A Good Life
August 21, 2009
I just finished and strongly recommend Robert Benson’s A Good Life: Benedict’s Guide to Everyday Joy. Here is a small taste.
“Many of us do not even know much about the office anyway. We are not always taught that this way of praying is part of our heritage as faithful people. The liturgies and forms and practices have long since been dropped from the ways that we are taught.
Our lives are already very busy from morning until night-too hectic, it seems, to stop two or three times each day and read the prayers from a book or to say them from memory. We live in a world in which we are encouraged to multitask, and to read books on tape (which is something that actually cannot be done, if you think about it). We eat fast food, expect overnight delivery, and sign up for instant messaging. We get too little sleep, have too many commitments and too much on our plate most days and weeks.
So we look for books that can help us pray our way to powerful Christian living in ten minutes a day, and we wonder why we are often left feeling somehow devoid of God’s presence in our lives.
“Can you not stay with me for one hour?” asks Jesus of the ones who said they loved him.
“Can you not move a little more quickly?” we seem to be saying in return.
If it is beginning to sound to you like I am trying to sell you something, it is only because I am. And if you have begun to feel that I am preaching to the choir, remember that I am in the choir myself and have been in it long enough to know that this is the best way to get us to sing.
For centuries, the payer of the office was at the center of the life of those who would serve the God that we say we want to serve. The people of Yahweh, our mothers and fathers, and the people of the early church and the people of the church across the years since–the desert monastics, the ones who kept the church alive through the Dark Ages, the ones ho wrestled it through the Reformation, regardless of which side they were on-kept such traditions of prayer alive. They preserved the prayer, they observed the prayer, and they have now handed those traditions of prayer to us in our time.
It may well be time for us to pick up the mantle, shoulder the burden, take up the song, or whatever metaphor you want to choose. It may be time for us to learn to pray the hours, to do the Work of God-with devotion, with art, with discipline, and with care.
It is reasonable to wonder about the efficacy of such prayer, especially when it is unfamiliar to us. And so much has been written and said about dead liturgy and dry, rote prayers that we are right to enter into such prayer with care and with discernment. And we are certainly wise to consider the time and effort that it will take to say such prayer.”
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A few moments of silence, inner reflection, and a focus on meeting with God, eliminate for me the dry and rote problems that some complain about.
Thanks for posting on this book. You beat me to it and that’s a good feeling to know that someone appreciates Benson’s reflections as much as I do.
He wrote further on this aspect of praying in the Ancient Practices series: In Constant prayer