The resurrection of Jesus sent shockwaves into every molecule of creation, even into this crazy century of ones and zeroes and jet engines. And the first step is to remember-to remember the dream of Eden that shimmers at the edges of things, to remember that the madman on the corner was made in God’s image, to remember that work and play and suffering and celebration are all sentences in a good story being told by God, a story arcing its way to a new creation.īy remembering the holiness of each moment we banish that old Gnostic ghost and thwart its lie that there’s nothing holy about flesh and bone, soil and stone, work and pleasure and all tangible, tactile, visible things. If that’s true, then it is our duty to reclaim the sacredness of our lives, of life itself. Wendell Berry wrote, “There are no unsacred places there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” In that spirit, this new book of prayers, Doug McKelvey’s Every Moment Holy, reminds us that there are no unsacred moments there are only sacred moments and moments we have forgotten are sacred. So while I love those old prayers, the last few years found me wishing I had new ones, prayers that were not just speaking to my current situation, but crying out from within it. Our lives feel at once too frenzied and too mundane, too connected and not connected enough, too demanding and too sedentary. Sometimes I look up from reading those old prayers to find myself in a clamorous culture so far removed from the authors’ experience that their words can feel irrelevant. There are no unsacred places there are only sacred places and desecrated places. ![]() If Cranmer and Baillie and Oswald Chambers and George Herbert and the puritans who wrote The Valley of Vision had so much of value to say, then aren’t there new voices we should pay attention to? Aren’t there new prayers that we need help articulating? While it’s true that our struggles at their core are the same as those of the saints before us, it’s also true that the world of the 21 st century is vastly different than they could have imagined: a world of smartphones and high speed internet and high-tech terrorists and pollution and ubiquitous pornography and selfies and Netflix. The fact is, there have always been poets underfoot. It is through this great cloud of witnesses that the Lord is teaching us to pray. ![]() For many of us, this old thing is a new thing, and that brings with it some discomfort-but also a heightened appreciation for the ancient rhythms of prayer and meditation which have been more or less absent from our experience.Īnd as much as we may need this new (to us) language for prayer, those who grew up with it may also need our fresh enthusiasm for it to remind them what a profound gift it is to speak these ancient tongues, not just to know but to be reminded by all the saints how wide, high, deep and broad is the love of God in Christ. But the fact is, there are millions of Christians the world over, for a host of reasons, who have never engaged in liturgical worship. ![]() If you come from a liturgical tradition you may find it surprising that I was so surprised by all this it may be perfectly obvious to you that there’s a good reason certain prayers have survived for centuries. “King of Creation” by Ned Bustard (copyright 2017) In them I’m confronted by my own darkness-not just of obvious sins, but of the sins that lurk beneath them-as well as the light of God’s great mercy, as the revenant of that Scottish saint takes me by the hand and leads me through the thorny hedges of godly shame and repentance into the wide, golden fields of gratitude for God’s mercy in Christ. Andrew Petersonīaillie’s words lead me gently but firmly into prayers I would not have otherwise thought to pray. While I love those old prayers, the last few years found me wishing I had new ones. Our family tried them hesitantly at first, but soon found ourselves reaching for the book more and more, in the end treasuring it so much that I bought copies and gave them to friends. Baillie’s book is arranged into morning and evening prayers for each day of the month, plus special prayers for Sundays. Growing up in a nondenominational church in the American south, I was suspicious of anything that could be described as liturgical, assuming as many do that prayer should be extemporaneous and “from the heart,” and anything less was in danger of becoming rote at best and ritualistic at worst. The book I received was Scottish minister John Baillie’s A Diary of Private Prayer, and it not only reminds me fondly of those friends, but it represents my earliest realization that I need help praying. The fact that they gave me a book and not a gift card is evidence of our friendship, because my love language is books. Several years ago some good friends gave me a book.
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