The Worship and Prayer Map
In the high vault of heaven, glory to you.
Light has sprung up for the righteous, *
and joyful gladness for those who are truehearted.
Rejoice in the Lord, you righteous, *
and give thanks to his holy Name.
Psalm 97: 11-12 Dominus regnavit
Which of these human longings is primary in your life now?
Longing for differentiation & unity, uniqueness & harmony
Longing for forgiveness and/or sense of alienation, estrangement
Longing for direction, purpose, meaning or sense of being lost, adrift
In a recent Shaping the Parish session many participants said that the third longing was the desire the Holy Spirit was nudging them with. We can hunger and thirst to have a sense of purpose and meaning in life. I wrote about my own experience of that recently - “You were looking for a place to give your heart.” David French has been exploring the difficulties of young men in our society and concluded that the young men are seeking hope and purpose.
The model is a variation on the work of Martin Thornton in Christian Proficiency and Prayer: A New Encounter. The suggestion is that each of the “longings” can be focused and engaged by certain actions. For example, the longing for direction and purpose by silence, intercession, petition, curiosity, inquiry, discernment and making decisions.
The Worship and Prayer map can be used in our reflections. You may want to take a look at the map as you read what follows.
Begin with the top three “longings” - does one draw you more than the others?
Then consider the related acts of engagement and focusing. Do you make use of them? Do you know how to pray in that way?
The map assumes that everything is strengthened when we practice the Threefold Rule of Prayer (Eucharist, Daily Office, and Reflection/personal devotions.
My “longing” has been strongest around “differentiation & unity, uniqueness & harmony.” A friend suggested it might be related to my age, or how I am going about aging. That it was that category that spoke to me became clear when I looked at the related practices: adoration, awe, thanksgiving, oblation and praise. My heart ached for them and was joyful. Yesterday I found myself wasting time (deeply reflecting?) on YouTube. I listened to hymns being sung by the people of Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia. The videos were of processions — including last year’s All Saints Day. Then I watched and listened to this year’s mass on the Feast of the Ascension (of course I did that!).
Adoration, awe, and praise. Holy rhythm and beauty.
Splendor and honor and kingly power *
are yours by right, O Lord our God,
For you created everything that is, *
and by your will they were created and have their being
(A Song to the Lamb Dignus es)
In the years in between my ordination and becoming a parish priest I worked for several ecumenical agencies (an industrial mission, training system, council churches). Sunday would often find me at Saint Marks. The parish is beginning a search for a new rector. There were comments posted on what Saint Marks has meant to some parishioners. This one captured the reason I attended there so many years ago. “The first time I came to Saint Mark's, I knew I was home. I found a community that deeply appreciates the transformative power of liturgy and music. I discovered a diverse congregation committed to serving others and devoted to spirituality.”
So, the longing for unity, awe and adoration has old and deep roots.
Take a look at the Worship and Prayer map. Where are your longings?
Emotional and spiritual maturity
In this module of Shaping the Parish We’ve been exploring our emotional and spiritual maturity as seen in stances we take in relationship to the parish and abilities such as self-awareness, self-control, leadership, and empathy.
In broad terms we suggest dealing with the issue of maturity this way:
Develop your gifts. Build on what you’re good at. Learn to do it even better.
At the same time watch for a tendency to overuse them. At times we use our gifts and strengths in situations that don't call for them.
Be aware of your blind side. Acknowledge it.
And sometimes develop a new strength.
And in all things pray that you may be sustained by the Holy Spirit, and have an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and love God, and the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works. (BCP baptismal rite)
In the parish church
How might the Worship and Prayer map be used in the parish? Let’s use the three purposes of the parish church in organizing this.
The worship of God
The formation of the People of God for the sake of the world
Being a sanctifying presence in the broader community
(From An Energy Not Its Own: Three cycles of parish life and the purposes of the parish church)
A few examples
The worship of God
In our preaching we might take care to address each of the longings. The easiest way may be to focus our attention on the matter twice each year. Two cycles of three sermons each. Each of the three on a different longing. Approach the propers of the day with a particular longing in mind. Such a discipline may help us in two ways. First, it may assist us in not shaping the preaching around the longing that happens to be strongest in our own life at the moment. That's where our training and conversations with parishioners comes into play. We can find language and illustrations of each longing rising from the church’s scriptures, tradition and the life of our parishioners. Second, the exercise of doing it in a very intentional manner, a few times a year, is likely to produce a sensitivity in us that influences our preaching more broadly.
The church’s liturgy expresses all three longings. So here too we might want to take care to not tinker too much with the text as that may be simply using our authority to impose the lens most active in us, upon the entire congregation.
The formation of the People of God for the sake of the world
Offering systematic training in the various practices related to each longing, and the occasional quiet day or retreat, possibly focused around one or the other of the desires, can be a way to both allow a person to explore their own inner life while also developing more capacity to take responsibility for it.
The concern is about increasing the capacity of our baptized members to understand and engage the relationship between spiritual practice and the working of the Holy Spirit. Of course, this will vary, depending on where they fall in their practice of the spiritual life. The Shape of the Parish model can be a useful resource for spiritual guides. The Worship and Prayer map is going to be difficult for some on the outer edges to understand. So we need methods that are likely to be useful to people in different stages of spiritual life. Those who are in the Stable or Progressing part of the Sacramental stage may be helped by learning something as tangible as the Threefold Rule of Prayer or how to be silent. People need a starting place. These methods may also be useful for those in the Experimenting stage. Those who are tentative or immature may be helped — if it is direction they are seeking — by teaching them how to carry others on their heart in prayer, to develop curiosity rather than defensiveness toward those things they don't understand, and allow themselves to believe that they are in a process of discernment in which the Holy Spirit is active.
Being a sanctifying presence in the broader community
It is absolutely essential that we help members understand the organic nature of this sanctifying presence. The primary sanctifying relationship of any parish to the broader community is through the presence of the baptized members scattered into the arenas of daily life—family and friends, workplace, and civic life. To the extent they have become Light through their participation in the worship of God, they will be Light in the life of others. This stance facilitates a sense of human dignity and the importance of each person's life in relation to the world. The emphasis needs to be on the daily life of the baptized. Otherwise, they may understand the church’s sanctifying presence as primarily being some kind of social service agency. Which as valuable as that is, can end up undermining the individual’s sense of purpose. It is Underhill’s point, “They go right down into the mess; and there, right down in the mess, they are able to radiate God because they possess Him.”
Corporate or institutional expressions of the parish as a sanctifying presence can range from church bells ringing three times a day to providing food for the poor to gathering political leaders to reflect on issues of human need and professional ethics. In times of local or national crisis, opening the doors for times of prayer make serve of all three of the longings. A well done Saint Francis Day blessing of the animals, in a local park or the parish garden, may connect to the seeking of harmony and unity in acts of thanksgiving and awe. And a parish service project can express the desire for purpose and direction, especially when we make time for intercession, petition and silence as part of the work.
Aquinas got it right: prayer is ‘loving God in act so that the divine life can communicate itself to us and through us to the world.’ Christian action is not action of which Jesus approves but action that he performs through his incorporated, and therefore prayerful, disciples. (Martin Thornton)
This abides,
Bother Robert, OA
The Feast of The Martyrs of Uganda, 1886