Praying With the Sick (Not Just For Them)

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Pastor Foley

Part XII of our series on Healing and Comforting

Now, with these last few blog posts in place, it’s time for us to turn to our overarching subject for the month: What does fixed hour prayer have to do with the Work of Mercy of healing?

Answer: Quite a lot!

In The Whole Life Offering, I write about the origin of the concept of the hospital. You can read about that in more detail there, but let me just summarize what I wrote by sharing that the earliest hospitals were places where mature Christians guided ill Christians—and even ill nonbelievers—through fixed hour prayer as a healing process. These Christians prayed together with patients, not just for them, until they recovered or passed away.

Now, that is revolutionary to our understanding of the purpose of the hospital and what it means to heal! We may have assumed that what early Christians—the founders of the first hospitals—did was to use whatever primitive medicine they knew to cure the bodies of sick people, or to provide them physical care and relief. And indeed, that was part of what happened in hospitals. But as historian Rotha Clay notes, that was the lesser part of what happened in hospitals, not the greater part!

It will be well to make clear what the hospital was, and what it was not. It was an ecclesiastical, not a medical institution. It was for care rather than cure: for the relief of the body, when possible, but pre-eminently for the refreshment of the soul. By manifold religious observances, the staff sought to elevate and discipline character. They endeavored, as the body decayed, to strengthen the soul and prepare it for the future life. Faith and love were more predominant features in hospital life than were skill and science.

Admission to the hospital began not with the completion of insurance paperwork or with an initial diagnosis by an emergency room nurse but rather with the prayerful administration of a solemn oath sworn by each patient. Clay offers one administered at Oakham Hospital as representative:

I, __________ the which am named into a poor man to be resceyued into this Hospital after the forme of the Statutes and ordanacions ordeyned…shall trewly fulfille and obserue all the Statutes…in as moche as yey longen or touchen me to my pour fro hensuorthwardys…without only fraude soe helpe me God and my Holydom and by these holy Euangelies the whiche y touche and ley my honde upon.

Illness, then, was not the occasion for a new kind or brand or type of prayer but rather the occasion for a new reliance on the kind of prayer one ought always to pray and the life of regular daily prayer one ought always to practice. It is no exaggeration to say that the hospitals of thirteen centuries brought healing by teaching the sick to pray and by providing them the framework in which they prayed daily and were enveloped by prayer. Medicine was neither absent nor central. Prayer was all-encompassing, and, through it, patients participated in their own care and the care of others.

Hospitals resounded not only with prayers for the sick but also with the prayers of the sick:

The almsmen of Ewelme after private prayer by their bedside, attended matins and prime soon after 6 a.m., went at 9 a.m. to mass, at 2 p.m. to bedes, at 3 p.m. to evensong and compline. At 6 o’clock the final bidding prayer was said around the founders’ tombs.

What did Christians do when they were sick and went to the hospital? They prayed throughout the day with those who were well. And remember this: They prayed the daily prayers, which meant that they didn’t pray only for—or even primarily for—their own healing.

Now, what should we do when practicing Work of Mercy of healing and comforting? We should pray throughout the day with those who were sick. And remember this: We should pray the daily prayers, which means we don’t pray only for—or even primarily for—others’ healing.

How might a prayer like this read?  Do any come to mind from Scripture or Church History?

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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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