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Prayer for the week
Anna Matthews on a prayer for the perfection that only God can give
My God, I desire to love thee perfectly: with all my heart which thou madest for thyself, with all my mind which only thou canst satisfy, with all my soul which fain would soar to thee, with all my strength, my feeble strength, which shrinks before so great a task, and yet can choose naught else but spend itself in loving thee. Claim thou my heart, fill thou my mind, uplift my soul, and reinforce my strength, that where I fail thou mayest succeed in me, and make me love thee perfectly.
Walter Howard Frere (1863-1938) JUST BEFORE I was ordained priest, I had a recurring dream. In it, I would reach the sanctuary of the church in which I served as curate, only to be confronted with an altar that towered above me, over which I could not see, and around which I could not go. No prizes for guessing that I had some anxieties about celebrating the eucharist for the first time. So my training incumbent sent me off on retreat with some wise advice and this prayer. It was exactly the right prayer to give me, for I really did want to love God better and serve him well as a priest, but I also shrank from what lay ahead, because I was terrified of failing. That is where this prayer is so refreshing: it combines a great optimism about the soul’s desire for God with a matter-of-fact certainty that our bold and heartfelt resolutions about the spiritual life will surely fail. The Christian life is not about the evasion of failure, or resting secure in our own resources, but about a beckoning on into the “strange country” of God’s promise. There we must learn anew to depend on God, and there strength is made perfect in weakness. The first half of Frere’s prayer draws on Jesus’s summary of the law: the first commandment is to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength. Well may our feeble strength shrink before the task of loving God wholly: it is a daunting and, on the face of it, impossible prospect. Certainly it is impossible if we think loving God perfectly means loving God exclusively: after talking about loving God, Jesus goes on to say “and love your neighbour as yourself.” Loving God will not leave less room for loving others, but more, as our capacity for love is enlarged by growing in relationship with the God who is love. Loving God, for Christians, always has a communitarian aspect: it is never just a personal relationship, but one that has an inescapably social dimension. Even the hermit has to come out of his cell to wash the feet of another. As a religious brother and one of the founders of the Community of the Resurrection, Frere knew the value of community and of time spent apart in prayer. This prayer comes from one who knows both the human yearning for God and the human weakness that means that our love for God will be imperfect and partial. Yet it is this incomplete, imperfect love that casts us back on to God. We cannot love him fully in our own strength; we should not even try to. For Frere, the natural home for our hearts, minds, souls, and strength is in God, and it is he who will take our weak offering of love, and perfect it. Human striving alone will never lead us to love God perfectly. The confidence with which Frere ends this prayer comes from the knowledge that God’s love will reach out to draw us back to himself. Our failure to love God perfectly is an invitation to depend on him more. Before ordination, Frere’s prayer helped me to take to heart what I already believed in theory: that the miracle of the eucharist is up to God, not to me. So I celebrated the eucharist for the first time on 4 July, four years ago today. And I pray this prayer still. The perfection of my love seems as far off as ever, but I am comforted and challenged by Frere’s confidence that God will take not just my strengths, but my failures. He will teach me, yet again, that his grace and love are sufficient. The Revd Anna Matthews is a Minor Canon of St Albans Abbey. |
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