Anchor Your Day in the Lord

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Pastor Foley

Part XI of our series on Healing and Comforting

In our last post, we explored how adding fixed prayers at fixed times during the day to our prayer repertoire can help us grow as pray-ers and focus our time on God (not ourselves).

At this point, we may be quietly musing to ourselves, “But I don’t have enough time to pray that much! It’s hard enough to pray before I eat and before my meetings! If I added fixed hour prayer, then…” Then what? Then it would fundamentally change your schedule? Require you to work around him instead of him working around you? Make you cut back on your own activity so that you would have to rely on his more? That’s really the purpose of it, you know!

Or you may be thinking, “But isn’t that legalistic? I mean, praying at the same time every day and praying prayers someone else has written?” Answer: Yes, of course—if we think we’re gaining merit from God by doing it. Truth is, God does it for our sakes, not for his!

It shapes us in his image—and gently stops us from shaping him in ours.

Also, as with every spiritual practice ever undertaken—from Bible reading to church attendance—it can become legalistic if we focus on the practice rather than on God. But that’s no reason not to read the Bible, go to church, or pray the hours. That’s just a reason to not do it on our own. If we undertake these practices with others, and we combine them with ongoing healthy accountability practices like the five questions from John Wesley that we learned about in this post, we can avoid the fall into the pit of legalism and we can grow up spiritually, to the fullness of Christ.

To put it a bit differently, it would be hard to imagine us growing into the fullness of Christ if we don’t undertake spiritual practices like reading the Bible, going to church, and praying the hours.

But “praying the hours” is a broad term. There are a lot of ways to do this. I wouldn’t recommend that you begin by instituting services of worship for yourself at 6, 9, 12, 3, and 6, because then your focus will be on “praying the hours,” not on the God who is the owner of the hours!

Instead, begin by asking yourself: What are the “turning points” of your day where you are likely to turn somewhere else other than the Lord? They may not be 6, 9, 12, 3, and 6. For me, for example, my “turning points” are when I wake up, when I go work out at the YMCA, and when I get ready for bed. During meal times and evening prayer, I’m naturally drawn to focus on God. It’s on these times that I am alone that I recognize the special need—and opportunity—to “pray the hour.”

And “praying the hour” can be as simple as praying a particular Psalm with your family or meal companions (you’re not still eating alone, are you?) from the Bible after each meal that week. In other words, instead of speeding through the book of Psalms and reading a different one each meal, do what we do with the Scriptures in general and focus on going deep with one Psalm for the week.

Or you can try out one of the books on praying the hours. Phyllis Tickle’s are some of the most well-known, and I’ve found them somewhat helpful in the past. I say somewhat because they’re a bit too elaborate for me—a lot more than Psalms or Scripture here; they put in devotional thoughts from different books and lots of responsive liturgies and things. Thus, they’re sometimes confusing, especially if you’re praying on your own. (Another reason to do this with others, I guess.) Church of the Transfiguration in Orleans, Massachusetts does a simpler one called The Little Book of Hours that might be worth looking at.

Another option for praying the hours that I like is the podcast or iPhone app. There are a lot of options available that are free and that download and update automatically so that whenever you check your iPhone, the updated prayer is right there for you. In the podcast format, there are ones where the Psalms are sung, which I enjoy because the melody helps me to hear the Psalms differently and remember them better. The good thing about the podcast format is that you can “pray the hour” as you exercise, for example, or drive in your car.

The version I like the best is called The Divine Office—Liturgy of the Hours of the Roman Catholic Church. Yes, it’s Catholic and I am not. But it’s very focused on the Psalms, which are the same regardless of what branch of the Christian family tree you’re from. This particular podcast does different Psalms and worship services for each of the hours, but what I do is to use a single “invitatory” for the week. An “invitatory” is a Psalm that’s sung by the leader, with an “antiphonal”—a response that’s sung by the congregation, in this case: me!  I like this approach because it’s the way Christians prayed for centuries. Many were illiterate, and there weren’t printed Bibles to hand out to everyone, so the leader would “line out” the congregation’s part for them to memorize, and then they’d sing it as part of the Psalm.

However you choose to “pray the hours” and whichever hours you pray, the point is to anchor your day in the Lord by doing something other than just praying about your own needs at times that your schedule permits.

What are the turning points of your day?  What resource do you think would be helpful in praying during those turning points?

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Why Pray Fixed Prayers?

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Pastor Foley

Part X of our series on Healing and Comforting

As we learned in Friday’s post, Christians have been praying fixed prayers (not ones they came up with) at fixed hours of the day (not whenever they felt like it) for a long, long time.  This practice relates to the Work of Mercy of Healing and Comforting in some very practical ways, but before we get to that, I want to revisit those two questions we concluded Friday’s post with.

First: Why might Christians have prayed psalms and other Scriptures rather than their own extemporaneous prayers during their fixed hour prayer time?

Here’s one possible reason. It comes from David Hegg, who wrote The Obedience Option. He wasn’t writing about fixed hour prayer but rather about our practice of prayer in general. But what he writes sure has a lot of carry-over to this subject:

If we’re honest, we have to admit that most of our praying is self-centered. Even when we start off extolling God and His greatness, it most often is just a show of praise in hopes that God will think good things of us and grant us all of our wants and needs. It’s almost like we need to let God know the day’s announcements and agenda so He can make sure our day goes well. We treat prayer as though it were a fax machine to heaven that puts our list of needs on God’s desk so He can serve us better (p. 123). 

(By the way, a fax machine is a… well, never mind.)

