Rowan Williams On Prayer

I am happy to say that Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, finally has a website that isn’t absolute shit. You will find this new site to be a significant upgrade to the old one and light years more accessible. I thought I’d post an excerpt from Williams’ reflections on prayer which you can find here.

One of the primary tasks of any prayer is ‘How do I let God be God? How do I empty my mind and heart – not so as to confront a kind of void, but so that the personal presence of God can come in?’ If all prayer is trying to listen to God we have to remember that the God that we are seeking to meet is a person, and we come into a personal presence. And that means of course, that praying is about a great deal more than words in the same way that personal presence is about a great deal more than words. The Word of God – the way God communicates – is by being God, by being himself; so one of the primary tasks of any kind of prayer is ‘How do I let God be God?’ ‘How do I empty my mind and heart, not so as to confront a kind of void but so that the personal presence of God can come in? And words are part of that but only a very small part.