Prayer of the Bear - Mr Paget

“Our Father which art in Heaven...” He prayed on bended knee. I, too, knelt beside him there on the sitting room carpet. He prayed fervently, a prayer as etched into his memory as breathing is to the rest of us. His head bowed and his eyes closed.

My eyes, however, were wide open and worried. Mr Paget was very frail and I feared that he would topple over. At the prayer’s end I helped him back to his chair. And so it continued week in and week out praying with Mr Paget until he died.

What strikes me now is how he pushed himself. Pushed himself beyond his comfort zone, literally off the edge of the chair. To get down on his knees was extremely difficult, and to get up even harder. But he wouldn’t compromise when it came to prayer. So off the edge he went, risking failure, risking embarrassment, risking injury.

Some might say, “What a silly old man!” Some might say, “That’s the shackles of tradition for you!” Others, unkindly and ignorant, might call his prayer: “Ritualistic habit.”

I wonder what he thought about when he prayed. Maybe his family long dead. They were an impressive brood. Maybe he thought of his family in this country, and their ups and downs. Maybe he thought about people in need, or the nations of the world, or the world in his neighbourhood.

Yet I suspect he tried to think of nothing except remaining open to the presence of God.

There is a book, a one-time best seller in the U.S., called The Prayer of Jabez. The five phrase prayer simply says “Oh, that you would bless me indeed and enlarge my territory, that Your hand would be with me, and that You would keep me from evil, that I may not cause pain” [1 Chronicles 4:10]. The author, Bruce Wilkinson, in the style of ministerial verbosity, expands this prayer into ninety nine pages.

Unlike the “Our Father” it is a ‘me’ centred prayer. It appeals to the indulgent kind of spirituality where prayer focuses on oneself and one’s concerns. Is it any accident that we don’t hear in the Bible again of Jabez?

Those who like simple methods for maximum results have latched onto the book, praying and interpreting the prayer to fit 21st century needs. As one reviewer put it, “It’s very evangelical and very American, this whole notion that if you know the right technique, the right form, that prayer will be efficient and effective. Kind of like golf.”

Maybe they should copy Mr Paget’s technique. Not the bended knee, but the bended ‘me’. Not the right form, but the right heart. Receptive to that which is beyond the ‘me’, and before whom the ‘me’ diminishes.

“For Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.”

Lieutenant-Colonel Humphrey Paget died in 1985. His beloved brother Bernard was the Archbishop of Central Africa, his father, Francis, was the Bishop of Oxford, his grandfather [after whom the disease was named] was Queen Victoria’s Surgeon-General... to say nothing of the women in the family!!