October 12, 2008 - "A Prayer-Shaped Life"

Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
Pentecost 22
October 12, 2008
W. Gregory Pope

SERIES: The New Monasticism

A PRAYER-SHAPED LIFE

Exodus 32:1-14; Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23;
Philippians 4:1-9; Matthew 22:1-14

Anybody here searching for some peace?

These are anxiety-ridden days. I know what Paul said in our text for today, but it is difficult to refrain from anxiety and to keep our minds only on what is excellent and honorable and good and true. It helps to know that Paul was no stranger to hard economic times and difficult life-situations. We may not always like what Paul has to say, but someone who lived a life like his, full of incredible hardship, we at least must listen to what he has to say, because they are not words spoken from an ivory pain-free palace, but words forged from the fire of a deep faith in God.

And as we continue our reflections on monastic spirituality, we also want to ask what we can learn from the monastery in relation to this text.

Bill Johnson and I were talking just a few days ago about how in these dark economic days the monastery was looking better all the time. To be a monk or a nun might make it a bit easier not to be anxious about anything. But even monks and nuns have worries. Far from being removed from the world, they carry the world in their hearts constantly in prayer.

As we try to discern a path to peace for our own lives, it is the witness of scripture and the church, including especially monasteries, that the journey toward peace is marked by a life that is shaped by prayer.

Don’t be anxious about anything, says Paul, but in everything with prayers and petitions make your requests known to God, and the peace of God which passes all understanding will guard your hearts and minds.

Paul is not speaking of a life that simply includes a prayer in the morning or at meals or in moments of crisis. This is a life immersed in prayer for the purpose of living in peace, no matter how difficult the circumstances.

And it is important I think to notice the thoughts of a prayer-shaped life. Notice Paul did not say, “Think about what is comfortable or secure or prosperous.” Which is what we usually seek in order to have peace. But rather he says to think on what is excellent and true and just.

Many of us carry doubts about prayer and whether or not it changes things. We pray and pray and pray for something good and it doesn’t happen, and so we wonder, “Why pray? What good is prayer? Does it really make any difference?” These are legitimate questions we have and we must continually ask them as we search the mysteries of prayer.

As we look to monasticism and some of the great writers on prayer throughout the history of the church, we find that prayer is not so much about changing the circumstances around us as it is about the change that takes place within us in spite of or because of the circumstances around us.

Writer and nun Joan Chittister says we pray “so that our minds and our hearts, our ideas and our lives, come to be in sync, so that we are what we say we are, so that the prayers that pass our lips change our lives, so that God’s presence becomes palpable to us. Prayer brings us to burn off the dross of what clings to our souls like mildew and sets us free for deeper, richer, truer lives in which we become what we seek.” [1]

Elizabeth Canham adds, “Prayer is work. Prayer is the context in which we confront our fears, recognize resistance, let go of demands for immediate solutions to life’s dilemmas, and learn to wait.” [2]

One monk writes: “Prayer is God’s abiding presence made real.” [3]

Monasteries have much to teach us about God’s abiding presence made real. They are governed by a rule of life centered in prayer and worship. They teach us that prayer is not meant to be an attachment to the life that we live; it is meant to be the center of the life that we live, permeating all that we do, considering our every activity, our every breath as prayer.

Prayer lies at the very heart of the Christian life; it holds everything together, it sustains every other activity . . . Praying can never be set apart from the rest of life, it is the life itself. St. Benedict did not ask his monks to take a vow to pray, for he expected prayer to be central in their lives, permeating whatever else they were doing. [4]

Devote yourself often to prayer, he writes. Prayer in the Rule of Benedict is appropriately discussed in chapter 8 immediately after the chapter on humility. Prayer is the natural response of people who know their place in the universe. [5]

The great purpose of monastic life and for every Christian life is to pray constantly, keeping the memory of God alive in your heart at every moment of the day and night; seeing God in everything and to be aware of God at all times.


Two Ways of Praying

How do we do that? As we consider a prayer-shaped life, I want to offer two ways of praying that may help us experience a continual awareness of God.

