Facets of Prayer in a Pastorate
| Roy Hange
I have now come to see prayer, public and private, as spiritual food. Praying is a life-giving process through which the Lord does not take our souls but remakes them. In this transformation of heart and spirit, we find new ways to stand before the Holy One as co-creators and as brothers and sisters of Christ.
Facets of corporate prayerOur congregation has incorporated various ritual prayers into our regular Sunday worship order. We all say the Lord’s Prayer at the end of the pastoral prayer. A great and unexpected blessing is the pleasure of hearing the children’s voices praying with vigor at these moments. When the offering is brought forward, we all sing, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow” (OLD HUNDREDTH) as a prayer that frames our giving within a greater good. When people leave our church or are sent in mission or service, they are invited to stand at the front of the church, hear a word of affirmation or sending from the pastors, share about what is next, and receive a sung blessing, “The Lord lift you up,” 1 from the congregation. We have found that this sung prayer has ritual power in the way it invites those leaving to move—with blessing foremost—from the past through the present into the unknown future. The prayer honors the relationship between those sent and those sending, enables us to say farewell, and places our fears of the new in a context of grace and benediction.
The grieving and healing we experience in this communion worship are a foretaste of the new heaven and new earth envisioned in Revelation 21:1-4, in which God is with God’s people, and death and mourning and crying and pain are no more. We read this promise as part of the service of anointing, during which those who remain in their seats identify and feel a profound resonance with those who come forward to be anointed for healing. These and other forms of prayer in congregational worship (including invocations, prayers of confession, and pastoral prayers) function as encounters with the holy and the other within, beside, and beyond. The glimmering facet of corporate prayer is its capacity to refocus and re-form the spiritual and moral vision of a group in a way that transforms relationships. I repeatedly structure our prayer to flow in these three basic movements: from the past in the power of remembering, to the present as a time of transformation of self or relationship, to the future as our imagination and vision are joined with the way of Christ. Through our praying we then begin to see what could yet be, in our lives and in situations we confront. Facets of personal prayerMy own journey with prayer has taken me down many paths. I have done contemplative or listening prayer, intercessory prayer, and phrasal prayer. In the last number of years I have moved from silently repeating the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”) to repeating the Sanctus:
I say the Sanctus through six breaths, and with the seventh breath, I rest. During the phrase “heaven and earth are full of your glory,” I look around me for new aspects of that glory in creation, in others, and in myself. The focus of this prayer is on glory, not on sin. This prayer suits my temperament, and especially addresses my need to be less pessimistic and more hopeful. Many people have given up on praying because the dominant form of prayer they were taught does not fit their temperament. I have found Prayer and Temperament: Different Prayer Forms for Different Personality Types, by Chester Michael and Marie Norrisey, helpful to me and to others with whom I have walked. 2 Some spiritually hungry Christians turn toward eastern religions that offer other forms of prayer, without realizing that Christian tradition offers many ways to pray that Protestantism in the West and Mennonites in particular have not focused on. Prayer for social change, prayer for individual healingTwo additional dimensions of prayer in my pastorate have developed in response to two books on prayer. In Claiming All Things: Prayer, Discernment, and Ritual for Social Change, George McClain looks beyond the domestication of prayer toward socially transformative prayer. 3 In Consenting to Grace: An Introduction to Gestalt Pastoral Care, Tilda Norberg explores facets of healing prayer that are informed by the disciplines of psychology and therapy, yet move beyond these areas to work at emotional and spiritual transformation rooted in prayer. 4 In a small group setting, a ritual Norberg developed has been especially meaningful for half a dozen people in our congregation; some have described this prayer for individual healing as life changing. The prayer ritual names the lies that have been part of a person’s formation and ritually replaces those lies with new truths spoken to the person by the circle of those gathered to pray. Our experience of these rituals has been a further manifestation of the power of prayer to bring personal and corporate transformation. Reprinted, by permission of the publisher, from Vision: A Journal for Church Notes
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My earliest images of prayer are associated with life, death, and silent subservience. Our family said prayers before life-sustaining meals, and each day ended with the bedtime prayer that concludes, “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” During prayer in corporate worship we sat in bowed stillness, listening as the leader spoke.