Cathedral Quarterly for Lent 2021: Prayer

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C AT H E D R A L Q U A R T E R L Y s LENT 2021

Prayer

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S S 3 s

A Letter from the Dean The Very Reverend Kate Moorehead S 7 s

Prayer and Our Common Life The Reverend Dr. Bob Dannals S 11 s

Zoom-Inspired Prayers The Reverend Dr. Linda Privitera S 15 s

Making the House Ready for the Lord Mary Oliver S 17 s

The Work Is Very Near You The Reverend Christopher Martin S 23 s

The Practice of Prayer The Reverend Dr. Margaret Guenther

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A LETTER FROM THE DEAN

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This time of pandemic has been a fertile time in so many ways.

Our Staff and Vestry have worked hard to increase our digital communication with you, and we have embraced new technologies with speed. As a result, the function and purpose of this Quarterly has been freed to become more scholarly. This is a gift from God to us, for we now no longer need to include news in this publication.

T H I S C AT H E D R A L Q U A R T E R LY C A N B E C O M E A T O O L F O R F O R M AT I O N A N D G R O W T H , A R I C H S C H O L A R LY J O U R N A L F O R Y O U R R E F L E C T I O N A N D C O N T E M P L AT I O N .

The theme of the next 18 months here at the Cathedral is Vital Signs.

I believe that the spiritual life greatly resembles the physical life. We have vital signs when it comes to measuring the health of our physical bodies, and COVID has taught us to pay close attention to these vital signs. The spiritual life has vital signs too. It is equally important that we pay attention to those signs, as they tell us about the health of our relationship with God. What are the vital signs of the spiritual life? They are seven: Prayer, Giving, Serving, Learning, Worship, Grouping and Work. During the next few seasons, we will focus on each one of these themes, beginning with the theme of Prayer during Lent. Hence this Cathedral Quarterly is dedicated to one simple question: How do we pray?

O U R M I S S I O N Inspired by the love of Jesus, we are building the kingdom of heaven, where differing people live in community, serving God and each other.

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I am pleased to present to you some deep and rich writing from our own clergy, this Diocese and beyond. Let us explore what it means to pray.

With love in Christ,

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L I G H T I N T H E DA R K Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

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P R AY E R A N D OUR COMMON LIFE

By The Rev. Dr. Bob Dannals, Senior Associate

When I do, I often see the kaleidoscope of possibilities. I also see the challenges ahead. Fresh from the morning news, the complexities of life and the massive needs in our world, I confess I sometimes have no idea what to pray for. And as I learn more about praying for myself and others, I am trying to speak less and listen more.

S O M E T I M E S I P R AY W I T H M Y E Y E S W I D E O P E N .

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“ I N S H O R T, T H E R E I S A D I R E C T L I N K B E T W E E N P R AY I N G W I T H A N D F O R E A C H O T H E R A N D EXERCISING OUR FAITH IN THE WORLD."

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Of course, I pray for St. John’s Cathedral, so much a part of my life during the past year. One specific prayer has imbedded itself in my devotions in recent years. It’s from the Book of Common Prayer (page 817), and like the best prayers, it is apt and direct and keeps my own sentiments and irrelevancies safely to the side: “Almighty and ever living God, ruler of all things in heaven and earth, hear my prayer for this parish family. Strengthen the faithful, arouse the careless, and restore the penitent. Grant us all things necessary for our common life, and bring us all to be of one heart and mind within your holy Church; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

More and more this prayer seems right to me. It seems to ask God to give us what we need. It describes us all — faithful, careless, penitent.

Then there is that appropriate and wide-open request that God “grant us all things necessary for our common life.” In an increasingly fractured and contentious world to be part of a common life is a rare and wonderful thing. This is something we don’t make up and provide on our own. This is the common life made holy by God’s Spirit, and it is in direct continuity with the community of disciples called by Jesus and the first Christian churches who, as portrayed in Acts, “held all things in common.”

In all kinds of large and small ways, we maintain and build up our common life at St. John’s Cathedral. One visible way is praying in community.

