In Constant Prayer (Ancient Practices Series) - Softcover

Benson, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0849946034 ISBN 13: 9780849946035

Verlag: Robert Benson, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

What does it mean to pray without ceasing? Is it really that important to pray as the early Church did?

In this installment of The Ancient Practices series, Robert Benson presents a structure for our lives where we can live in continued awareness of God’s presence and reality. A pattern for worship and prayer that is offered to God at specific times throughout the day, the daily office is meant to be prayed by all the faithful so the Church may be continuous and God’s work in this world may be sustained. Yet it is highly personal too―an anchor between the daily and the divine, the mundane and the marvelous.

Says author Robert Benson, “At some point, high-minded discussion about our life of prayer has to work its way into the dailyness of our lives. At some point, we have to move from talking about prayer to saying our prayers so that the marvelous that is possible has a chance to appear.”

In Constant Prayer is your gateway to deeper communion with God. Expect something new to unfold before you and within you while heeding this ancient call.

The Ancient Practices

There is a hunger in every human heart for connection, primitive and raw, to God. To satisfy it, many are beginning to explore traditional spiritual disciplines used for centuries . . . everything from fixed-hour prayer to fasting to sincere observance of the Sabbath. Compelling and readable, the Ancient Practices series is for every spiritual sojourner, for every Christian seeker who wants more.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Benson is an acclaimed author and retreat leader who writes and speaks on the art and the practicality of living a more contemplative and prayerful life in the modern world. He has published more than a dozen books about the search for and the discovery of the sacred in the midst of our everyday lives. His works include Between the Dreaming and the Coming True, Living Prayer and Digging In: Tending to Life in Your Own Backyard. His writing ranges from books on prayer and spirituality to travel and gardening to baseball and the Rule of St. Benedict. Benson's writing has been critically acclaimed in publications from the New York Times to USA Today toSpirituality & Health to the American Benedictine Review. He is an alumnus of The Academy for Spiritual Formation, a member of The Friends of Silence & of the Poor, and was recently named a Living Spiritual Teacher by Spirituality&Practice.com.

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In Constant Prayer

By Robert Benson

Thomas Nelson

Copyright © 2008 Robert Benson
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8499-4603-5

Contents

Foreword, ix, 
1. One True Thing, 1, 
2. Ancient Prayer for the Ancient of Days, 15, 
3. The Daily of the Divine Office, 27, 
4. Praying Upside Down, 43, 
5. The Divine of the Daily Office, 59, 
6. The Real Currency of Our Age, 75, 
7. Lost Between the Daily and the Divine, 91, 
8. Praying Alone Together, 105, 
9. An Invisible Reality, 121, 
10. The Great River of Prayer, 139, 
Author's Note, 151, 
Appendix A: Sample Office: Morning Prayer, 153, 
Appendix B: Additional Resources, 158, 
Study Guide, 162, 
Glossary, 170, 
About the Author, 173, 

CHAPTER 1

ONE TRUE THING

Tell them what you have seen and heard. —Jesus of Nazareth

We believe that the divine presence is everywhere.... But beyond the least doubt we should believe this to be especially true when we celebrate the divine office. —The Rule of Saint Benedict

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you are going no matter how you live, cannot you part. —Annie Dillard

I have a friend named Bettie who lives in Alabama. I pray for Bettie by name a lot of days, not because I think that she needs my prayers, but because I want to be sure God remembers that I am a friend of Bettie's.

A priest told me once that he did not think God had favorites. But, he told me, with a twinkle in his eye, he is pretty sure God has special friends. If that is true, then Bettie may well be one of them.

If I could pray like Bettie, I would not likely be writing this book about these things.

This is a book about the most ancient practice of Christian prayer, a way of prayer known as the daily office. It is known by other names as well—the liturgy of the hours, fixed-hour prayer, the divine office, the canonical hours, the divine hours, daily prayer. Its roots are firmly planted in the early Church, and it has become, in recent years, the focus of a great deal of interest among people who grew up in Christian traditions in which such a way of prayer was not a part of their ongoing prayer life.

