Prayer - an extract from Tim's sermon (5th February)

Prayer begins in reverent attention to something that isn't yourself. It begins when you concentrate on something beautiful that lies beyond your own petty concerns, something perhaps that is quite irrelevant to them, and are caught up in self-forgetfulness because you are focused on that. All you can see is the beautiful picture, or the image of someone else's generosity to someone else, or whatever it may be that you're focusing on. And this attention to something other than yourself has set you free from what Iris Murdoch called “the fat relentless ego”: it's enabled you to get beyond yourself. There is a curious paradox in the fact that the only way for us to make sense of ourselves is for us to learn to forget about ourselves and start focusing on something else. But like many other paradoxes, this one is true.