The Apostle Paul wrote the earliest letter we have in the New

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Testament barely eighteen years after Jesus’ death and resurrection.

He begins his first epistle to the Thessalonians by assuring them of his prayers, and he ends his letter with the request, “Beloved, pray for us.”

In his second letter to the same community, Paul amplifies his request: “Pray for us, so that the word of the Lord may spread rapidly and be glorified everywhere.” Notice that his concern is not to advance his own opinion or need, or his own safety or glory, but that God’s graceful word might be advanced and bear fruit in faith and service.

In short, there is a direct link between praying with and for each other and exercising our faith in the world.

Many years ago, a teenager in our parish was killed suddenly in an automobile accident. Several days later on a Sunday afternoon, I met with Jason’s friends. Well over one hundred teens came to talk, to listen, to question, and to share their grief with one another.

One of Jason’s friends said to the group, “I feel so stupid; I went to church this morning and prayed for Jason and it was already too late.”

Another person told us, “I prayed and prayed and I just knew it was going to be better, but it wasn’t ... he’s dead and there’s not one thing we can do about it.”

John Westerhoff, a priest and former professor of spirituality and formation at Duke University, once said to a group of us: “Prayer is not magic, and it is not a religious transaction. It is not an avenue by which we convince God to do something that God would not otherwise do. That is, prayer is not an attempt to manipulate the natural occurrences of reality and cannot be a means by which we’d like to control outcomes or steer God’s intentions. Prayer is a love language we’ve been given to be in communion with God and each other.”

grace, the concerns offered in prayer are quite often complicated and multi-dimensional.

A student at Harvard wrote a masterful poem, telling the story of a man who wonders about life’s meaning and purpose. One mark of that character’s depleted sense of self-worth is his inability to consider a life of prayer. In the midst of his confusion he blurts out one day, “Do I dare disturb the universe?”

Actually, the question T. S. Eliot’s character expressed in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was also the question of the author, at that time a young agnostic. After Eliot discovered a faith of his own, he came to a whole new understanding of prayer. Later works, “Murder in the Cathedral” and “Journey of the Magi,” became the artistic and theological responses to his question about prayer: “Dare we disturb the universe?” Eliot discovered an honest prayer life in community where he was able to “speak the truth in love,” and dare to disturb the universe — together, with God. At the heart of praying in community is a humble little word “common.” Our prayer book is a book of “common prayer,” meaning that it belongs to all of us and is normally used when we come together. What we hold in common binds us together and cements the wonderful disparate pieces of the collage of St. John’s Cathedral.

And within this collage of prayer, we trust each other to utter the several petitions that bring us together: “I love you,” “Please help me,” “I’m sorry,” “Come be my friend,” “Help me discover my calling and purpose,” “Encourage me to step out in faith and serve the world in God’s name.”

So we celebrate our common life. And we pray. And by extension, we give and we serve. We invite you to join us in these important aspects of being the community of Jesus.

To pray in community means to shorten the distance — relationally, spiritually and otherwise — between people and with God. As the Medieval Church attested, “we cannot hate and wish damage on one for whom we’re praying.” Or as Jesus himself said, “pray for your enemies and do good to those who do you harm.” Within the journey of faith, people of all ages and of every kind of theological and political opinion feel the need to pray in community. Because communion with God involves mystery and a profound wonder of S 8 s

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Z O O M I N S P I R E D P R AY E R S

By The Rev. Dr. Linda Privitera

That is part of the thinking behind the prayers of the people and the rich collection of collects in our prayer book. As our prayers are directed by the beliefs of the church, we are formed in our concerns and directed to right actions in response. I am also learning that believing shapes our prayers. I am grateful for the Zoom groups I have been a part of during the pandemic and am in awe about how they have influenced my prayer life in this strange time. I hope others have found similar inspiration in focused faith studies.

P R AY I N G SH A P E S BE L I E V I N G .

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“ I A M G R AT E F U L F O R T H E Z O O M G R O U P S I H AV E B E E N A PA RT O F D U R I N G T H E PA N D E M I C A N D A M I N AW E A B O U T H O W T H E Y H A V E I N F L U E N C E D M Y P R AY E R L I F E I N T H I S S T R A N G E T I M E .”

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The Sacred Ground groups have led to deep dives into unlearning racism and its hold on our common life; my prayers have often led me to lament, to confession, to my deepest hopes for beloved community.

I pray more seriously about those in prison, those whose lives have been challenged by systems of injustice, those whose aspirations have been denied, those who cannot see any hope for change. I enter the stories of those on the margins, the anawim, the outcasts who are loved by God and who need relationships of wholeness, the wounded ones. My intercessions have grown. I have rejoiced in the wisdom of Howard Thurman and the prayers of his heart.

A group study in Advent led me to consider the comments made by a retired bishop who said that each week he visited a parish to confirm the faithful he was immersed in the baptismal promises. And so I began to pray again the promises adding the new commitment from the Anglican Church of Canada. In 2013 the church added a new promise to its liturgy: Will you strive to safeguard the integrity of God’s creation and respect, sustain and renew the face of the earth? I will, with God’s help.

Anne and Jeffery Rowthorn have written a new collection of praise and prayer for creation in the book God’s Good Earth. He was my liturgics professor at seminary and so, when I saw this selection at the Cathedral bookstore, I picked it up as a liturgical resource, not knowing that each of the 52 chapters would lead me into a new form

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of weekly prayer. I aspire to be more aware of my new baptismal promise and its reality in how I am faithful to its challenge. I am paying more attention to the theological implication of kinship with creation. My prayer life is changing thanks to a Zoom group studying Pope Francis’ encyclical letter Laudato Si. I was asked to bring a prayer to close our first session, and I found in the Rowthorn book a prayer by an Aboriginal priest in the Canadian church. I am able to enter the prayer space of writers I have long admired, such as Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben and The Iona Community. My prayers have changed; my spiritual life is enlarged. In the past I have neglected the challenges of the cries of creation; I have taken its blessings for granted and forgotten to realize that I am being encouraged to new action.

In other years, I followed a Celtic prayer book for my daily office; for a time, I used Richard Wagamese’s book Embers. I now join a Daily Office Zoom community as it follows the lectionary and add my petitions to those of others. I rest in the faith we are holding onto together.

Praying shapes believing. The rich selections in our own Book of Common Prayer join the prayer books of New Zealand and Canada on my shelf to enlarge my prayer life. I am formed by the prayers of the church and I am being reformed by the prayers of others. Prayer is a way I live my faith. I am held in its widening embrace. I am continuing to learn, to be zoomed beyond my small world, to allow my beliefs to shape my prayers.

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MAKING THE HOUSE R E A DY F O R T H E L O R D From Thirst: Poems by Mary Oliver, Beacon Press, 2007

Dear Lord, I have swept and I have washed but still nothing is as shining as it should be for you. Under the sink, for example, is an uproar of mice - it is the season of their many children. What shall I do? And under the eaves and through the walls the squirrels have gnawed their ragged entrances - but it is the season when they need shelter, so what shall I do? And the raccoon limps into the kitchen and opens the cupboard while the dog snores, the cat hugs the pillow; what shall I do? Beautiful is the new snow falling in the yard and the fox who is staring boldly up the path, to the door. And still I believe you will come, Lord: you will, when I speak to the fox, the sparrow, the lost dog, the shivering sea goose, know that really I am speaking to you whenever I say, Original drawing by Linda Privitera

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as I do all morning and afternoon: Come in, Come in.

