On Sunday mornings during Lent, at 10AM, we will be learning about various prayer practices. We’ll experiment with a different prayer practice each week.
Even if you have a favorite way to pray, trying out new ways of praying can enrich your prayer life, and bring more life and joy into your time with God. Make an effort to come to these sessions.
Sunday, February 22 Praying with the Prayer Book. The Book of Common Prayer is full of resources that can help us to grow, expand, and strengthen our ways of praying. We will learn more about our prayer traditions and how to use The Book of Common Prayer in our daily prayer disciplines.
Sunday, March 1 Lectio Divina is a way of praying by reading scripture prayerfully. Learning about this practice provides not only a new way to pray, but also a way to read scripture that can bring you into God’s presence to rest and to listen for what God is trying to say to you.
Sunday, March 8 We are hoping to have Bishop Goff speak to us about her own practice of prayer, and to answer questions we have about prayer.
Sunday, March 15 The Jesus Prayer. Our Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters find this practice of prayer particularly helpful. The simple practice of this prayer can structure our day by keeping us mindful of God’s constant presence with us. This prayer also opens the way into many physical ways of praying.
Sunday, March 22 Praying with Silence. Silence is hard to find in our culture, and yet it is essential to our spiritual well being and ability to feel God’s presence in our lives. Practicing contemplative prayer can help us to cultivate an inner silence that creates space for God to dwell in us and for us to dwell in God.
Here is Mary Oliver’s poem on prayer, "I happen to be standing":
I don’t know where prayers go,
or what they do.
Do cats pray, while they sleep
half-asleep in the sun?
Does the opossum pray as it
crosses the street?
The sunflowers? The old black oak
growing older every year?
I know I can walk through the world,
along the shore or under the trees,
with my mind filled with things
of little importance, in full
self-attendance. A condition I can’t really
call being alive.
Is a prayer a gift, or a petition,
or does it matter?
The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way.
Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.
While I was thinking this I happened to be standing
just outside my door, with my notebook open,
which is the way I begin every morning.
Then a wren in the privet began to sing.
He was positively drenched in enthusiasm,
I don’t know why. And yet, why not.
I wouldn’t persuade you from whatever you believe
or whatever you don’t. That’s your business.
But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be
if it isn’t a prayer?
So I just listened, my pen in the air.