Sabbath 11: Let it be

Sabbath 11: links to Tripp's post, Meeegan's post

I think Muller's main point for this chapter is really made in the first two paragraphs, which I summarize this way:

part of the wisdom of the Jewish Sabbath is that it begins at sundown. We don't stop working on the sabbath day when we are finished with a project, we don't stop when we're done returning our phone calls, we don't stop when our email box is empty, instead, we stop when it's time to stop.

If we refuse rest until we are finished, we will never rest until we die. Sabbath dissolves the artificial urgency of our days, because it liberates us from the need to be finished.

For this week's exercise, Muller tells a story about praying the angelus prayer at noon on a campus of people who all stopped and prayed together for just a moment. He then goes on to suggest "prayer" while being maddeningly unspecific about how or when or why. (I'm coming to realize this as Muller's style.) I'll admit to a little twinge of disappointment, because I've enjoyed his suggestions that fall outside of my normal routine.

My thoughts immediately went in the direction of his 'praying the angelus' story. I don't live, and I've never lived, in a society where the church bells all ring at noon or the voice of the muadhan calls the people to prayer five times a day. But my faith tradition does hold on to a tiny portion of that culture.

One of the roots of the Anglican tradition goes back to the monasteries, and the rule of St. Benedict, which calls for a careful balance between work, rest, and prayer. Benedictine monks would gather for prayer many times a day in the monasteries, and/or do individual prayer at specific hours. I've always sort of admired from afar the concept of a community who agrees to gather for prayer day in, day out, good weather and bad, rain or shine. I've heard it described as the breath of the community--a rhythmic exercise that draws the people in and sends them out, and is the source of life of the community.

In the monastic tradition, some of the prayer hours included the middle of the night, mid-morning, noon, late evening... I've only tried to follow that discipline once, at the suggestion of my spiritual director, and couldn't get into stride. Maybe it was that I was doing it by myself. Setting an alarm clock to remind me of prayer hours (given my hectic schedule at the time) never really worked, and I was tired all the time from changing my schedule around, so I gave it up after a couple of weeks.

When Thomas Cranmer wrote the first English prayer book, he gathered the tradition of the multiple services of monastic prayers (formerly in Latin) into a smaller number of daily offices (in English). They survive in today's version of The Book of Common Prayer as morning prayer, evening prayer, noonday prayer, and compline.

The closest I've ever come to living in that sort of intentional community was during seminary, when the daily offices were observed. I was actually excited, when I arrived, about the possibility of living with an intentionally praying community for a few years. But I lived off campus, which made it really hard to attend early and late prayers, and our services in the chapel....well, um.... had a tendency to be three times as overblown as they needed to be. In the words of one of my favorite professors, who shall remain nameless: "good Lord, every day is Sunday, and every thursday feels like Easter!" So chapel became a chore far more often than I'd like to admit. But now I'm griping about the practice of the praying life of the community in a specific place, which is a different thing than the offices themselves.

For the non-Episcopalians (or Anglophiles), here's the rough outline of "Daily Morning Prayer:"

• confession of sin
• psalms and readings from scripture
• Apostles' Creed (basic statement of belief, said together)
• Lord's Prayer ("Our Father...")
• prayers collecting the cares and concerns of the community
• general thanksgiving, collecting the joys and gratitude of the community

While I won't lie and say that I pray the whole daily office...um, daily, I do manage to use one of the services as a form of prayer (either personal or corporate prayer) more days than not. We actually offer morning prayer as one of our regular services at St. Thomas on Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 9:30. It mostly happens through the gentle faithfulness of one of our saints, who leads the service. I join him when I can, and pray one of the offices (usually morning prayer or compline) using a daily office book given to me as a gift by one of my Christian friends.