Every Wednesday at 5 PM, we have Evening Prayer at the church. It's not wildly popular—numbers have ranged from a dozen down to one or two and average around six—but this half hour has become extremely important, both to me and to the life of the church.
Because we work from the Prayer Book and the Lectionary, the evening is extremely predictable. With just a little research, I can tell you what the Scriptures will be six months from now. Today, for example, we read about Samuel anointing David and Peter visiting the household of Cornelius. That's one value of a Lectionary: we tend to get trapped in our own little circle of favorite Bible verses and ignore the rest of it.
For a long time I was taught to value spontaneous prayer. Apparently God was pleased with people who are struggling to find words and to remember what to pray about more than he's pleased with people who figure out a prayer in advance (or worse, use a prayer someone else figured out in advance). That value judgment doesn't make much sense. Why not decide in advance what to pray for and what words to use? Again, the format helps because it takes us away from the prayers that repetitively focus on ourselves and our own situations.
Some topics always come up: prayers for our priest and our bishop, prayers for people in the parish who are suffering, prayers for family members.
Personal schedule conflicts will take me away from this discipline for about a month. I'll miss it.
1 comment:
Sometimes we meet on Wednesdays, sometimes on Thursdays (The schedule tends to change with the seasons). It all depends on the changing schedules of the people involved. If you're interested in joining us, look on the Announcements page to learn when we are meeting.
Post a Comment