The Daily Office / Liturgy of the Hours

The first is called by many different names: The Daily Office, The Liturgy of the Hours, The Opus Dei, Daily Prayer, or Fixed Hour Prayer. It is the call to pray several different times each day so as to frame the day in prayer with praise and thanksgiving. It serves to make the worship of God the center of our life.

The heart of the prayer life proscribed by the Rule of Benedict is called the Opus Dei - the Work of God. It is the work we are to do for God and the work that God does in us.

The psalmist says, “Seven times a day I will rise to praise your name.” And so the early Hebrew faithful and the early Christians did just that. Some monastic communities still pray seven times a day. Others four or five times.

In the sixth century, Benedict scheduled prayer times during the day to coincide with the times of the changing of the Roman imperial guard. When the world was revering its secular rulers Benedict taught us to give our homage to God, the divine ruler of heaven and earth.6

Thousands of years before Christ, the people of God . . . made it their practice to rise up in the night or stop in their daily rounds to praise the name of Yahweh, to give thanks, to acknowledge God’s presence, to seek God’s blessing, and to offer themselves to God for God’s work here on earth. [7]

Praying the Hours is a Jewish, Christian, and Muslim tradition. Faithful Muslims stop four times a day - at work, at home, while traveling - and pray toward Mecca. There are Jews and Christians outside monasteries who do the same. This is a counter-cultural practice. To stop commerce, travel, conversation, even ministry for a short time in order to make a prayer offering to God. Our culture does not reward those of us who stop three of four times a day. But God does. God rewards the One who practices regular prayer with peace and with an intimacy of relationship that truly is the meaning of life. [8]

To make such offerings each day - morning, noon, evening, and night, or by whatever pattern that one follows - is to live inside the frame of the day that the Lord has made. It is a chance to recognize and to be grateful for the fact that, as least as far as you are concerned, God has indeed acted, and the world is indeed a new and fresh creation in which you can live and love and work and rest. [9]

The saying of the offices seven times is so that each stage of the day’s work may be appropriately offered to God. [10]

Each of the day hours (or times of prayer) begins with the verse, “O God, come to my assistance: O God, make haste to help me” (Ps 70:2)

Benedict instructs his communities . . . during the day, to recite brief, simple, scriptural prayers at regular intervals, easy enough to be recited and prayed even in the workplace, to wrench their minds from the mundane to the mystical, away from concentration on life’s petty particulars to attention on its transcendent meaning. [11]

Merton speaks of being attentive to the times of the day: when the birds begins to sing, and the deer comes out of the morning fog, and the sun comes up. The reason why we don’t take time is a feeling that we have to keep moving. This is a real sickness. [12] And it will not bring peace.

The Daily Office allows prayer to permeate everything we do. Returning to prayer throughout the day reminds us that attending to one’s spiritual life is as essential as the habit of eating meals. [13]

Monasteries have a bell that calls them to prayer. I love the sound of church bells that ring across a town. Thomas Merton says, “The bells break in upon our cares in order to remind us that all things pass away and our preoccupations are not important. The bells say: we have spoken for centuries from the towers of great Churches. We have spoken to the saints, your fathers and mothers, in their land. We called them, as we call you, to sanctity.” The bells are calling us all, and that echo we hear within is the sound of our longing to be with God. [14]

Ron Rolheiser suggests that we consider the alarm clock as a monastic bell calling us to prayer. A revolutionary way to think of the alarm clock. Not quite the beauty of church bells, but we can set our alarms to sacred music.

To give you an idea of what praying the daily office might be like, I want to share with you portions of prayers from a prayer book I sometimes use written by Robert Benson. [15]

Imagine rising in the morning with the words:

God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.
This very day the Lord has acted. May God’s name be praised.
Deliver us, Almighty God, from the service of self alone,
that we may do the work You have given us to do,
in truth and beauty, and for the common good.
In your tender compassion, the morning sun has risen upon us,
to shine on us, we who live in darkness,
to guide our feet into the paths of peace.
We will know your power and presence this day
if we will but listen for your voice.

And then pausing in the middle of the day to pray:

Drive far from us all wrong desires, Almighty God,
and incline our hearts to keep your ways.
Grant that having cheerfully done your will this day,
we may, when night comes, rejoice and give you thanks.

