The Individual Spiritual Life: Prayer
+In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today, in the third sermon in this series about spiritual life, we finally get to the subject of individual prayer. I’m going to take this topic up in two pieces, first looking at the more ordinary kinds of prayer in today’s sermon, and then turning in the next sermon to what are called “skillful means”—the more advanced forms of individual prayer that you probably shouldn’t try without the spiritual version of a personal trainer: what we call a “spiritual director.”
Consider first of all the settings and times for prayers. One kind of prayer is what some folks call an “arrow” prayer—it’s like an arrow because it is aimed straight at God and meant to go as fast as we make it. “God, make that semi swerve the other way!” would be an example, and so would “God, please give me a miraculous grasp of calculus so I’ll do all right on the test next period even though I haven’t studied.” We can talk later about whether some kinds of prayer subjects are better than others, but the fact is that these little spontaneous momentary prayers are a natural part of individual life.
A second kind of prayer is “constant prayer”—literally trying to pray constantly, with every breath you take. This counts as a “skillful means,” and I’ll talk about it in the next sermon.
Besides our occasional arrow prayers and the advanced technique of constant prayer, there is the most common thing, regular prayer—and I mean regular here in the sense of happening over and over again on a predictable, daily, basis. Just like what all the experts tell you about doing homework, daily individual prayer will do us the most good if we set up a good workplace to do it and a regular time. Some people can study lying on the floor with the TV and the stereo both on while they’re carrying on three IM conversations with people they haven’t seen since three-thirty that afternoon. But most people learn a lot more stuff a lot more effectively if have a well-organized desk that they can sit down to for some quiet study time every evening at 7:30. The same thing is true of regular prayer. The place you choose may be a room in your home, or someplace you like out of doors, or even here in the chapel: but it should be a place which you can somehow mark off for yourself as reserved for prayer. The time could be in the morning when you first get up, or in a free block during the day, or in the afternoon, or at bed-time. One of the dangers with many of these time-slots, particularly for teenagers, but to a degree for the faculty as well, is that you’re liable to be drowsy at the time you’ve picked for prayer. I once wrote to my abbot up in Michigan to ask what I should do because I kept falling asleep when I said my prayers after getting home from work; his reply was that it sounded like I needed a nap more than I needed to be praying at that time of day.
Assuming that we have a place and time set aside, then, where do we actually start? What’s the first step in regular individual prayer? All the experts say, and I would agree, that we have to start our prayers simply by being quiet. We spend so much of our day running around and getting stuff done that, if we’re not careful, we’re tempted to treat this conversation with God the same way, like greetings exchanged with a parent while dashing out of the house to grab a meal at Mcdonald’s on the way to some evening school function. Those quick conversations with God are arrow prayers, and they have their own value, but the daily training regimen needs to include something more than that. In physical training, the athlete very often begins by stretching muscles that have grown stiff through disuse since his or her last exercise section. In spiritual training, the spiritual athlete begins by stretching the muscles of his or her intention, quieting down and becoming calm so that he or she can pay attention to God.
Once we have quieted down, it seems to me that there are three approaches we can take—three likely topics that we can use to begin prayer. These three are Thanksgiving, Adoration, and Penitence. Prayer of thanksgiving is just what it sounds like—when we look around us, and see how many good things we have, not only the good things of our personal life but also the good things of the natural world, we have constant reason to give thanks to God; and, as the “General Thanksgiving” in the Prayer Book points out, above and beyond all our other thanksgivings, we should give thanks for God’s gift of salvation in Jesus Christ our Lord, for the “means of grace and the hope of glory.” The idea of giving thanks to God is so basic to us that the central act of Christian worship, the Lord’s Supper, is often called the Holy Eucharist, where the word “eucharist” comes from the Greek word for “thanksgiving.”
Prayer of adoration is closely related to thanksgiving, but it has a subtle difference. In thanksgiving, we praise God for the good things God has given us—it is a form of prayer that talks about God in relationship to us. Adoration, on the other hand, simply praises God for being God—it reflects back to God the sheer joy of glimpsing part of God’s glory. The song that the angels sing to God in the vision of Isaiah, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts,” is pure adoration, and it’s no coincidence that we say or sing that hymn right at the beginning of the Great Thanksgiving, the Holy Eucharist.
The third of these openings for prayer will probably be the least common. Penitence is being sorry for our behavior when we know that we have done something that is unworthy of God’s love for us. If we have feelings of guilt every time we come before God in prayer, that’s probably a good sign that we should find a spiritual director or spiritual friend of some sort—but everyone will sometimes have such feelings, and when we feel that way, the best thing to do is to start our prayers with a confession of sin and an assurance of God’s mercy—then thanksgiving or adoration may turn out to flow very naturally, as our response of God’s forgiveness.
If prayer usually involves and sometimes begins with thanksgiving, adoration or penitence, there are some other subjects of prayer that usually come up, though not necessarily as the first thing. The most common of these other subjects is prayer that asks God for something. We call this Intercessory Prayer when we are praying on behalf of other persons, and Petitionary Prayer when we are praying for ourselves. Some people would mark off a special category of Prayer for Discernment—prayer in which what we are asking for is God’s insight or guidance, to help us better understand God’s will. (In fact, some experts would say that all prayer is ultimately prayer for discernment, since the ultimate objective of prayer is to bring our wills into line with God’s will, not the other way around).