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THE WORK I S V E R Y N E A R YO U

By The Rev. Christopher Martin Excerpts from “Guiding Principles: How to Use this Book” and Chapter 1 “The Work Is Very Near You” from With Gladness: Answering God’s Call in Our Everyday Lives

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“ M O S E S H A S B E E N T O L D T H AT H E I S N O T TO E N T E R T H E P RO M I S E D L A N D W I T H T H E M , AND SO HE GIVES HIS LAST WORDS OF C O U N S E L A N D A DV I C E . N E A R T H E E N D O F T H I S POWERFUL BOOK OF SCRIPTURE, IN A CRUCIAL SECTION, HE ASSURES THE PEOPLE: “THE WORD I S V E RY N E A R T O Y O U ; I T I S I N Y O U R M O U T H A N D I N Y O U R H E A R T. ”

EXCERPTS FROM GUIDING PRINCIPLES XIX - XX P R AY E R M E A N S T W E N T Y M I N U T E S O F S O L I T A R Y P R AY E R

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each day. The twenty minutes a day is neither arbitrary nor prescriptive. Research shows that people who pray for twenty minutes or more a day express a much higher level of satisfaction with their prayer life than those who pray less than that. We are specific about the minimum time spent, but what you do with that time is between you and God. After teaching prayer for more than two decades, I have found that almost everyone has a baseline practice of either centering prayer or some other variation of Christian meditation or Morning Prayer as found in The Book of Common Prayer. Your creative work is to find a way of prayer that works for you and then, in the words of the great spiritual director, Abbot John Chapman, to “pray as you can, and don’t try and pray as you can’t.”

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The work of improving the posture of your soul begins with concluding your prayer time each day with prayer. The first chapter introduces a prayer, explains it, and then invites you to pray it each day, alongside a gentle practice of reminding yourself that the work is very near you. Chapters two and three introduce the gentle practices to look at each face and name each work. In chapter four, the gentle practice is to pray and reflect on the sabbath. The sabbath prayer invites reflection, such that the gentle practices start to integrate themselves into our body and soul. In weeks five and six, I introduce two more gentle practices. These gentle practices are both more subtle and more profound than the first two. Find your secret smile and use your wounds to touch on and transfigure our sense of truth and reality.

word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart.” His teaching is an invitation for God’s people to take the words of the law into their hearts and to trust that God has given those words into the care of the people so that they might live out their intimate covenant relationship with God. Some years ago, Martin Smith, then the superior of an Anglican monastic order, the Society of St. John the Evangelist, titled his book on prayerfully reading scripture, The Word is Very Near You. The book gently but firmly invites the reader to apply the words and images of scripture to daily life.

The prayer that I offer here replaces the word “word” with the word “work.” Here then, taken from Deuteronomy 30:11- 20, is Moses’ teaching, abbreviated and slightly altered as an invitation to imagine that the work that God would have us do next is close to hand. (The words I changed or added are in italics.)

EXCERPTS FROM CHAPTER ONE P. 3 - 12

Prayer helps introduce the gentle practices into our bodies and so into our lives. The daily prayer is composed of the two postcommunion prayers in Rite II of The Book of Common Prayer. This daily prayer takes sentences we ordinarily apply to the coming week and applies them to the day before us. The prayer is:

“O God, send me this day to do the work you have given me to do, to love and serve you with gladness and singleness of heart. Amen.”

There are many powerful words in this prayer, and throughout this chapter, we will unpack these words, a process that will continue in the weeks and chapters to come.

The first word we will unpack is “work,” which is at the heart of the occasional prayer. In the Bible, the book of Deuteronomy is presented as a series of sermons Moses gives to the people of Israel. The Israelites have made it through forty years in the wilderness and are on the cusp of entering into the promised land. Moses has been told that he is not to enter the promised land with them, and so he gives his last words of counsel and advice. Near the end of this powerful book of scripture, in a crucial section, he assures the people: “The S 18 s

“Surely the commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away...no, the work is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart and in your hands...I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity...Choose life that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God.” The act of doing the next thing that God would have us do is as lifegiving as bearing in our mouths and hearts the words of scripture.

The two are intimately connected. The more we know the words of scripture, the more likely we are to understand what good work God would have us do next. To make a start, we pray, especially in times of transition, by simply saying to ourselves, “The work is very near you.”