That was certainly true for me. I stumbled into the daily office when I was almost forty years old. And I have never quite recovered.

I spent two years as part of a community of sixty-five people known as the Academy for Spiritual Formation. Our Academy met for a week each quarter. We spent our days learning about the history and traditions of Christian prayer and how to transpose some of that wisdom and practice into the busy and noisy lives of us modern folks.

I finished the Academy some fifteen years ago now. The world of prayer and contemplation to which the Academy introduced me still draws me deeply, and I am still fooling with all of this, still convinced that there are deep truths buried here if I can just be smart enough or patient enough or devout enough to dig them out.

I am not much holier than I was before I began, but I am still trying nonetheless.

During those weeks in the Academy, each day would begin before breakfast with morning prayer at seven. We would say vespers together and take Holy Communion together as the sun was going down and dinner was being prepared. The day would end with night prayer at nine thirty—the offering of confessions and praise—completing our day's journey and taking us into the Great Silence, where we slept and waited for the whispering of the Voice over the dark and the void, waited for God to say, "Let there be light" again.

I wish I were poet enough to take you back there with me.

We said our prayers together in this great room, large enough to hold four hundred people if the chairs were in rows the way they set them for camp meetings. The room was paneled in old pine with great beams above us. It was the way all old campground chapels should be. The place has been there since the '30s, I think. As my father might say, there was laughter in those walls—and there were tears and prayers and praises and hymns and shouts and sorrows in there too. I used to sit in there at the altar for hours some nights.

For the Academy, the chairs were arranged in a circle of two rows, with an opening at one end for the procession of the candle or the gifts for the Table. At the other end was the Table itself. No matter where you sat, you were always looking into the faces of your fellow pilgrims. No small comfort, that.

I cannot fully express what it meant to me to say the office twenty times in a week with those brothers and sisters. If I sit still enough just now, though, I can still hear them singing the psalms and saying the Gloria, making their way through the liturgy together with care and joy. I can hear the silences, even.

Bettie was a part of the same community. At the end of each day, we would meet in small groups to process the day's information and to encourage one another in the new bits and pieces of our spiritual journey. Then we would share prayer requests and pray around the circle.

Bettie would say something like, "Jesus, help Alan's back to feel better in the morning," and in the morning Alan's back would feel better.

Or she'd say, "Jesus, help Robert not to worry," and the next day I would not be so anxious.

One day, after six days of torrential rain, she said, "Jesus, we need good weather tomorrow for traveling home," and the rain stopped before any of us had time to say amen. I swear it did, and I have witnesses.

Over the years, whenever something untoward or difficult would happen to one of us in the group, someone would call Bettie to tell her so she could pray for us. Invariably, she always knew about it before anyone called her. It was among the most powerful things I have ever seen. It was also a little scary sometimes.

There are those among us for whom the life of prayer, a life of close communion with God, a life in which there is a simple faith and a simple conversation that goes on with the One who made us, takes place in an extraordinary way. There is no doubt about that. There are one or two folks like that in your church as well. They are not always the ones who are asked to pray in public, but they are the ones you call when something terrible has happened.

If you are one of those people, I may well have very little, if anything, to teach you about prayer. Except to say, of course, that my back is sore and I am worried about some of the stuff I am saying here and I have not seen the weather forecast but I could use a few sunny days if it is not too much trouble.

If you are one of those people, you know it. And you know that most of what I have to say about prayer may have meaning only for the rest of us.

I grew up in a church crowd where the Bettie way of talking with God was expected of all of us all of the time. Even those of us who were not like Bettie at all.

So I would pray like Bettie, and nobody's back ever got better, and the rain did not stop. The problems never got solved, the fears never went away, and the healing I prayed for so fervently never came. I began to believe that prayer would not make any difference, or it would not make any difference if I was the one doing the praying. For a while I believed that I just needed to pray louder or shed more tears....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Robert Benson
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0849946034
• ISBN 13: 9780849946035
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: HarperCollins Publishers Ireland; enquiries@harpercollins.ie; ; Macken House 39/40 Mayor Street Upper; Dublin; D01 C9W8; Irland