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Given the unsettled weather, this may seem like a ludicrously optimistic reflection. But one of the most arresting images of prayer I have ever come across is from Rowan Williams. Prayer, he said, is like sunbathing. “When you are lying on the beach something is happening” he says “something that has nothing to do with how you feel or how hard you are trying. You're not going to get a better tan by screwing up your eyes and concentrating. You give it time, and that's it.” In other words, according to the former Archbishop of Canterbury, prayer should be seen as a good deal more passive than we generally perceive - not so much about how we affect God but about how God affects us. And so it’s not, for instance, just another way of imposing our will on the world. The Lord's prayer says 'thy will be done' not 'my will be done'. Even so, sunbathing is not an entirely passive affair. Not only do we need to give it a certain amount of time in order for it to be effective, but, even before that, we need to search out the light and to take off our clothes - which is to say, we have to be prepared for the vulnerability that exposure requires. And stripping off those layers of self-protection that separate us from the light is no mean task. But what prayer isn't, however, is presenting God with a shopping list of demands in some act of cosmic lobbying. As a parish priest, I think the most common request I get from my parishioners is for help with the whole idea of prayer - are they doing it right, how can they do it better. And sometimes this feels like a request about how to accelerate the process or how to make it more effective – as if one is waiting in some endless queue to a heavenly complaints department, being continuously fobbed off with pious music and frustratingly never getting through to the right person. The sunbathing image is intended to disrupt this picture. The waiting, as it suggests, is a crucial part of the whole process. So it’s not about technique. Which is why when another former Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, was once asked how to pray he simply replied: "I just get down on my knees and hope for the best". That’s all very well. But what about those times when the light does not readily present itself. After all, the weather forecast for today is not terribly encouraging. But, of course, I'm not literally talking about sunlight. From Plato's Cave allegory to St John's Gospel and beyond, light is a metaphor for truth. And that's the real discipline of prayer and the whole challenge of the sunbathing image - how long can we sit exposed to the truth, to the light? And unfortunately, for most of us, the answer to that is probably: not very long at all. For whilst the truth may set us free, the truth can also be profoundly disconcerting. Which is why the idea of simply lying in the sun may be one of the greatest challenges of them all.