The first spiritual discipline I have worked at is prayer. I began with the assumption or conviction that prayer should be regular and as fixed in time as possible. I’m not sure what gave me this idea at the time, but I was sure that if Christian devotion meant anything it involved somehow submitting oneself to God, and submission can not happen in prayer if I only pray when and how I feel like it.
I came to understand it later in Benedictine terms as what Anthony Damron, O.S.B. calls “the sanctification of time.” He goes on to write that formal prayers are necessary because relying on spontaneous prayer would be too irregular and thus not useful for growth while also recognizing formal prayers have dangers too, that of becoming incantation. (Singing God’s Praises p. 43)
My attempts at actually going about praying, like I said, have been very mixed. I wanted a prayer regimen that was based in a book that was fairly easy to follow, that heavily incorporated the psalms, and that involved at least a few readings or offices a day. I leafed through the Book of Common Prayer a few times, but didn’t really get how it worked and didn’t know how to figure it out. (Outside the Abbey, I’ve only been to an Episcopal service a handful of times and don’t really know very many Episcopalians.) I came across a new prayer compilation, I think just about three years ago, still in the first year of my conversion, called The Divine Hours edited by Phyllis Tickle. It included four Offices a day, each with one complete psalm, a Psalm fragment repeated a few times throughout, some Collects from the BCP, a paragraph reading of scripture, the Gloria which I then recognized (this was also probably right about the time that I was brought to the Abbey for the first time), and also some other religious poetry or hymns.
When I started, I was very committed and read all four offices, one in the morning, one at lunch, then next right after work was through for the day and last, right before bed. I’m not sure how long I kept that up, but I think it was for a few months. Then I stopped for a few months after becoming disillusioned. One problem was that the book was rather large and thus a pain to haul back and forth to work. I then started back up for a little while doing all four, but soon left that off for an idea of my own devising. I continued using the prayer book for morning and evening prayers. During the day, I selected and memorized five Collects from the BCP to recite in place of a longer Office. The goal was to have a total of seven periods of the day, and I ordered them as made best sense for the rhythm of a workday. I couldn’t do them at fixed times, since my schedule varied, and I didn’t have five events to base them on, like meals and so forth. My solution was to recite them at fixed intervals, an amount of time that spread them roughly evenly between waking and sleeping (I think it was about every two and a quarter or two and a half hours.) I procured a watch that had an automatically resetting timer that also had a vibrate function, whenever it went off, the push of one button turned it off and started the countdown again. Wherever I was during the day, I would get a vibration every two and a half or so hours that no one else could usually notice, then at the next available moment recite the prayer mentally or verbally, depending on the setting.
I was pretty proud of my solution because I felt it suited my goals and matched the needs of my schedule and abilities. I liked the idea of having the simple memorized prayers and their carrying me through the day, so that even if I worked late, or ate lunch early, the cycle kept me aware of my relative position in the day. I liked the idea of a call to prayer; my little watch mirroring a monastary’s bell. Of course, I chose the number seven also to duplicate a monastic day’s cycle even if my ‘Little Hours’ were very little, about thirty seconds.
Most of all, I wanted something on a fixed schedule (intervals being an adequate substitute for fixed times in my mind) because I was drawn to the idea of making prayer a kind of seasoning spread throughout the day, acting as a reminder that everything I was doing during the day should be done with an awareness of God and as an offering to God. Since the interval model could and did catch me literally doing anything and everything in my day it held the opportunity of drawing me out of my indifference and redirecting me to my present task with greater mindfulness. Well that was the goal.
My actual performance of the discipline of prayer seems to swing from extreme to extreme. Either I am praying a lot and wondering why, or praying very little and wishing I was. (I try to get insight into this wishing but it's slippery. I don't think it's just guilt, which would obviously not be a good motivation. But just as I'm not always sure that my prayers are genuine, I'm not even sure that my desire for genuine prayer is genuine.)
