One for the road...: Practicing prayer or discovering the 'our' in the Divine Hours

The topic of prayer seems to be in the up in the air (and sometime hot air in my case) - my synchroblog post on how do I pray is here.

I was kindly given a complimentary copy of the pocket edition of the ‘divine hours’ to review. I’ve been using the book now in a number of different environments:

in my daily commute on the train
on holiday
as a spiritual resource at home.

Clearly the size of the book and its contents – a week’s worth of the daily offices of the hours - makes it ideal to use on holiday or on a journey. I would recomend the book as something that has helped my own spiritual rhythm and practice and because it has made me aware of my own heritage and how I pray.

Helping me explore how I meditate/pray

For me though using the divine hours for the first time has also been about exploring set times and patterns of prayer/scripture mediation in my life. I am used to pretty much praying what I want/when I want/using my own words and similarly for reading and reflecting on what I want in the bible. This is part of my evangelical/charismatic heritage where there has been a move away from written prayers to extemporising, under the inspiration of the Spirit. It has its drawbacks:

It’s me dependent – when I want/what I want
It can be hard when I don’t want to pray or don’t know how to pray to actually start to pray
It can be all over the shop, random thoughts and rabbit trails, distracting me or distancing me.

On the other hand as I found with the ‘hours’ it can often feel routine, glib, shallow reading written prayers, particularly when I’m half awake or half asleep – is there a process of spiritual formation going on? Hmmm… well more formation than if I look at the reality which is I probably wouldn’t be praying at all if it wasn’t for me trying to follow the office of that part of the day. And at one point when I was feeling particularly crappy with my self actually having something written to follow rather than flailing around in self loathing was really helpful and powerful.

In fact I often found myself engaging in a mixture of the two traditions – inviting the Spirit to fill and lead my times of prayer/reflection and following the prayers whilst being open to further prayer/reflection/direction. Sometimes I’d just enjoy the rhythm of the parts of the office and other times I’d find myself being inspired by one refrain/part, a doorway into the deep.

Praying communally

Perhaps what I enjoyed the most was praying the Lords Prayer so often. It is a prayer I remember having to say as a kid in school in assemblies and when I attended an Anglican church whilst at university (so much so that saying it out loud on my own felt very strange and also it was incredibly hard to remember the words of it with no one else there to prompt). It reminded me of how communal the prayer is – the use of ‘our’ – and that I miss that we so rarely say it together in the evangelical/charismatic/missional churches I have been in. Praying for ‘our’ rather than just for me/mine was a sweet detox from my own self centred prayers and a practice that I would like to continue to incorporate into my spiritual practices.

Your praying practices...

How do you pray...

...In a cupboard? In a community? Set prayers? Set hours/offices? Inspired prayers? What is informing your prayer practice...