A prayer to be disturbed

This poem was in a recent issue of Critique and it caught my attention. I particularly found myself thinking about the line, "We ask you to push back the horizons of our hopes...." Perhaps your eye will land and stay on a different line.

Disturb us, Lord, when
We are too well pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we have dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when
With the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity;
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wider seas
Where storms will show your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.
We ask You to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push into the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.
Amen.

–Sir Francis Drake (attributed to)

~~~

[Photo: taken of a fall scene]

Prayer as a complicated polyphony ad infinitum

When I was in junior high a Sunday school teacher told us thatwhen we pray out loud the prayer is prayed forever, because the sound waves produced by the audible prayer go on and on without end. I didn't know enough then – and still don't – about the physics of sound to evaluate the truth of that statement, but it fired my young imagination to consider the possibilities for a reality that I couldn't see or hear or even understand as well as my interaction with that reality.

Last night, reading a book review by Lauren Winner in the latest issue of Image (no. 88) reminded me of this. Her review, "Through the Ear," discusses two books about Scripture, one of which is The Art of Listening in the Early Church by Carol Harrison. In a section about theLord's Prayer, Winner writes that Harrison, drawing on the early church fathers, suggests that the prayer is "fundamentally an act of listening." God is listening and we the prayers also are listening.

Winner quotes Harrison:

"The individuals who said this prayer together would thus hear not only their own voice, along with the common voice of the faithful, but [would also hear] God, as it were, speaking to Himself." Thus prayer becomes, in Harrison's phrasing, "a complicated polyphony of speaking and hearing: God speaks to Himself; the individual and the congregation speak to God; God hears His own words and those of the faithful; the faithful hear what they pray, overhear the words of their neighbors as they pray with them, and above all, overhear God's own words."

This is a new way for me to think about the Lord's prayer. Tomorrow morning around 11:45 a.m., I'll be paying close attention to the "complicated polyphony" and wondering about the ad infinitum waves.

~~~

[Photo: another taken at the sculpture garden at Pratt College (see post from May 5).]

A prayer of St. Aquinas

"Grant, O Lord my God, that I may never fall away in success or in failure, that I may not be prideful in prosperity nor dejected in adversity. Let me rejoice only in what unites us and sorrow only in what separates us. May I strive to please no one or fear to displease anyone except Yourself. May I seek always the things that are eternal and never those that are only temporal. May I shun any joy that is without You and never seek any that is beside You. O Lord, may I delight in any work I do for You and tire of any rest that is apart from You. My God, let me direct my heart towards You, and in my failings, always repent with a purpose of amendment."

–St. Thomas Aquinas

~~~

[Photo: taken of the paint chip used as a bookmark in this book on my shelf from which I've typed this prayer that I had underlined many years ago. I don't think I ever painted anything using either of these colors.]

A prayer to start the workweek

Yesterday at church, this prayer.

This prayer, a good one to start the week on, the work week or any other kind of week.

Almighty God, speak to us your grace and truth. May we seek your will above others. Bless us with a restless discomfort at easy answers and half-truths. Stir our hearts with a passion for your Spirit, a hunger to be faithful, and a commitment to love as you do. Lead us deeper in devotion, and further in mission; to one another and to the world, in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Our minister, Matt Kennedy wrote most of that beautiful prayer but borrowed some words (restless discomfort at easy answers and half-truths) from a Franciscan blessing.

When you pray it, you make it your own.

~~~

[Photo: taken on a morning beach walk a couple weeks and many miles ago.]

Turning on the alarm: Charleston and prayer

A couple years ago, I wrote a guest post for Good Letters blog in the months following the Newtown school shooting and the Boston bombs. You can read that post here: "Deliver Us From Evil." If you haven't read it, this post may not make much sense, so if you have the time, I encourage you to click over and then come back.

That post at Good Letters has now been on my mind in the days following the Charleston shooting, because last week I realized I'd gotten out of the habit of that specific prayer: a prayer for deliverance from evil on behalf of this country, this world. In that post I stated that I was setting my alarm for a certain time each morning and would pause at the ring to say a prayer of corporate protection, adding my small prayer to all the prayers.

