18 January 2010

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 new 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, 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 at www.chpublishing.co.uk.