And then as the sun begins to set and the work day draws to a close to pray:

You made this day for the works of the light, Almighty God,
and this night for the refreshment of our minds and bodies.
Keep us now in Christ;
grant us a peaceful evening, and a night free from sin.

And then before we close our eyes in sleep to pray:

May the Lord grant us a quiet night and peace at the last.
Look down from on high, Almighty God,
and illumine this night with your light.
Keep watch, dear Lord, with all who work or watch or weep this night.
May the Lord guide us waking and guard us sleeping;
that awake we may watch with Christ
and asleep we may rest in peace.

Joan Chittister says that this night prayer, also known as Compline, is designed to do what we all need to do at night: (1) recognize that what we did that day was not perfect, (2) hope that the next day will be better, (3) praise the God whose love and grace brought us through another day, and (4) go to bed trusting that the God who sees our every action is more concerned with our motives than with our failures. [16]

One of the suggested scripture readings contained in the beautiful late-night service of Compline is the invitation of Jesus from Matthew 11: “Come to me you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest.” What an appropriate way to end the day.

This way of praying is a re-focusing of our attention on God at specific moments. To do so makes a great difference to the quality and enjoyment of each day. For really the Rule is telling me that ultimately praying is living, working, loving, accepting, the refusal to take anything or anyone for granted but rather to try to find Christ in and through them all. For Christ is to be found in the circumstances, the people, the things of daily life. St. Benedict hopes that if we are continually aware of this we shall lift our hearts to God and in this way our whole life will become prayer in action. [17]

So the Daily Office.

The Jesus Prayer

There is also The Jesus Prayer that for centuries people have been taught to pray throughout the day. It is the prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.”

In J. D. Salinger’s novel, Franny and Zooey, Franny is seeking to understand what is meant by the biblical instruction to pray without ceasing. She comes across the classic book The Cloud of Unknowing where the pilgrim in the story is on the same search. The pilgrim is introduced to The Jesus Prayer and invited to pray that prayer over and over and over again. To pray the Jesus Prayer, or as the pilgrim suggests, just repeat any name of God.

Franny decides to do the same. And she finds the experience rewarding. Her boyfriend at the time, Lane, is not so impressed. He wants to know the reward. And Franny says, “You get to see God. Something happens in some absolutely nonphysical part of the heart . . . and you see God.”
The idea is that sooner or later, the prayer moves from the lips and the head down to a center in the heart, and the prayer becomes automatic in the heart, right along with the heartbeat.

Franny’s brother Zooey tells her the only aim of the Jesus Prayer is to endow the person who says it with Christ-Consciousness. “When you don’t see Jesus for exactly who he is,” says Zooey, “you miss the whole point of the Jesus Prayer.” [18]

The life we are called to seek is a prayer-shaped, Christ-Conscious life, where every part of the day is immersed in prayer, where every heartbeat is a humble prayer for mercy, where our lives becomes prayer. So that our thoughts are filled with all that is good and noble and trustworthy and excellent. And so that the peace of God which passes all our understanding will guard our hearts and minds.

________________________

1. Joan Chittister, The Rule of Benedict: Insights For the Ages, Crossroad, 1992, 89-90
2. Elizabeth Canham, Heart Whispers: Benedictine Wisdom For Today, Abingdon, 1999, 74
3. As quoted in Esther de Waal, Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict, Liturgical Press, 2001, , 156
4. Ibid., 145
5. Chittister, 75
6. Chittister, 85
7. Robert Benson, A Good Life: Benedict’s Guide to Everyday Joy, Paraclete Press, 2004, 19-20
8. Tony Jones, The Sacred Way: Spiritual Practices For Everyday Life, Zondervan, 2005, 122
9. Benson, 28
10. de Waal, 150
11. Chittister, 85
12. as quoted in de Waal, 155
13. Dennis Okholm, Monk Habits For Everyday People: Benedictine Spirituality for Protestants, Brazos, 2008, 102
14. Benson, 29
15. Robert Benson, Daily Prayer: A Little Book for Saying the Daily Office, Carolina Broadcasting and Publishing, 2006
16. Chittister, 88
17. de Waal, 151-153
18. J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey, Little, Brown and Company, 1961, pp.36-39, 112, 170