An interesting thing happens when we pray the Psalms rather than our own extemporaneous prayers at certain points in the day: We grow into bigger prayers and into bigger pray-ers! That is, we ensure that our prayers—and us—become bigger than our needs. Prayer becomes not our way of getting God to focus on us, but God’s way of getting us to focus on him. Hold onto that thought, because we’re going to come back to it when we talk about what all of this has to do with the Work of Mercy of Healing and Comforting

This certainly doesn’t mean that praying our own extemporaneous prayers is wrong—by no means. But it does mean that praying only our own extemporaneous prayers probably is. If Jesus and Peter and Paul and Christians down through the Middle Ages prayed a mixture of the Psalms and their own extemporaneous prayers, there’s probably a good reason why. And as we’ve just talked about, the reason likely is that if all we pray is our own prayers, we’re going to remain intensely focused on ourselves.

Second, then: Why did Christians—from Jesus on through the Apostles on through the Middle Ages—pray at specific hours throughout the day?

Just as praying the Psalms reminds us to concern ourselves with God and not just our own needs, praying at set hours every day has a way of reminding us that each part of each day belongs to him.

When we observe fixed hour prayer, we are reminded every few hours that the day itself belongs to him, and our living is intended to be our whole life offering.

“Yes, but isn’t that why we pray before each meal and at the start of each meeting?” Well, yes. But typically when we pray at these times, what’s our focus? It’s on ourselves and our agenda.

And that’s not bad. After all, God cares about us! A lot! So right before a meal or a meeting is a great time for our own extemporaneous prayers.

But if the only times we pray during the day are right before our own activities, well, the day—and the agenda thereof, and the concerns and issues therein—are pretty much set by us.

So rather than thinking of these things as an either/or—“either we pray the Psalms or we pray our own extemporaneous prayers,” “either we pray at fixed hours or we pray before we eat or have a meeting”—we think of them as both/and. We do both, because each has its own particular purpose in growing us to fullness in Christ.

Besides, since our purpose as human beings is to mirror Christ and his goodness to us into the world, we should ask, “Which way did Christ pray?” And the answer is: both ways! He prayed at fixed hours and before each activity. He prayed the Psalms and his own extemporaneous prayers.

If we are seeking to mirror that into the world, then we should go and do likewise.

What objections do you have to praying this way?

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What Does Fixed Prayer Have to do With Healing?

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Pastor Foley

Part IX of our series on Healing and Comforting

We are continuing our focus on hearing and doing the Work of Mercy of healing and comforting. And you may be surprised where that focus takes us today: to the subject of fixed-hour prayer—that is, praying specific prayers at specific hours every day.

What does that have to do with healing? Prepare to be very surprised!

You may be surprised that we’re even talking about fixed hour prayers at all. After all, praying at several set times throughout the day every day is something that today we may associate primarily with Muslims. But it was a core part of not only Jewish practice at the time of Jesus but Christian practice as well, from the birth of our faith on through the middle ages. Here’s an extremely helpful excerpt from The Divine Hours: Prayers for Summertime by Phyllis Tickle:

Centuries before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the Hebrew psalmist wrote that “Seven times a day do I praise you” (Ps. 119:164)….

By the beginning of the common era, Judaism and its adherents, already thoroughly accustomed to fixed hours for prayer, were scattered across the Roman Empire. It was an empire whose efficiency and commerce depended in no small part upon the orderly and organized conduct of each business day. In the cities of the Empire, the forum bell rang the beginning of that day at six o’clock each morning (prime or “first” hour); noted the day’s progress by striking again at nine o’clock (terce or third hour); sounded the lunch break at noon (sext or sixth hour); called citizens back to work by striking at three o’clock (none or ninth hour); and closed the day’s markets by sounding again at six o’clock in the afternoon (vespers or evening hour).

Every part of daily life within Roman culture eventually came, to some greater or lesser extent, to be ordered by the ringing of the forum bells, including Jewish prayer and, by natural extension, Christian prayer as well. The first detailed miracle of the apostolic Church, the healing of the lame man on the Temple steps by Sts. Peter and John (Acts 3:1), occurred when and where it did because two devout Jews (who did not yet know they were Christians as such) were on their way to ninth-hour (three o’clock) prayers. Not many years later, one of the great defining events of Christianity—St. Peter’s vision of the descending sheet filled with both clean and unclean animals—was to occur at noon on a rooftop because he had gone there to observe the sixth-hour prayers….

Such readiness to accommodate circumstance was to become a characteristic of fixed-hour prayer. So too were some of the words Peter must have used. We know, for instance, that from its very earliest days, the Christian community incorporated the Psalms in their prayers (Acts 4:23–30); and the Psalter has remained as the living core of the daily offices ever since….

We know from their writings that by the second and third centuries the great Fathers of the Church—Clement (c. 150–215 a.d.), Origen (c. 185–254 a.d.), Tertullian (c. 160–225 a.d.), etc.—assumed as normative the observance of prayers in the morning and at night as well as the so-called “little hours” of terce, sext, and none…or in modern parlance, nine a.m., noon, and three p.m. These daily prayers were often said or observed alone, though they could be offered by families or in small groups.

Regardless of whether or not the fixed-hour prayers were said alone or in community, however, they were never individualistic in nature. Rather, they employed the time-honored and time-polished prayers and recitations of the faith. Every Christian was to observe the prayers; none was empowered to create them.

So Christians prayed “fixed prayers” (i.e., actual psalms from the Bible rather than their own extemporaneous prayers) at each of the major “turns” in the standard work day—the start of the day, the third hour, lunchtime, the ninth hour, and the close of the work day.

This brings up two questions that we can ponder over the weekend:

1. Why might Christians have prayed psalms and other Scriptures rather than their own extemporaneous prayers during their fixed hour prayer time?

2. Why did Christians—from Jesus on through the Apostles on through the Middle Ages—pray at specific hours throughout the day?

What do you think?

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