This weekend, after the holy start to the season on Ash Wednesday, we take a deeper dive into Lent. As I wrote last week, Lent is a time for renewing our commitment to Christ and his beautiful and challenging way. If you haven’t already given any thought to how you will make changes to your daily routines in order to grow closer to God, now is the perfect time. Spiritual disciplines are how we move from where we are now to where we know God wants us to be. They are how we grow more mature as Christians.

One of the most important disciplines of a healthy, mature Christian is an active, regular prayer life. It is hard to have much of a relationship with someone when you’re not conversing, and God is no different. Our thoughts may already be open to God, yet God still longs to know our hearts and minds are truly focused on him. The honest truth is that, despite its centrality to our faith, prayer is not something that comes easily for most of us. It is something that takes effort and commitment. It is beautiful and life-giving, but like many things that are actually good for us, we have to focus on practicing before it ever feels natural.

This Lent at Transfiguration, we’re going to focus on prayer in two big ways. First, we’ll be exploring prayer in our Wednesday Lenten program. We have various guest presenters who will join us these five weeks to talk about how they pray, why they pray, and to help us nurture and develop our own practices of prayer. First up next Wednesday we’ll learn from the Rev. Dr. Paul Bradshaw, one of the world’s leading scholars on Christian liturgy, who will also be teaching a class on Sundays in Lent on the liturgies of Holy Week (he and his wife, Rowena, are also members of Transfiguration). He will talk about how our acts of prayer are joined together with and amplified by Christ’s prayer. I hope you’ll join us for that and all the subsequent weeks, when we’ll explore Jewish practices of prayer, how neo-monastic communities pray, how to pray in the midst of despair and heartache, and how the Lord’s Prayer is a template for a richer prayer life.

That final topic, the Lord’s Prayer, will actually be our second big focus on prayer this Lent. Father Michael, Mother Erin and I will be exploring the Lord’s Prayer in a sermon series in our weekend worship all the way through Palm Sunday. Each week we’ll dissect a phrase from it to try and get to the heart of why Jesus would teach this, of all things, when asked by his disciples to “teach us to pray.” It is the only prayer Episcopalians say in every prayer book service, and the only prayer all Christians share in common, regardless of church or denomination. But how often do we slow down enough to really focus on these words we know by heart, which may have been the first words of prayer we ever memorized?

In order to help us delve more deeply into this simple yet profound prayer, we are going to do something that may make some people uncomfortable…we’re going to change the words. Instead of the traditional language (“Our Father, who art in heaven…”), during Lent we’ll use the alternative form presented in the prayer book (“Our Father in heaven…”). The hope in making this change is to help us pay more careful attention to what we’re saying, and to brush some of the dust off this prayer by saying it with slightly different words.

The point of all this is to help us all pray, more faithfully, more consistently, more earnestly, more honestly. The tiny flickering flame of our faith needs the oxygen that comes when we stand still long enough to speak to God and strain the ears of our hearts to listen for what God has to say to us. See you this weekend.  

-Casey+

The image is Lord’s Prayer, Albani Psalter, from Art in the Christian Tradition, 
Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu