The Power of Prayer

It is as if the waters envisioned by Ezekiel flow as words. A trickle from the Temple that babbles into an ankle-deep stream. Praise and lamentation, with desolation and glory spoken and sung day after day until a river flows knee deep and gleaming-clear. Words combine over centuries countless voices add their chants participating in a surge, and contributing to it rendering the waters many cubits distance from the altar hip-deep.

From earliest time the prayers of the Church have been the prayers Jesus spoke: the psalms he beatified and fulfilled— consecrating abandonment on the cross. Praying ceaselessly as St. Paul enjoined the Church sought to make time holy and each hour sacred with its Liturgy of the Hours.

Prayed for millenia the river of words grew so wide and so deep as to be impassable. Yet that Mississippi-width and Amazonbreadth of waters sustained as Ezekiel foresaw rich growth and incalculable richness along its centuries-meandering length. Do you believe in the power of the prayer? If so then it cannot but be that the world as it is, www.magdalacolloquy.org with blessings and beauties wrought from risks and temptation is fashioned (at least in part) from the lake-wide mile-deep river of prayers offered for centuries by priests and nuns and monks and holy women and men.

Do you believe in the power of prayer? If so then we cannot but acknowledge a growing and current deficit— a drought of words from convents now silent and monasteries increasingly empty.

To be clear: God does not need our prayers, we do. All of humanity and our history ahead need as ever the torrent of daily prayer to heal and forgive what goes awry as well as fructify our highest possibilities into concrete reality.

We need to recover the Liturgy of the Hours to lose ourselves de-centring ego-centrism to find freedom in our utter dependence on God.

We need to relearn the Liturgy of the Hours to replenish the reservoir of prayers invoking the grace to replenish the waters that sate the thirst for justice and peace.

John Dalla Costa