During the retreat we talked a lot about prayer, which Father Hughes defined as “daring to make the inner journey.” Later he added that there are times in the journey when one needs companions and there are times when one needs to pray alone. On that basis there was no need for any tug-of-war between what my self-defense mechanism called “private religion” and what Colson, Alison, and Thomas variously called “fellowship,” “prayer partnership,” or “prayer support group” religion. Even so I was still equivocal about getting involved with such novel (for me) activities, until one night I was reading a lecture on prayer by Evelyn Underhill who quoted some advice from a sixteenth-century Catholic mystic, St. Teresa of Avila. The advice was, “when you start to pray, get yourself some company.” This sentence hit me like a killer punch, knocking out my already fading resistance to Michael Alison’s proposal of “a prayer support group” to help me through my troubles.
The group that duly convened for breakfast, Bible reading, and prayer every Thursday morning consisted of what appeared to be a gathering of reserved, cautious, and determinedly nonintrusive Englishmen. In alphabetical order we were: Jonathan Aitken, Michael Alison, Tom Benyon (all ex-MPs); Alastair Burt, a sitting MP; Anthony Cordle, the son of a former MP; Michael Hastings, a senior BBC executive; James Pringle, a retired businessman; and, later on, Mervyn Thomas. How Michael Alison got this lot together remains something of a mystery. I myself knew none of them well and three of them not at all. The only common denominator was that they were all willing to turn up once a week to pray for someone in trouble.
Although my troubles were getting steadily worse, unfolding into the nightmare scenario of defeat, disgrace, divorce, bankruptcy, and jail, the dynamics of this prayer group soon took on a life that went deeper and wider than the Aitken dramas.
Until I joined this group, my idea of praying was to say the Lord’s Prayer, occasionally adding one or two “Lord, help me!” mumbles of an entirely self-centered nature. On a bad day I might possibly open the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and read whichever of its versicles, responses, prayers, or collects seemed particularly appropriate to my circumstances. Although some of the BCP’s liturgical creations have great power and beauty, such a formal style of prayer can easily become stilted and depersonalized. So I was ready to enlarge my prayer horizons even if the new prayer techniques to which I was being introduced came as quite a surprise.
The most regular of these techniques was to go around the table at our Thursday breakfasts, asking, “What are your prayer needs?” Once we had broken through the barriers of British reserve with each other, this question brought to the surface all manner of replies in areas such as family worries, job or money pressures, personal relationship problems, and so on. “What are your prayer needs?” may sound a mundane question, but the oral prayers that flowed from it were sometimes remarkable, as were the answers to those prayers.