on prayer

Yancy's gem-book on prayer is unlike anything I have ever read. He tackles and more importantly, meditates & confronts the questions head-on...prayer as a seemingly senseless and feeble act / need yet it is a decision that reflects our turbulent if not growing relationship with God; God not as santa claus as we like him to be...but one whom by his 'strange intimacy' meets us at every junction of life and enters the heart's deepest groans and yearnings. Just as all human relationships find deepest expression and completion through authentic relationship, trust and seeking, prayer is the eternal earthbound dialogue; what makes us most human is brought to level-ground. He also shares the pain of unanswered prayer and the sheer absurdity that is faith and how it can be borne on this long journey. This story touched a chord in me.

'I have seen evidence of God's presence in the most unexpected places. During our trip to Nepal, a physical therapist gave my wife and me a tour of the Green Pastures Hospital, which specialises in leprosy rehabilitation. As we walked along an outdoor corridor, I noticed in a courtyard one of the ugliest human beings I have ever seen. Her hands were bandaged in gauze, she had deformed stumps where most people have feet, and her face showed the worst ravages of that cruel disease. Her nose had shrunk away so that, looking at her, I could see into her sinus cavity. Her eyes, mottled and covered with callus, let in no light; she was totally blind. Scars covered patches of skin on her arms.

We toured a unit of the hospital and returned along the same corridor. In the meantime, this creature had crawled across the courtyard to the very edge of the walkway, pulling herself along the ground by planting her elbows and dragging her body like a wounded animal. I'm ashamed to say my first thought was, She's a begger. She wants money. My wife, who has worked among the down- and- out had a much more holy reaction. Without hesitation she bent down to the woman and put her arm around her. The old woman rested her head against Jane;s shoulder and began singing a hymn in Nepali...a tune we all instantly recognised: "Jesus loves me this I know, for the bible tells me so..." Her name was Danmaya who welcomes visitors at the small christian chapel on the site.







A few months later we heard that Danmaya had died. Close to my desk I keep a photo that I snapped just as she was singing to Janet. Whenever I feel polluted by the beauty-obsessed celebrity culture I live in - a culture in which people pay exorbitant sums to shorten their noses or plump up their breasts to achieve some impossible ideal of beauty while 9000 people die each day from AIDS or lack of treatment and hospitals like Green Pastures scrape by on charity crumbs - I pull out that photo. I see 2 beautiful women: my wife, smiling sweetly, wearing a brightly coloured Nepali outfit she had bought the day before, holding in her arms an old crone who would flunk any beauty contest ever devised except the one that matters most. Out of the deformed, hollow shell of a body, the light of God's presence shines out. The Holy Spirit found a home.'

adapted from Philip Yancy: Prayer- Does it make any difference?

p/s: i shared a similar experience with my students in a AP-lit class. It concerned a similar trip i made to Taiwan to visit a hospital where lepers were treated. The poem was 'The Missionary.' For obvious reasons, i had to carefully filter my faith from the 'secular' lesson that was shared. Yancy's account answers and completes the full heart of the story.