The other category of prayer content is Oblation, prayer in which we offer God something. This kind of prayer involves our remembering that everything we have comes from God anyway (“All things come from you, O Lord, and of your own have we given you,” one of the offertory sentences in the Prayer Book says), but granted that, God still puts many things into our hands, and our giving them back is a form of prayer, connected to the one great offering in all of history, God the Son offering his human life in Jesus Christ as an oblation to God the Father.
Now let me say just a word about helps to regular prayer and we will be done for today. One of these is Bible reading—not study of the Bible in the academic sense, but reading and rereading the same passage. Back in the days when most people spent a lot more time around farm animals than we do today, spiritual experts talked about “ruminating” over the Bible—bringing a passage up from somewhere inside and chewing it all over again, the way a cow chews its cud. So ruminate on the Bible as a help to prayer.
Sometimes it is helpful to read a short meditation as part of a prayer session—there are lots of collections of these, in print and on line. The most common one for Episcopalians is called Forward Day by Day, and for Methodists, there is The Upper Room. I have put links to several of these things on the Chapel web-site.
Some people find it helpful to pray with the aid of an icon, one of those very formal and stylized paintings of a saint or a holy event. This was for a long time mostly a practice amongst Eastern Christians, but has become increasingly popular in the West, and you can even now take classes in how to create icons.
Keeping a spiritual journal can help with prayer, to help you look back and get the big picture of your spiritual life or simply to remind you of what you have to be thankful for. Other people find it helpful to have a set pattern for their individual prayer—they might say the daily office privately (there are links on the Chapel website for Anglican and Roman Catholic forms of this) or perhaps say the Rosary (there’s a link to a Rosary site from the Chapel page, as well).
One of the biggest helps to an individual prayer life (and I am afraid this will sound contradictory!) is to belong to some sort of a prayer group. This work of this group may be to pray together, but it will also involve people supporting the prayer lives of the other members through their own prayer; it may also involve group study of forms of prayer; and last but certainly not least, it will involve holding each other responsible for the prayer commitments people have made. It’s one thing to say to yourself “This week I’m going to start praying the Rosary every day at five” and something else again to have a group of other people ask, “So how did that daily Rosary thing work out?”
Well, then, so much for regular individual prayer, which is naturally the center of an individual spiritual life. Next time, I’ll talk about “skillful means,” the advanced forms of prayer.
--John Wm. Houghton
+In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today, in the third sermon in this series about spiritual life, we finally get to the subject of individual prayer. I’m going to take this topic up in two pieces, first looking at the more ordinary kinds of prayer in today’s sermon, and then turning in the next sermon to what are called “skillful means”—the more advanced forms of individual prayer that you probably shouldn’t try without the spiritual version of a personal trainer: what we call a “spiritual director.”
Consider first of all the settings and times for prayers. One kind of prayer is what some folks call an “arrow” prayer—it’s like an arrow because it is aimed straight at God and meant to go as fast as we make it. “God, make that semi swerve the other way!” would be an example, and so would “God, please give me a miraculous grasp of calculus so I’ll do all right on the test next period even though I haven’t studied.” We can talk later about whether some kinds of prayer subjects are better than others, but the fact is that these little spontaneous momentary prayers are a natural part of individual life.
A second kind of prayer is “constant prayer”—literally trying to pray constantly, with every breath you take. This counts as a “skillful means,” and I’ll talk about it in the next sermon.
Besides our occasional arrow prayers and the advanced technique of constant prayer, there is the most common thing, regular prayer—and I mean regular here in the sense of happening over and over again on a predictable, daily, basis. Just like what all the experts tell you about doing homework, daily individual prayer will do us the most good if we set up a good workplace to do it and a regular time. Some people can study lying on the floor with the TV and the stereo both on while they’re carrying on three IM conversations with people they haven’t seen since three-thirty that afternoon. But most people learn a lot more stuff a lot more effectively if have a well-organized desk that they can sit down to for some quiet study time every evening at 7:30. The same thing is true of regular prayer. The place you choose may be a room in your home, or someplace you like out of doors, or even here in the chapel: but it should be a place which you can somehow mark off for yourself as reserved for prayer. The time could be in the morning when you first get up, or in a free block during the day, or in the afternoon, or at bed-time. One of the dangers with many of these time-slots, particularly for teenagers, but to a degree for the faculty as well, is that you’re liable to be drowsy at the time you’ve picked for prayer. I once wrote to my abbot up in Michigan to ask what I should do because I kept falling asleep when I said my prayers after getting home from work; his reply was that it sounded like I needed a nap more than I needed to be praying at that time of day.
