Prayer--One for All,All for One

I didn't realize I'd missed a week! Here are two blogs for the price of one!

Thoughts from chapter three in Joan Chittister’s The Monastery of the Soul.

This week our little group read chapter three. One of the things this chapter invites us to consider is a part of the Rule of Benedict that says,” Perform the Opus Dei [the work of God] where you are. . . Those on a journey are not to omit the prescribed hours [of prayer] but to observe them as best they can.”

In today’s multicultural world, this rule brings to my mind the image of devout Muslims stretching out their prayer rugs no matter where they are—in malls, in airports—and praying at the prescribed times. No matter what one thinks of Islam (which means “submission”) or of Muslims (that means “submitted ones”) I think one can almost envy the sense of unity that must bring—knowing that one is praying with thousands—millions!—of others at that very moment.

Chittister expands on this part of the rule this way:

We are to pray by ourselves,

if necessary, “as best we can,”

but in the way

the community, as community, is praying,

so that our hearts and minds

stay in the place

where our bodies cannot now be.

One of the commitments our group made to each other the first time we met is that each morning we would pray for ourselves and our needs, each evening for the world and its needs, but each day at noon, we would pray for each of our group by name. In particular, we were to pray that each one would “listen with the ear of the heart.”

This week, our group leader asked for specific feelings about how this discipline of prayer is affecting us. Some spoke of difficulty in praying for our own selves. Others said that was the easy part.  Many say that remembering right at noon is hard, but that the prayer itself is blessing them. (I can only say, phone alarms are wonderful things!)

For myself, something new had happened during this past week. I was having no difficulty praying at noon (thanks to the phone) and I knew each person enough to ask for specific things for that person besides the listening with the ear of the heart. Each week I’d learn a little more and be able to pray more intelligently. But it was only last week, oddly, that it suddenly occurred to me that I was being prayed for by everyone else at (somewhere near) that same moment!

I don’t know why I hadn’t real-ized that. (Made it real to myself, that is. Did you ever take that word apart? Interesting!) It was a very comforting and illuminating sensation. I was being held, not just in the Everlasting Arms, but in the arms of my friends, held up to God, “held in the light,” as the Friends like to say.  It made for oneness. Like the Muslims. Like the Benedictines.

Like the Body of Christ.