551[1]

I
FOREWORD
T IS NOT UNUSUAL, among the New Year’s resolutions made by
Christians, to find some related to prayer. People hope to pray more
regularly, or for longer, or with greater attentiveness. Nor is it unusual,
as with most such resolutions made at this time of year, to find them
abandoned and forgotten after just a few days. Yet the desire to live a
better life of prayer does not go away, and seems somehow to be hardwired
into the spirituality of the average follower of Christ.
This issue of The Way looks at both what it means to pray and who
it is that is doing the praying. Anne Mouron takes us back to the late
Middle Ages, describing a manual to aid monastic prayer assisted by very
contemporary-looking illustrations and diagrams. Matt Kappadakunnel
outlines how, when seeking to discover ways of praying in a very busy
life, finding suitable places may be as important as being able to set aside
an appropriate amount of time. Meanwhile, if working for social justice
seems at first sight to be at the opposite end of the spectrum of Christian
living from contemplative prayer, Meredith Secomb suggests that these
two approaches can be seen as complementary rather than competing.
Sometimes negative experiences block that road to God that is
opened up by prayer. A factor common to Christianity and Judaism is
the feeling of God’s absence, and the desire to make some sense of it.
In Christian spirituality one of the chief exponents of this quest for
understanding is the Carmelite friar St John of the Cross. He called the
experience of God’s seeming absence the ‘dark night of the soul’, and
Louis Roy here shows the continuing relevance of his analysis. As a
practising psychotherapist for the past three decades, Peter Wilcox has
had plenty of opportunity to see how some people are able to make use of
the sorrowful aspects of their lives to grow in fruitfulness, and applies his
insights to faith development. Few events of the last century can have
been more challenging to faith in a good and caring God than the
dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Pedro Arrupe, who would later become Superior General of
the Jesuits, survived the first of these bombings and tended its victims.
James Menkhaus draws lessons from his experience, seventy years on.
Strictly speaking, prayer can never be merely a solitary activity, linking
us as it does not simply with God but with all those others who have
The Way, 55/1 (January 2016), 7–8