Praying the hours...

There are two ways to look at daily prayer: either you do it or you don't. For many years I practiced morning and evening prayer as part of my daily discipline. In time, I also included about 20 minutes of centering prayer. And then, after a long dry spell of just going through the motions, I found myself bored with traditional Christian prayer - so I began using music to both center and express my prayers - and that lasted for a few years until I mostly quit praying altogether.

Well, that's not exactly right: I still offered a quiet prayer of gratitude at night before going to sleep and I regularly found myself expressing short bursts of ecstatic prayers of joy or concern throughout the day. But there was nothing disciplined about it... and I was rather ambivalent about this fact. Oh, at first I felt guilty and slothful - and that was partially true - but in time I let go of the guilt and simply affirmed "that to everything there is a season..." Perhaps even a season for being undisciplined. Like my friend, Black Pete, recently put it in a great new poem:

Squalor and beauty
abide together:
I see the mixture,
live with it,
perhaps be it--
I fear purity.

Sometime last year, however, this began to shift: at first I found myself praying the Morning Prayer liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer more mornings than not; later I found that praying the daily Psalms brought some clarity and focus to my life. And as this summer matured, I found that I wanted to pray "the hours" - roughly morning, noon and evening prayer - but not in an elaborate or deeply formal way. But, rather, as a way of marking the hours of the day and drawing my attention back to the sacred. So I began using a lovely resource from England called: Pray as you go (check it out @ www.pray-as-you-go.org/) This is both sensual and challenging using the wisdom of Ignatian prayer as the foundation.)

And this has led me gently and quietly to adding Phyllis Tickle's helpful reworking of the traditional monastic order: The Divine Hours. She has made this grace-filled commitment simple by including ALL the prayers and readings in one place. Have you ever tried to pray using the Breviary? Or even the BCP? It isn't impossible, but it is complex - which can be off-putting to someone like me - so Tickle has removed the obstacle of flipping pages and searching for the correct Psalm or prayer. So now I can refocus my thoughts and hearts on God in a very tender way: reading short portions of the Psalm three times a day along with a hymn and the Lord's Prayer. It seems to be just what I was searching for at this moment in the journey.

And I think there are at least two reasons for my appreciation of "praying the hours" in this contemporary form:

+ First, they take me out of myself and wash over me with the sacred and time-tested words of my tradition. In this self-obsessed and market-driven culture, this is a good thing and I feel refreshed stepping beyond my own small world three times a day. It is a way for me to affirm: it is NOT about me! This morning, for example, was this short song from Psalm 62:

For God alone my soul in silence waits; truly, my hope is in the Lord. God alone is my rock and my salvation, my stronghold, so that I shall not be shaken. In God is my safety and my honor; God is my strong rock and my refuge.

+ And second, these prayers and readings call me towards my best and most compassionate self rather than my usual compulsions, anxieties or concerns. They lure me towards the Sacred within myself, the world and creation. In other words, they help me locate the authentic center of true worship: God and God's grace.

Glory be to the Creator and to the Christ and to the Holy Ghost: As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen! Amen!

I'm still praying spontaneously each day, to be sure, and finding the presence of the Lord in music, too. But for now this seems to be a season for praying the hours... A spiritual director in Tucson told me that the whole point of prayer is NOT to go through the motions - although I think that sometimes even that has value at a subliminal level - but to be awakened. Thich Nat Han, for example, uses the ringing of a telephone to help him reclaim mindfulness. I am finding that these simple and short prayers are awakening me.