The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity
Day Five: Walking as Friends of Jesus
Today we reflect on the biblical images of human friendship and love as models for God’s love for every human being. Understanding ourselves as beloved friends of God has consequences for relationships within the community of Jesus. Within the Church, all barriers of exclusion are inconsistent within a community in which all are equally the beloved friends of Jesus.
Night Office
Christian Unity 1981
A Reading about Christian Unity and Prayer for
Unity
by Dom Robert Petitpierre
Visible unity will come only according to his
will and by the means he chooses to use. This will and these means may well prove
to be very different from those we envisage. Yet we can be sure that the will and
the means involve inevitably for us the process of growth. We have
to grow up into the one new man. It is fatal and easy for christians to refuse to
grow into Christ. We think we are good enough. We are sure that we have learnt all
that we need to know about the ways of God. We have found a certain stability (it
may be a stability of mediocrity) to move from which would make us feel unsafe.
So we resist the loving care of the Lord of the body. We reject new experiences
of grace and worship and christian fellowship. We close our minds to new apprehensions
of truth, being determined to make do with what we have already received .. We
avoid a fresh inflow of grace for fear it may (as it must) involve fresh effort.
We do not wish for sanctification, but only for a passport to heaven. Yet we
cannot stop growing; we are human. If we do not grow with our fellow-christians
into Christ, then we shall grow out of him. To resist the loving care of the Lord
is to promote disunity.
The habit of prayer is the essential condition
of right response to the will of Christ, and the habit of prayer is linked always
with the sanctification, the purifying and hallowing, which he who is the saviour
of the body gives as its life to the Church. It is in the measure that christians
and christian Confessions are sanctified that they enter into the will and purposes
of Jesus the Christ of God.
Christian prayer is always personal; but, unlike pagan prayer, it
is never private. The christian never prays alone, but always as a member of the
Body of Christ and therefore with and on behalf of all his fellow-christians.
But the head of the body is Christ, and he ever lives to pray with and for us.
The moment that we start to pray, we find that Jesus our Head is ahead of us.
Our personal prayers have but to be joined to his prayer to reach the throne of
God. Here again all christians find a unity which the Lord provides. In him all our praying is knit into one prayer. Wherever
prayer is offered in his name, there he is in the midst, and all his body with him.
He leads our prayers, teaching us what to pray and how to pray; the whole art of
surrender to the will of God. We then who pray for the visible unity of all christians
do so with him. He prays for his disciples 'that they may all be one.' Our prayer
is but the humble, inadequate entry into that impassioned supplication. By our praying we draw near to the flame of love, and
the flame purges our selfish desires, enlightens our limited vision, warms the coolness
of our hope, and strengthens us to act and to suffer according to his prayer and
his will.
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One in Christ (Faith
Press, Lndon, 1958, pp. 78-79.)
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