Prayer III

      Last week I wrote a bit about “Penitential prayer.  Another form of prayer that I want to ponder a bit this Lent is “Thanksgiving.”  Recapping: prayers are categorized as “adoration,” “supplication,” “confession” or “repentance,” “intercession,” and “thanksgiving.”  Or less formally I said: “Wow, you are wonderful, God,” “Could you help me/us with this,” “We made mistakes,” “Can you help so-and-so with something,” and “Thank you for what you have done for us” prayers, respectively.

     Prayers of Thanksgiving are pretty simple to grasp, but are sometimes hard to remember to raise.  With but a bit of conscious practice, it can become a wonderful part of a well-rounded prayer life.

      Years ago Robert Fulghum wrote his delightful essay on how wisdom is found on the playground, including “be aware of wonder.”  That is a great start to thankfulness.  In addition to mot of our parents, Presbyterian minister Fred Rogers taught us to say “Please and Thank you.”  That’s the essential next step.  Marveling at something or appreciating something or someone is fine, but you really have to go the next step and say it!  Remember?  What do you say to Grandma for the cookie?”  “Thank you!”  Of course, when it comes to saying thanks to God, you don’t actually have to say something out loud (God can hear your heart say thanks, too).  But it is still good to say thanks to God in the presence of other people in prayers of thanksgiving, whether holding one or two people’s hands or as part of Sunday worship.  It helps us practice being thankful.

      Some people would say that thankfulness rises from a grateful disposition of the heart.  When your approach to the world is of wonder and appreciation, saying thanks bubbles up from within you almost naturally.  But some people believe that you can develop that inner disposition (even if it is not your natural personality) of thanksgiving by intentionally reminding yourself to be thankful.  If you consciously, conscientiously assign yourself finding moments of grace for which to be grateful, after a while you will become a thankful person.  Even if you have to force yourself at first to murmur a prayer of thanks to God every so often, after a while it will become almost second nature, then natural, and soon you will discover that you are an intrinsically thankful soul.  You can act your way into a spiritual practice.

      In general, Lent has an ancient tradition of self discipline and penitence and reflection, but the remainder of this year’s season, I suggest a bit of discipline in being thankful.  A couple of times a day notice something good and give God thanks for it.  Each day find one person to particularly thank God for placing in your path.  Be thankful for some little gracenote you see, like a pretty song or sunset or delight.  But also give God thanks for some little problem, irritation, annoyance, interruption, because getting outside of your immediate reaction sometimes helps you appreciate something you would otherwise dismiss.  Finding something to be grateful about in a problem takes the most discipline of the forms of prayer.  Which is why this is a Lenten practice; it’s not supposed to be easy.  And each day, lift thanksgiving to God simply for the day itself and God’s grace that gets you through it.  Some people do that as a wrap up at the end of the day; others like to set the stage for appreciating the day by making their first prayer in the morning one of thanksgiving.  See which one feels better to you, and maybe, just maybe, you will start a habit that lasts beyond Lent! Give giving thanks a try.

      Prayer works… particularly if you work at it!
                                                                       

                                                                                                  In Christ,
                                                                                             
                                                                                                   David
              

Prayer II

      Last week I wrote a bit about prayer, mostly intercessory prayer.  The other form of prayer that is particularly part of Lent is “Penitential prayer.”  Recapping from last week: prayers are categorized as “adoration,” “supplication,” “confession” or “repentance,” “intercession,” and “thanksgiving.”  Or less formally I said: “Wow, you are wonderful, God,” “Could you help me/us with this,” “We made mistakes,” “Can you help so-and-so with something,” and “Thank you for what you have done for us” prayers, respectively.  Prayers of penitence are a species of confession and repentance.

      Honestly, the whole concept of penitence doesn’t make much sense to many people today.  At most, people may remember “it’s a Lent thing,” or think medieval monks, but for most oldline mainlines or under-sixties, it’s a shrug.  In the scientific age, and with the mindset most of us have, abjectly casting ourselves before God in sorrow and to make deep existential amends is hard to grasp.  If you don’t imagine God as some sort of austere “ancient of days” judging every moment of your life, the idea of a formal apology to God doesn’t make sense.  Or if you don’t have a very personal relationship with Christ in the sense that you imagine a tear of sadness running down Jesus’ face because you hurt his feelings for you, you don’t get the undertones of betrayal at work behind penitence.  If you imagine God as a less personal “entity” or in Paul Tillich’s “ground of being,” this Lenten discipline makes no sense.  So “prayers of penitence” seem quaint and irrelevant to most people I know, since they presuppose breaking God’s laws or God’s heart.

      Still, I’d like you to consider the significant value of those quaint concepts in how that attitude of penitence helps us personally.  It is good for us to undertake the internal spiritual work represented by penitence even if our understanding of the Holy Other is less personifiable.  It is good for us occasionally (like once a year for forty days?) to review our progress through life, assess our results against our deeply held values, recognize our shortcomings against our own hopes, against our community-held norms, against the ideals described by our faith, against the ideals held up in scripture, and to resolve to do better and to map out a path to do a better job loving our neighbors, serving God, and being the best people we can be.  That intention to live better and the sketching of a plan to actually do things better are part of the spiritual discipline that is penitence and not just feeling sorta bad and mumbling an insubstantial “oops, sorry,” toward the sky.  Lent is long enough to diminish bad habits and establish healthy and holy habits-- habits that benefit others and benefit our selves.

      It is on this last point-- follow through-- that most of us must further confess lackluster performance.  Bridging the gap from spiritual to practical, from intention to actual, is the truly difficult part of Lenten disciplines.  It takes work, and most of us are so busy working on other things that minding the state of our soul falls by the wayside.  Yet millennia of Lenten spiritual practice tell us that the effort to mind our spirits and to correlate our behavior with our faith genuinely improves our lives.   When our internal intentions and external expressions line up, we are happier, healthier, more centered, and more able to make a positive difference in the lives around us.  Identifying, confessing, repenting of our shortcomings, resolving to act more congruently with our faith, and making specific concrete actions to demonstrate our faith is a hard but satisfying Lenten practice.  I encourage you to follow that ancient tradition of penitence and re-engagement in the world, even if its taking on only two or one small, simple new habit.  “Taking on” is a far different way to observe Lent than giving up.  Give it a try.

      Prayer works… particularly if you work at it!
                                                                          

                                                                                                In Christ,
                                                                                         
                                                                                                David
                                                  
Texts For Sunday Worship:
    From the Hebrew Bible         Exodus 20:1-17
    From the Epistles                  I Corinthians 1:18-25
    From the Gospels                 John 2:13-22