praying with the church in 2009

I started off the year with the book, Praying with the Church by Scot McKnight. It is always cool how God brings just the right book right when I need it! Some of you have followed my journey in exploring and learning more about the seasons and liturgy of the church calendar. For someone who did not grow up in a liturgical church tradition, I have found it refreshing and meaningful to my personal rhythm of spirituality and abiding with God these past few years. It has also been cool to share in some of these rhythms with my friends and communities in SoCal, Buenos Aires, and around the world via cyberspace. I am beginning to recognize how the church calendar and seasons have provided a routine and consistency in my inner life of worship, reflection, and meditation during a period of change and inconsistency in my external circumstances. It has provided a space of comfort and rest.

Praying with the church in 2009 seems to be the next step in this journey. In his book, Scot McKnight recognizes two types of prayer in Scripture. There are spontaneous individual prayers and communal prayers. McKnight says, “Prayer is both small and private and quiet and all alone, and prayer is public and verbal and with others and in the open. We may seek individual prayer, but the individual needs to be encompassed by the Church in prayer. We need both the personal and communal – both are good, both are spiritually formative.”

He goes on to say, “We are invited to let our personal prayers be engulfed and enlarged by our prayers of the Church. We are invited to pray both in the church and with the church…Praying with the Church involves allowing our prayer lives to be adjusted to the sacred rhythms of the Church’s tradition and invites us to use the words of the Bible and the Church.”

The book goes on to highlight the daily sacred rhythms of communal prayer found in the history of the Israelites, the Psalms, and in the life of Jesus. It then summarizes and describes a few of the primary historical prayer books of the Church, including A Manual of Eastern Orthodox Prayers, The Liturgy of the Hours, and The Book of Common Prayer. There is also a chapter on praying with the The Divine Hours by Phyllis Tickle, which is a newer prayer book. Scot McKnight’s blog, Jesus Creed, includes a Blogroll on the sidebar of Daily Prayers from various prayer books online if you want to check it out (http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/).

I plan to take my time in this book as a guide in exploring and experiencing these various prayer books over the coming year. I started with The Book of Common Prayer, which I will blog more about next time.