I have found that my times of transition frequently happen in the car and on the stairs. I first introduced this prayer into my daily life on my short commute to work. Getting out of my driveway and through the neighborhood always requires staying alert, so it’s usually not until I’m through the first stoplight and onto a road with timed lights that my thoughts settle down, and I remind myself, “The work is very near you.” Sometimes I think about my schedule of the day to come, S 19 s

but more often, I attend to the way I drive: being a benevolent driver in the clogged Bay Area is an active challenge. I strive to be both a courteous and non-judgmental driver. If I attend to my breath, I can usually maintain an even temper through my commute. Not judging other drivers with my thoughts is more of a challenge. And yet isn’t that what Jesus asks us to do? And what a clear and straightforward place to practice! Bad drivers are all around us, providing multiple opportunities to work on our moral life.

Walking up stairs and saying this occasional prayer gives me an opportunity to think of work in the more concrete sense of the term.

My office is upstairs, and the front door of my house has a landing with a few stairs. Here, I often think of the most demanding work or tasks that I sense I’m avoiding and find the determination to do that work first.

Jacob attended a class I taught on this practice. In the week after receiving this teaching, he prayed this prayer after leaving a room.

Toward the end of his tenure at a health clinic, he brought in a city official with whom he had a working relationship from a previous position. His only task was to make the initial introduction between the official and two of his younger colleagues at the clinic. They were set to have a difficult conversation about city regulations and the operation of the clinic. The conversation began in a tense and unpleasant way, and Jacob, with his part of the work over, was relieved to offer a light-hearted comment and make his way out the door. Partway down the hall, Jacob thought to himself, “The work is very near you,” and he stopped. He listened to his heart, not his head, and realized that his work right now was to stand by his young colleagues, simply as a non-anxious presence, and provide silent moral support. Jacob turned around, entered back into the room with another light-hearted comment, and sat back down. He felt deep assurance afterward that he had done the work God had given him to do.

do next always lies close to hand. After receiving communion, we pray:

“And we humbly beseech thee, O heavenly Father, so to assist us with thy grace, that we may continue in that holy fellowship, and do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in.”

Not only is the emphasis on doing the work, whatever that might be, but also it is explicit that we are to believe that the work has been prepared for us ahead of time. In one of the grandest promises in all scripture, Jesus assures us that he goes ahead of us to prepare a place for us in his Father’s house. Jesus tells us, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:2-3).

You have an adventure of spiritual discovery before you. By engaging each of the gentle practices, you will discover your soul and improve its posture. But before you begin your first gentle practice, you must prepare your heart with daily prayer. So, write or type out the prayer and put it in the space where you intend to pray for the next week.

Then, ever so gently and from time to time, particularly in moments of transition, remind yourself: “The work is very near you.”.

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P R AY E R A S C O N V E R S AT I O N : I S A N YO N E L I S T E N I N G ?

By The Rev. Dr. Margaret Guenther from The Practice of Prayer, Volume Four: The New Church’s Teaching Series. Cowley Publications, 1998

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“ T H E Q U E S T I O N I S , H OW D O W E L I S T E N TO W H AT G O D H A S T O S AY ? ”

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The partners are aware of each other, attuned to each other, sensitive to nuances in tempo and rhythm. A good conversation with a friend – in contrast to idle chitchat with an acquaintance – allows for space for pauses. There is no need to fill every minute, for there is comfort in the intimacy of shared silence. A good conversation is generous: each partner brings the gift of willing attentiveness. Listening is as important and as dynamic as speaking.

A G O O D C O N V E R S AT I O N I S L I K E A D A N C E .

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We take it for granted that God is listening to our prayers, but just to be sure we usually add a petition to our litanies, “Lord hear our prayer.” I catch myself wondering if God finds some of our prayers more interesting and promising than others. From my years in the classroom, I know that students at all levels are eager for their papers (even the badly written, shamefully overdue ones) to be read at once and commented on – favorably of course. They cannot imagine that their teachers are not eager to plunge into the often dreary task.

Does God feel that way about our prayers, I wonder? Surely not! As the words of the psalm reassure us, “The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and his ears are open to their cry” (34.15).