Assuming that we have a place and time set aside, then, where do we actually start? What’s the first step in regular individual prayer? All the experts say, and I would agree, that we have to start our prayers simply by being quiet. We spend so much of our day running around and getting stuff done that, if we’re not careful, we’re tempted to treat this conversation with God the same way, like greetings exchanged with a parent while dashing out of the house to grab a meal at Mcdonald’s on the way to some evening school function. Those quick conversations with God are arrow prayers, and they have their own value, but the daily training regimen needs to include something more than that. In physical training, the athlete very often begins by stretching muscles that have grown stiff through disuse since his or her last exercise section. In spiritual training, the spiritual athlete begins by stretching the muscles of his or her intention, quieting down and becoming calm so that he or she can pay attention to God.
Once we have quieted down, it seems to me that there are three approaches we can take—three likely topics that we can use to begin prayer. These three are Thanksgiving, Adoration, and Penitence. Prayer of thanksgiving is just what it sounds like—when we look around us, and see how many good things we have, not only the good things of our personal life but also the good things of the natural world, we have constant reason to give thanks to God; and, as the “General Thanksgiving” in the Prayer Book points out, above and beyond all our other thanksgivings, we should give thanks for God’s gift of salvation in Jesus Christ our Lord, for the “means of grace and the hope of glory.” The idea of giving thanks to God is so basic to us that the central act of Christian worship, the Lord’s Supper, is often called the Holy Eucharist, where the word “eucharist” comes from the Greek word for “thanksgiving.”
Prayer of adoration is closely related to thanksgiving, but it has a subtle difference. In thanksgiving, we praise God for the good things God has given us—it is a form of prayer that talks about God in relationship to us. Adoration, on the other hand, simply praises God for being God—it reflects back to God the sheer joy of glimpsing part of God’s glory. The song that the angels sing to God in the vision of Isaiah, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts,” is pure adoration, and it’s no coincidence that we say or sing that hymn right at the beginning of the Great Thanksgiving, the Holy Eucharist.
The third of these openings for prayer will probably be the least common. Penitence is being sorry for our behavior when we know that we have done something that is unworthy of God’s love for us. If we have feelings of guilt every time we come before God in prayer, that’s probably a good sign that we should find a spiritual director or spiritual friend of some sort—but everyone will sometimes have such feelings, and when we feel that way, the best thing to do is to start our prayers with a confession of sin and an assurance of God’s mercy—then thanksgiving or adoration may turn out to flow very naturally, as our response of God’s forgiveness.
If prayer usually involves and sometimes begins with thanksgiving, adoration or penitence, there are some other subjects of prayer that usually come up, though not necessarily as the first thing. The most common of these other subjects is prayer that asks God for something. We call this Intercessory Prayer when we are praying on behalf of other persons, and Petitionary Prayer when we are praying for ourselves. Some people would mark off a special category of Prayer for Discernment—prayer in which what we are asking for is God’s insight or guidance, to help us better understand God’s will. (In fact, some experts would say that all prayer is ultimately prayer for discernment, since the ultimate objective of prayer is to bring our wills into line with God’s will, not the other way around).
The other category of prayer content is Oblation, prayer in which we offer God something. This kind of prayer involves our remembering that everything we have comes from God anyway (“All things come from you, O Lord, and of your own have we given you,” one of the offertory sentences in the Prayer Book says), but granted that, God still puts many things into our hands, and our giving them back is a form of prayer, connected to the one great offering in all of history, God the Son offering his human life in Jesus Christ as an oblation to God the Father.
Now let me say just a word about helps to regular prayer and we will be done for today. One of these is Bible reading—not study of the Bible in the academic sense, but reading and rereading the same passage. Back in the days when most people spent a lot more time around farm animals than we do today, spiritual experts talked about “ruminating” over the Bible—bringing a passage up from somewhere inside and chewing it all over again, the way a cow chews its cud. So ruminate on the Bible as a help to prayer.
Sometimes it is helpful to read a short meditation as part of a prayer session—there are lots of collections of these, in print and on line. The most common one for Episcopalians is called Forward Day by Day, and for Methodists, there is The Upper Room. I have put links to several of these things on the Chapel web-site.
Some people find it helpful to pray with the aid of an icon, one of those very formal and stylized paintings of a saint or a holy event. This was for a long time mostly a practice amongst Eastern Christians, but has become increasingly popular in the West, and you can even now take classes in how to create icons.
Keeping a spiritual journal can help with prayer, to help you look back and get the big picture of your spiritual life or simply to remind you of what you have to be thankful for. Other people find it helpful to have a set pattern for their individual prayer—they might say the daily office privately (there are links on the Chapel website for Anglican and Roman Catholic forms of this) or perhaps say the Rosary (there’s a link to a Rosary site from the Chapel page, as well).
One of the biggest helps to an individual prayer life (and I am afraid this will sound contradictory!) is to belong to some sort of a prayer group. This work of this group may be to pray together, but it will also involve people supporting the prayer lives of the other members through their own prayer; it may also involve group study of forms of prayer; and last but certainly not least, it will involve holding each other responsible for the prayer commitments people have made. It’s one thing to say to yourself “This week I’m going to start praying the Rosary every day at five” and something else again to have a group of other people ask, “So how did that daily Rosary thing work out?”
Well, then, so much for regular individual prayer, which is naturally the center of an individual spiritual life. Next time, I’ll talk about “skillful means,” the advanced forms of prayer.
--John Wm. Houghton