I’ve set the alarm on my phone to go off thirty minutes after I usually get up. It’s set to repeat daily. When it goes off with its blues guitar sound, I am praying for the safety of this country, our schools, skies, and public places, for the safety of the world, for protection of the innocents.

I had kept the practice going for a long time, but more and more often I turned off the alarm because of a work conference call, or travel, or any number of legitimate – or not so legitimate – excuses, until one day after turning it off, I forgot to turn it back on.

With sorrow, the alarm is now back on.

~~~

[Photo: taken of Boston Harbor.]

Soul as workplace bridge

In the Celtic Prayer Book, Aidan Clarke wrote that the soul is like a bridge, "bear[ing] the weight and accept[ing] the contradictions of the two-way flow between God and the world." I like this metaphor of the soul as a bridge and have been thinking about it in relation to one's work. I’ve always thought that God wanted his people to saturate the world, all industries, all domains. Here in the pool business. Here in the advertising industry. Here at an arts center, at a hospital.  God's bridges everywhere—God to world, world to God. But there's a catch to the world flowing over your bridge-like soul. Back to the Clarke passage: this travel over and across one’s soul does damage; repair is done through prayer. How can the bridge stand, how can it bear the weight, except through prayer. It's not so hard to think of bearing weight for family and friends, but what about bearing weight for an employer, a client, a customer?

~~~

[Photo: taken of a bridge I know. ]

O'Connor's and O'Donnell's Province of Joy

I bought this book a couple years ago when its cover and title drew me in at a bookstore. (Yes, people still learn about new books and buy them from bookstores.) Then last month I was delighted to have the privilege of meeting the book’s author, Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, when we were at the same writing workshop at Collegeville Institute. O'Donnell is a professor at Fordham University and has a host of books, poetry and prose, to her credit. O’Donnell radiated joy about her work and it struck me as so fitting that she had written a book with a focus on joy.

The Province of Joy: Praying with Flannery O’Connor (Paraclete Press, 2012) is a book of hours that leads the reader through morning prayer and evening prayer (prime and compline, respectively) on a Monday through Saturday schedule. Each day focuses on a theological theme, but each theme circles back to joy: The Christian Comedy, The False Self & True Self, Blindess & Vision, Limitation & Grace, The Mystery of the Incarnation, Facing the Dragon, and Revelations & Resurrections. This is not theology according to Flannery O’Connor, but rather O’Donnell has identified certain theological themes that appear in O’Connor's work and that her work can help us understand better. 

Today, for example, Tuesday, the theme is Blindness & Vision, and the morning prayer begins with a reading from the Gospel of Mark, the story of the blind man at the pool at Bethsaida, then a short prayer followed by a reading from the Psalms, followed by a reading from Acts when Paul was blinded and then healed. The readings are followed by an invitation to Lectio Divina and various prayers, including a space for intercession. The last entry is a short discussion of how the theme of blindness and vision plays out in O’Connor’s story “Good Country People.”

The idea for this book was sparked when O'Donnell learned of O’Connor’s daily habit of saying "The Prayer of St. Raphael," which O’Donnell includes in each day’s readings. It is a prayer with its eye on joy. For O’Connor the main point of the prayer was that we be guided “to the province of joy so that we may not be ignorant of the concerns of our true country.”

O’Donnell writes in the introduction:

"Through prayer and through her writing, which served as a kind of prayer for O’Connor, she could place herself on the threshold of that province using the power of word and imagination. Prayer, for O’Connor, was a means of moving from the limited place in which she found herself toward the limitless space of joy, a location that can be occupied in the here and now, as well as looked forward to in eternity. Indeed, prayer becomes both means and end for all of us, an act that propels us toward the prospect of eternity and an experience of the eternal achieved, paradoxically, within the limits of time and physical space. Such prayer provides the pray-er with a foretaste of eternity."

O’Donnell is currently working on a biography of Flannery O'Connor for Liturgical Press's "People of God" series. 

~~~