Christian's Spirituality

From Active to Contemplative (Part 2)

Sixth Wednesday of Lent

    "April is the cruellest month, breeding

      Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

      Memory and desire.

                                       --T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

    These words of my favorite poet came to my mind last night during dinner, while I was realizing that I needed to turn to the next page on the wall calendar. Eliot published the poem in 1922, although he had been working on it a long time. My guess was that he started in 1920, 100 years ago. Little could he have known how prophetic it would be of this, our own new month. This will be our cruellest month since September, 2001. We will be mixing our memories of our good months before this one with our desire for the months to come, when our plague is gone.

   Since we tend to be bombarded with Coronovirus news all day long, I intend for my blog to be something of a respite from it. We each do need to put it at the top of our prayer lists.

   

   These next few blogs will be something of an effort to explain the contemplative life. I am no expert, but I do read a lot. Some of this will just be explaining some of the terms contemplatives use for the things they do. Among those terms are:

The Daily Office

Lectio Divina

Centering Prayer

Contemplative Prayer

The Daily Examen

Holy Orders

The Order of St. Luke

    I won't be giving a detailed examination of each of these terms, but will be noting them as these days proceed. The Daily Office is a set of prayers for different times of the day. The most basic of these are Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer. Others are Mid-Day Prayer and Compline. Compline is a brief service before bed. Roman Catholics and Anglicans have some additional prayers and some different names for the prayers. 

    Although John Wesley regularly practiced the Daily Office, the practice never became a significant part of Methodist spiritual life in America. It is experiencing something of a reawakening today. The United Methodist Hymnal contains brief services, outlines really, of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer (pp. 876-879). The United Methodist Book of Worship also includes Mid-Day Prayer and Night Prayer (Compline). I don't find these resources to be adequate for a good practice of the Daily Office. More and more United Methodist pastors are praying the Daily Office (and not a few laypeople as well), but most use other resources.  There are many versions of the Daily Office. The one that I suspect is most used by Protestant clergy is that of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. The one that I use is that of the Order of St. Luke, of which I am a member.  For Lent this year Justin has me using Common Prayer: a Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals.

    Let me say that I am not particularly advocating that we all pray the Daily Office. While it is pretty much a requirement for contemplatives, and highly recommended for clergy, I see it as just a possible option for laypeople. I do think, however, that we would all do well to know what it is. 

     Don't worry, I won't be spending whole blog going through this list of terms above. In the net blog, we'll talk about the most famous contemplative of the twentieth century, and we'll also have a movie review. Also, I will be returning in a few days to our Omega class series on canon, with books that didn't make it into the canon.

Faithfully,

Christian

P.S. Gold star to the first reader who identifies the most famous contemplative of of the 20th century.