God indeed listens to our prayers with loving attentiveness – though, to be sure, it does not always seem so to us. Almost everyone experiences times when God seems inattentive to what we have to say, if not entirely absent. Yet, if we trust the promise of scripture that God desires an intimate relationship with us, we are impelled to communicate, to enter into the conversation of prayer. This conversation is a two-way street, however, and we need to do our share of listening. The question is, how do we listen to what God has to say?

of a medieval anchorhold. But how I wished that I could experience God’s immediacy as she had! From her writings, I could tell she was no crazy woman; she seemed very ordinary and down-to-earth. Why had she – like Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and Meister Eckhart, to name my other mystic friends – been so gifted? How do we tell the true mystics from the merely deluded?

The true mystics, those whom Evelyn Underhill characterizes as “person[s] with a genius for God” are gifted with heightened perception: inwardly they “see” and “hear” with great clarity. Their words, unlike the supposedly divine messages reported by the demented or the demagogue, can be trusted, for “the business and method of mysticism is love…it is the eager, outgoing activity whose driving power is love,” Underhill said. I have found that most mystics today are hidden, and quite out of step with our age of high technology; earlier centuries may have been more hospitable to their special giftedness. Almost without exception, they are humble folk, not preoccupied with their own proficiency. They would be surprised and a little embarrassed to be labeled “mystics.” We know they are true mystics because they wear their giftedness lightly, and their driving power is generous love.”

I am uneasy when I encounter people who purport to have received direct, verbally concise communications from God. Elijah and the other prophets of Hebrew scripture can get away with proclaiming, “Thus says the Lord,” or “The voice of the Lord came to me,” but we are wary (usually rightly so) of our contemporaries who announce, “God told me that…” These may be the truly deranged – “God told me to kill my children”- or the arrogantly manipulative – “God told me that all gay people are damned.” It requires temerity to assume that we know God’s will in minute detail and to dare to speak prescriptively in God’s behalf. Holy wars, great and small, and unspeakable cruelty are the fruits of such hubris.

And yet throughout the centuries, including our own, there have been those highly sensitive persons who seem to have a direct line of two-way communication with God. I remember my feeling of envy the first time I read Julian of Norwich’s Showings. I did not want to experience her terrible illness or to live out my life in the austerity S 24 s

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LENTEN PRACTICES Please visit our website jaxcathedral.org for more information on these and other offerings.

S U N D AY S Faith Forum | 9 – 9:50 a.m. | Zoom Dr. Scott Brown and the Cathedral Windows

W E D N E S D AY S Book Study | 10 – 11 a.m. | Zoom With Gladness: Answering God’s Call in our Everyday Lives

by Christopher Martin

Bible Study | 11 a.m. | Zoom Feasting on the Word with Deacon Saundra Kidd Meditation & Prayer | 11 a.m. – 12 p.m.

Lenten Labyrinth Walks in Cathedral Park Lenten Class | 7 – 8 p.m. | Zoom Prayer and Practice with Dean Kate

C O N T R I B U TO R S The Reverend Dr. Bob Dannals Senior Associate, St. John’s Cathedral The Reverend Dr. Margaret Guenther (deceased) former professor of Spirituality at General Seminary The Reverend Dr. Christopher Martin, Rector, St. Paul’s, San Rafael, California The Very Reverend Kate Moorehead, Dean, St. John’s Cathedral The Reverend Dr. Linda Privitera, St. John’s Cathedral Congregation C AT H E D R A L Q U A R T E R LY E D I T O R I A L B O A R D Owene Courtney

T H U R S D AY S Book Study | March 1 and April 4 | 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. | Zoom Cathedral Reads with various leaders F R I D AY S Bible Study | 9:30 – 11 a.m. | Zoom Reading Between the Lines with Owene Courtney S AT U R D AY S Art as Prayer and Spirituality | 10 – 11 a.m. | Zoom Contemporary Stations of the Cross with Linda Privitera

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The Reverend Gregg Kaufman Joe O’Shields The Reverend Dr. Linda Privitera A DV I S O R S The Reverend Dr. Bob Dannals The Very Rev. Kate Moorehead

256 East Church Street Jacksonville, FL 32202