Praying…at home…

March 19, 2007

Sunday I led the third of four Lenten series events at the church. We’ve been looking at Prayer: prayer in the bible, obstacles to prayer, and exploring together various ways to pray. Jeff and I have been trying to balance corporate and individual prayer as well as the various types of prayer (some people use ACTS as a way of remembering that: Adoration (or praise of God); Confession (recognizing the ways we ‘miss the mark’ and asking for ways to make it right); Thanksgiving (celebration!); and Supplication (or asking God for something…). We’ve also been working to balance prayers for ourselves and prayers for others.

For this session, I started with the question: What is Prayer? Conversation. Connection. My best definition: an authentic expression of the soul directed towards God. And I offered as a way to orient us a gathering song (think modern club music) from the Book of Uncommon Prayer. The point was to stress that authentic expression of the soul varies from person to person, and what works as prayer for some of us might not work for others.

We had three stations: the five-finger prayer, where we had people use crayons to outline their hands and then write over each finger the prayers suggested for that digit; prayer books and the daily office, to explore using a set liturgy or the words of others in our prayer life, and how to make that our own; and a form of the lectio divina as a way of seeing readings scripture as prayer, and even some discussion of doing that in groups. For the latter two, I suggested that the use of the daily lectionary might be helpful to some (see the PCUSA page on the daily lectionary and related devotional materials, or just the daily lectionary texts themselves.)

It was a good session. Maybe you can join us for our last one this coming Sunday…

Posted in Christian Education, Faith