April 22, 2024 - #mondaymoment #prayer
Happy Monday, my friends! I definitely started something in taking out the prayer last week and asking for your feedback. More than a few folks responded with strong words about prayer in their lives and in Monday Moments. In fact, I had more responses to that piece than I had to my April’s Fool joke the week before. Growing up Roman Catholic, prayer was standardized and while our evangelical counterparts were memorizing scripture, we were taught prayers including the Lord’s Prayer, the “Hail Mary,” the “Hail Holy Queen,” the “Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel,” and many others. Prayers during mass were similarly rote and taken from any number of traditional and modern sources. Spontaneous prayer was so rare that even now, having not been a Roman Catholic for over 16 years, I still struggle to pray spontaneously in any other way than stringing together petitions.
A cursory look through my private library, one finds several different books of prayers including three of the four books of the Roman Catholic Liturgy of the Hours (I’m still not sure what happened to the fourth book); several Episcopal Books of Common Prayer (BCP) including a well-loved combination BCP 1979 and Hymnal 1982 (very helpful as a Sewanee chorister) which I carried with me everywhere during college. Sitting next to one of the BCPs is a leather-bound French breviary. One need not look far in my home to find a rosary or an Eastern Orthodox icon among other method or means of prayer. Short of an oratory, an altar, or a dedicated prayer space, my home has about as much prayer paraphernalia as it does Bibles, though tea and teaware still dominate (more on that in another post).
Prayer can take many forms, but does it have any power in and of itself? There is definite personal power in prayer where prayer, much like meditation, helps the person who prays. However, beyond the personal benefits of prayer, the power of prayer is often questioned if not outrightly mocked by much of contemporary society. In an early episode of The West Wing, one of the characters, Josh, a deputy chief of staff to the president, is told that he can secure votes for an important bill in Congress if the administration will allow less than one million dollars—basically pocket change in the totality of the federal budget—to be appropriated to study the benefits of remote prayer. Josh, a person of faith and a shrewd politician, considers it a strange, but easy request to pass legislation on which he’s been working diligently. Almost immediately he’s questioned by his colleagues who assume he’s joking until finally being shut down by the chief of staff, a man whose religion is politics and who holds faithful devotion at arm’s length. Even the president, often shown praying and attending church throughout the series, agrees that the “optics” are bad and drops the idea even though it costs him the legislation.
I admit that prayer looks more like meditation for me personally and I’m still learning how to pray spontaneously, but prayer has and continues to be important to my life.
What does prayer look like to you? How do you pray? How has prayer or the method of prayer changed in your life?
Let us pray: Beloveds of God, we are invited to come and gather, to be nourished by a taste of what God desires to do among us. God calls us from institutional halls of power, from shelters and the streets. God calls us from classrooms and pulpits; Gay bars and prison cells. God calls us as we are, from wherever we are, to come and be in solidarity with Christ, who lives and loves on the margins.
Come, and love relentlessly; following Christ on paths of uncertainty, taking risks for one another, calling down unjust power from its throne and lifting up the lowly, the impoverished, the burdened. To answer the call of Christ is to find ourselves no matter our social location, choosing to align ourselves with the causes of the marginalized, the oppressed, the outcast, and the isolated, with the faith that together, we might realize new possibilities of healing, of connection, of freedom from all that destroys. When these are the desires of our hearts, we open ourselves to God. Amen.
Blessings on your weeks, my friends. Let me know if there is anything I can do for you.
Faithfully,
Ben
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