Tag: Prayer

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Unpacking The Student’s Prayer

Every semester, I start each class by having my students say aloud the following prayer:

O Creator of all things, true source of light and wisdom, origin of all being, graciously let a ray of your light penetrate the darkness of our understanding. Take from us the double darkness in which we have been born, an obscurity of sin and ignorance. Give us a keen understanding, a retentive memory, and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally. Grant us the talent of being exact in our explanations and the ability to express ourselves with thoroughness and charm. Point out the beginning, direct the progress, and help in the completion. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Every semester I find new truth in it. This is what I’ve been telling students about the prayer yesterday and today as the spring semester begins…

Continue reading “Unpacking The Student’s Prayer”
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Two Conversations

In prayer, we have a model for a holy conversation. Calvin writes that in order to experience prayer’s power, we must “have our heart and mind framed as becomes those who are entering into converse with God.” That is, we are prepared not just to share our thanksgiving and petitions with God, but also to listen.

In their book Literature Through the Eyes of Faith, Susan Gallagher and Roger Lundin use a conversation as a model for reading: “Understanding another person or a book is thus not a matter of casting off our own assumptions in order to put on those belonging to someone else. Instead, when we read, we are striving to hear what the other person has said about a subject that matters to us.” That is, we come to a book to have a dialogue, not simply to be passive and be lectured to.

If our traditional model of prayer is a time of simply speaking, our traditional of model of reading is simply listening. Calvin, Gallagher, and Lundin ask us to realize that both practices require an actual dialogue.

In this vein, I am struck by the final metaphor George Herbert uses for prayer in “Prayer (I)”: “something understood.” That word “understood” is not talking about something implicit or a meaning below the surface. The word is Old English in origin, and the “under” actually means “between.” At the heart of our spiritual lives are to be two great loves: for God and for others. We can exercise these loves in conversation–in speaking and listening–through prayer and reading.

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Prayed Over

This afternoon, a colleague took me to The Potter’s Place, a kind of prayer resort near our campus that gives disciples an “environment of quiet solitude where those who come can seek God.”

My colleague described the place as “prayed over” and just from my 45 minutes there with him today, I felt clarity and the ability to articulate some deep concerns in my own family and personal life.

Right now, my colleague is separated from his wife and children who are in Canada as they try to get proper visas for the US. This weekend, he said, he had finally put together and prayed over the beds his daughters will sleep in when they arrive.

The story cut me to the quick. This weekend, I was inside our new, still-under-construction home, and it never occurred to me to pray. As I continued to reflect on the semester, I had to admit that while my classroom was prayed in I couldn’t honestly call it prayed over. I’ve prayed for a place as a kind of metonymy for the people in it, but only as an abstraction.

So this evening, I prayed: “God, thank you for the spaces you’ve provided me to pray and share and serve. I commend to your continual care the home we are renting, the home plan to live in, as well as the office and classrooms I teach in. Remove any impediment in these places that would hinder your spirit’s work. Grant the family and students and neighbors and strangers who come into these spaces to know your love. Fill each of these spaces with your presence, and grant me a servant’s heart so that I may love you and others there.”

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Imperative Prayers

Daniel 9:19 “Lord, listen! Lord, forgive! Lord, hear and act! For your sake, my God, do not delay, because your city and your people bear your Name.”

There are times when it feels like all my academic training has done is ensure that I am never fully convinced of anything, that no matter what my stance on a topic is that I will have failed to cover all my bases.

I feel like this when I pray. God, if it be your will…God in taking into account x, y, and z, please…God, if this and this are fine, then maybe this thing too if I am…
It’s exhausting.

Or worse, I only let these endless caveats fill my mind when I’m outside my devotional space and never confess them to God. It may be helpful to actually ask God what to do with the complications I’m feeling about how and when to extend mercy to a student, the best way to discipline my daughter or how best to talk to my wife.

What a bracing tonic, then, to encounter this passage from Daniel where the prophet uses the imperative in his prayers and calls for God’s immediate action.

What a progression! First that God would listen, then that God would forgive, then that God would act on our behalf…

This is the confidence of a believer certain of his own incapability and equally certain of God’s power.

Not every moment demands this kind of prayer. I pray that I am ready to pray this kind of prayer when the moment comes.

 

 

 

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The Most Important Work I Did Yesterday

Yesterday, I taught Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in my British lit survey and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in my Shakespeare survey. I worked out a two-sided page outline for each class that included performances, class discussions, writing exercises, and engagement with secondary sources. This was not even close to the most important work I did yesterday. Continue reading “The Most Important Work I Did Yesterday”