Prayer as Place
January 14, 2009
Often, when speaking or writing about fixed hour prayer, the hours are referred to as place. Phyllis Tickle refers to them as a “small chapels or wayside stations within the day’s courses”. We frequently use language such as “entering in” or even “going to” for these special times of prayer. This language is not a recent human innovation but a tradition that is millenia old. It’s rooted in the Psalms themselves.
One thing I have asked of the Lord,
this is what I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life;
to behold the beauty of the Lord
and to seek Him in His temple.
The opening sentences of our morning office remind us of this fact and these sentences from evening prayer follow it up.
In the shadow of Your wings
I will sing Your praises, O Lord.
The Lord is the refuge of my life;
of whom shall I be afraid?
to dwell in the presence of my God,
to gaze on Your holy place.
I believe I shall see the goodness
of the Lord in the land of the living.
Each of these images are here to remind us of both the tangibility of God’s presence in prayer and in the incarnation of Christ experienced through the other. Through an emphasis on place, the Psalms, from which all of these words are drawn, root us in the reality that prayer is connected to real everyday life. These words further remind us that where we live and who we love matters and that this life in the Spirit exists beyond the space between our ears.
While these words may remind us that we have a citizenship in heaven (Phil 3:20), they keep us from borrowing against that hope of heaven without being rooted in and connected to the place we are now. The place where we live, serve and love God through loving our neighbors is that place where we experience God.
Wendell Berry, that champion of the sacredness of place and an enemy of the abstract, reminds us:
Love is never abstract. It does not adhere to the universe or the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, “the least of these my brethren.”
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The tangibility and the otherness of God - two great truths that pull at us all the time.
Are the places there due to our frailty or God’s pleasure or maybe it’s the mixture of both…
Good stuff…