deal of trouble.  To what extent he was directly or indirectly involved in acts of terrorism eventually became a subject off limits.  Yet most saw in his championing of the Northern Ireland Peace Process (at considerable personal risk and cost) something heroic or at least laudable.

The easy thing to say is that there is bad and good in all of us.  The harder thing is how we judge it.  The best thing to say is that we really can't and that the Judge of all the earth (Genesis 18:25) will need to be left to do what is right.

Bono

Here's a quote from Dubliner Bono for St Patrick's Day:

Great music is written by people who are either running toward or away from God.

Here, from St Patrick's Breastplate, an example of the former:

What's it for?

There before you is that perfectly harmless button on the remote control or appendage to the zoo enclosure or light on the car dashboard or hole in the kitchen wall or marking on the dog’s underside or buoy bobbing in the river or pocket in the handbag.  It had unobtrusively nestled in your life until a small quizzical mind bent its curiosity toward the thing.  And the truth is that for the first time you realise - you don’t know!

A harrowing (and small) question it may be, but “What’s it for?” is a surprisingly useful question for assessing many things.  I have read that, seen from space, the brightest man-made spot on earth is the city of Las Vegas (partly due to its desert location but mainly due to the intensity of its neon lights).  An approaching alien might therefore think it is the most interesting place on earth!  But not if they ask, “What’s it for?”.  And many shining places and things are rendered a lot less inviting by the application of that little question.

The question that transforms the cross is “What’s it for?”.  The reason for most of the New Testament writings is not to describe the event of the death and resurrection of Jesus, but to proclaim its purpose.   As the writer A. W. Tozer commented, ‘the cross is rough, and it is deadly, but it is effective.’

Isn’t the reason Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness after his baptism so that he might absolutely nail this purpose question before his ministry began?    As we pursue our way through Lent I do think that I must also, therefore, be sure that I do not get to Easter with this question still lurking anywhere concerning it.

O teach me what it meaneth,
That cross uplifted high,
With One, the Man of Sorrows,
Condemned to bleed and die!
O teach me what it cost Thee
To make a sinner whole;
And teach me, Saviour, teach me
The value of a soul!

O teach me what it meaneth,
That sacred crimson tide,
The blood and water flowing
From Thine own wounded side.
Teach me that if none other
Had sinned, but I alone,
Yet still Thy blood, Lord Jesus,
Thine only, must atone.

Happy St David's Day!

Kind of the Welsh version of Auld Lang Syne!  Is it just my welsh blood that thinks there's no real comparison?