Prayers for Worship

Each Sunday, SMC's worship service has a time for "Prayers of the People." Someone, usually a pastor or a person on the pastoral care team, leads the congregation in prayer. Often concerns for people in the congregation are mentioned, and there's usually a time for the people to voice their prayers in a word or phrase if they so choose. Today was my Sunday to lead these prayers, which sent me into a small crisis.

What is prayer? Is God an agent in prayer? Who or what is God? Are we agents in prayer? Is prayer just a way to make us feel better? Why do we close our eyes and bow our heads to pray? And so on and so on. I will spare you my own radical, even sacriligious understandings of prayer and simply say that with a huge pep talk from Jamie, I came up with a time of sorts in which I retained my theological integrity while (at least I hope) speaking words that resonated with those who have more "traditional" understandings of prayer. This all thanks to Rainer Maria Rilke, who I really should learn more about since I invoke his words semi-frequently.

Your thoughts about prayer? I'd love to know, so please share if you have anything worked out for yourself...

July 13, 2008 - SMC Prayers

Our existence here in community is a form of prayer in and of itself. When we notice that God is round about us, that God is the ground of our being, our every word and expression, indeed our every breath is prayer. I will pray the words of a Rainer Maria Rilke poem and begin a time for spoken or unspoken prayer. I will close our communal prayers with another Rilke poem. Let us take this time to notice our God.

I.45

You come and go. The doors swing closed
ever more gently, almost without a shudder.
Of all who move through the quiet houses,
you are the quietest.

We become so accustomed to you,
we no longer look up
when your shadow falls over the book we are reading
and makes it glow. For all things
sing you: at times
we just hear them more clearly

Often when I imagine you
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer
and I am dark, I am forest.

You are a wheel at which I stand,
whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up,
revolve me nearer to the center.
Then all the work I put my hand to
widens from turn to turn.

...

II.22

You are the future,
the red sky before sunrise
over the fields of time.

You are the cock’s crow when night is done,
you are the dew and the bells of matins,
maiden, stranger, mother, death.

You create yourself in ever-changing shapes
that rise from the stuff of our days –
unsung, unmourned, undescribed,
like a forest we never knew.

You are the deep innerness of all things,
the last word that can never be spoken.
To each of us you reveal yourself differently:
to the ship as a coastline, to the shore as a ship.


(Both English translations from Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God)