These days have been very crazy: a new baby, an illness, just all around unpredictable schedules. But probably none of that is really to blame. I've just been going through a period of low motivation the last few months. These things seem to go in cycles for me. A good day for me lately has meant just a brief prayer before bed, read from my prayer book, or not, depending on how late I stay up and when my daughter wakes up.
There are a few other practices I've experimented with around the general topic of prayer, the first was the rosary I bought sometime in the first year of my conversion. Now I wasn’t very serious about intending to use it, I was even a little wary of buying it, seeming as it did to fit into that old tendency of mine to focus on accessorizing hobbies over the hobbies themselves. I was at the store with my wife who wanted to buy a rosary because she had been studying it a bit and I just got one for the heck of it too. In an interesting foreshadowing, the rosary I bought, selected based on purely aesthetic bases – it looked fairly solid and simple – turned out to be a Benedictine one, having Benedict’s cross embedded in the crucifix and a Benedictine medal at the joining. I never really did much with it, but I had never really intended to. For a time I used it to do repetitions of the Jesus prayer punctuated by the Gloria and then an Our Father at the end. I never found this avenue very fruitful – I think I was too self-conscious about it – but I haven’t ruled out trying to use it again.I’ve many times read or heard someone talking up the benefits of scripture memorization and whenever I do, it strikes me as just the perfect thing to do. The first place to start was obviously the Psalms which over a few months I memorized eight of, but I also memorized, as prayers, a few religious poems: one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, A Dirge Without Music by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and the first of the Eleven Verses to the Lord by John Berryman, then also some non-religious poetry. I did the majority of this about two years ago. I worked on them, and then employed them, going for long walks around the neighborhood with my then infant daughter on my shoulder. I have no good reason for having stopped this exercise. I found it very helpful to be able to call up these words, and the work of memorizing I didn’t find that difficult. I still retain what I had though, or if one Psalm fades if I haven’t recited it in a while, I can usually recall it with a quick reading or two. I know this is a practice I need to return to.
To aid in the use of Psalms in prayer, either memorized or as encountered in prayer books, I wanted to study them. Over the past few years I’ve read a handful of small studies: Bonhoeffer’s Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Church, Breuggemann’s Spirituality of the Psalms, C.S. Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms, and I’m currently reading James W. Sire’s Learning to Pray Through the Psalms. In general I’ve found this study useful and definitely need to do more of it.
I’ve experimented with fasting for the last three Lenten periods. The first year I did a kind of sunup to sundown fast, eating a small breakfast, a regular dinner and nothing in between for most of Lent other than Sundays. The past two years I started with 24-hour fasts, having just a small lunch each day, then building toward longer fasts – 36, then 48, then 72 hours - at the end of the week and eating normally, perhaps more than normally - feasting, on Sundays.
I tried to talk about it as little as possible (Jesus' explicit instructions right?) but there were immediate and some extended family that had to know, the latter because we were living with them. Mostly it just felt kind of embarrassing to own up to. It wasn’t the kind of thing I was raised with. There were certain insights I was looking for or expecting based on what I had read about the discipline. I was hoping at the very least for a kind of increased awareness of my own weakness and an openness to God. I may have gotten that but it was mixed with the self-certainty that I could do this, could make it through x number of hours or days without food. C.S. Lewis writes that while self-mastery is the goal, one of the inherent dangers of will-focused disciplines like fasting is pride. What you could really call the pride at risk here is an idolatry of the will.
Then again there were days that were utterly humiliating, where I didn’t do what I had told myself to, where I came home at the end of the day depressed and tired and just sat and snacked. Emotional eating I’ve heard this called. Maybe seeing that this was obviously what I was doing on a ‘failed’ fast day was itself instructive in that it pointed to what I was probably doing during normal eating periods. Be that as it may, it still often felt like my ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ were counted for the wrong reasons.
I believe strongly that fasting is something that Christians are called to but at the same time I sometimes feel it is something that I have absolutely no business dabbling with. Maybe it's just the lack of guidance. But maybe it's my doubting my own faith that causes me to feel conflicted about my experience with such disciplines.
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