‘Prayers for Troubled Times’ includes words to express concern for those affected by disasters such as Haiti earthquake

A Church of England bishop will today take to the streets to offer hope to city residents and workers facing up to the “gloomiest day of the year”. The Rt Revd John Pritchard, Bishop of Oxford, will be distributing copies of a new collection of ‘prayers for troubled times’, compiled by himself and produced by Church House Publishing, the Church of England’s official publisher.

The book includes prayers covering work and financial issues, personal relationships, the environment, illness and bereavement. Among them, the bishop has penned a number of original intercessions which might address issues affecting the mood of households across England today, including the situation in Haiti, money worries and parental pressures*.

Bishop John stresses that prayer is no “quick fix”, but that in the work environment, “it provides a different back-lighting to the unpredictability of working life, a different screen-saver to our thinking”, while at home and in relationships it can “give God access to our over-defended lives, permeating the bone-hard ground of our confusions”. In words that may resonate with the thoughts of many in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, Bishop John describes how in prayer we “bring to God the awful wounds of the world in order to focus his love and ours on the victims and the situations in which they are caught”.

This morning [Monday], Bishop John will go on walk-about with city centre priest the Very Revd Bob Wilkes, Priest-in-charge of St Michael-at-the-Northgate and Oxford’s City Rector. St Michael-at-the-Northgate, on the busy Cornmarket, has a long history of ministry among shop keepers and other business people based within the city centre parish. The two clergymen will hand out free copies of the bishop’s book while chatting to shoppers and traders about life in the city, the wider economy and anything else on people’s minds.

Monday 18 January has been dubbed the ‘gloomiest day’ of 2010, following a trend of research published in previous years to pinpoint the bleakest day in the calendar**, based on the likelihood of unpaid Christmas bills, inclement weather, and failed New Year’s resolutions. But Bishop John’s pocket-sized book of prayers for tough times seeks to help people find the resources to cope with these and other hurdles in life.

“The prayers may not exactly echo what is going on within us, but they may come close to doing so and enable us to pray more easily for ourselves. Moreover, it’s good to remember that it’s all right not to know what to say and that quiet listening, and attending to our ‘deep thoughts’, is as important as speaking,” writes Bishop John in his introduction.

Surveys conducted in recent years indicate that around two-thirds of UK adults pray***, leading the Church of England’s Head of Research and Statistics, the Revd Lynda Barley, to describe prayer as “one of the best kept secrets in modern Britain”.

Pocket Prayers for Troubled Times, priced £5.99 (ISBN 978-07151-4195-3), is available from Christian bookshops or by mail order via the web.

Notes

* Three of the prayers specially written by Bishop John include:

God of every moment,

of times of disaster and times of elation,

you enter our bewilderment and outrage; you stand with your beautiful, broken people

in their illness and sadness.

Stay with us in our fear and confusion,

sustain us in the bleak hinterland of our loneliness

and promise us, we pray, a life beyond pain

and hope of a new day.

Gracious God, you know our need of money.

‘Times are hard’, they say,

But harder for some that others,

harder for us, in fact.

The mortgage, the supermarket, the heating,

the car, the insurance, the council tax,

the family, the TV, the odd meal out…

I don’t ask you for money (how could I?)

But I do ask you for more patience than I’ve got

and more grace that I find in my frustrated soul.

Ease your way back into my life, I pray,

and restore my sense of perspective and purpose,

for Jesus’ sake, and for mine.

Lord, what have we done wrong?

How has our curly-haired, chubby child

become a monster?

How did our relationship degrade

from smiles and laughter

to curled lip and monsyllables?

How did we get cut off from his world

and displaced to the servants’ quarters?

Graceful and consistent God, hold us steady in the quicksands of blame an grief

And haul us out onto the far shores of hope.

Be the rock on which we rebuild our family,

emulating your patience and endless forgiveness.

And in the meantime – help!

** Research regularly updated by Dr Cliff Arnall at Cardiff University suggests the third Monday of January is the unhappiest day of the year.

*** A Populas survey for The Sun, June 2005, found 65 per cent of adults in Britain said they pray; An ORB survey conducted for the Church of England in 2001 showed that 60 per cent of adults pray; the British Social Attitudes survey, 1998, found that 66 per cent of adults pray.