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1st Sunday in Lent - February 10, 2008 - St.
Christopher’s Episcopal Church The Discipline of Repetition I am a falconer. Keeping, training and working with hawks demands the very best of you, and the process will always stretch you in precisely those areas where you are the most vulnerable. Case in point: I hate repetition—it so often feels like the antithesis of creativity. I would reinvent the wheel every day of my life for the sheer joy of the creative energy. Falconry, however, requires repetition and consistency, doing the same thing over and over again until the hawks finally get it, and then doing it again! Falconry, however, is just a mirror of life itself. Life is constructed to throw us up against our shortcomings. This is not perverse. Being thrown up against our shortcomings gives us great spiritual opportunity. The experience teaches us humility and interdependence, and more importantly, it gives us the option of redemption—if we will embrace the journey of growth. And that journey requires repetition. Like placing one foot in front of the other over many dusty miles, sometimes it feels boring and depressing, but in the end you do get somewhere. In the midst of the boredom there is a process that is quietly working that yields a life patterned after Jesus Christ. What does that process look like? It is perhaps best described by the ancient Church Fathers, and drawn from the life of Christ. They speak of three paths that build on one another, tracing a path from self-centeredness to the capacity to “love one another as I have loved you,” the Via Illuminativa, the Via Purgativa, and the Via Unitiva. Two primary tools offered by the Fathers to help one along the paths are regular prayer, both personal and collective, especially the practice of using prewritten prayers, and regular worship, especially in the recitation of the Psalms. Let’s take a look at these two parts of our tradition, and how to use them to walk faithfully into this Lenten season. You will find that page 581 in the Book of Common Prayer is a title page for the Psalter. Here are the songs of ancient Israel, expressing virtually every human emotion in raw candor before the Lord. There are psalms of lament, penitence and praise, royal psalms of ascent, petition, request, and thanksgiving. To say the psalms as prayer is to lay before the Lord the raw truth of our human souls. How does one use them? First the mechanics: The Daily Office Lectionary for Morning and Evening Prayer will cycle you through all the psalms in six weeks. But there are other ways to read the psalms through programmatically. On p. 585 (485 in Spanish) before you actually get to the text of Psalm 1 there are two other lines. The first says, “Book One.” The Psalms are divided up into five books, each about 40 psalms long. Each book has a particular character to it with an introductory psalm and a summary psalm of praise at the end. They have been compared to the first five books of the Old Testament. The five in sequence tell the story of God creating and calling out a people for Himself. Then there is, “First Day: Morning Prayer.” The psalms have also been divided up into 30 sections. You can read the whole of the book of the Psalms in a 30-day period. Now the spiritual benefit: First of all, you read the psalms as prayers, you “pray” the psalms, remembering those times when you have felt how the author feels. You offer to God those feelings and experiences. Then you do so repetitively. Repetition gets you past your quick and easy answers, inviting you to consider more deeply the truth of your feelings, and bringing to light more healthy responses. Repetition allows you to apply the process over and over again until finally every hurt has been healed, every anger dismissed, every loss mourned, and every joy celebrated. Sticking to the Psalms anchors you, giving every emotion its proper place. You notice that even the Son of God in today’s Gospel lesson answers the devil with recitation of the Word of God! Recitation comes by repetition. What better way to drive the devil out of us than by repetition of the Word of God? Secondly, the Prayers. We are all enjoined to lift our hearts to God in prayer, and prayers that you make up as you go along should be a vital part of your Christian experience. But just like well-written prose and poetry have a depth and power to them that draw us back to the same lines over and over again, a well-crafted prayer has the power to express deep and otherwise overlooked dynamics of the soul in ways that demand repetition. Take, for example, the thanksgiving for the Diversity of Races and Cultures. (BCP Eng: 840, Span: 732) It praises God for the variety of human experiences expressed through the races and cultures of the world, but then goes further: it asks for grace to be enriched rather than threatened by them. Much more easily said than done…. But again, the mechanics: P. 810 (Span: 700) has a topical index. Each number identifies the prayer in the next pages. Just find the prayer that touches your concern and look it up. Copy it out, tape it on the fridge, the mirror in your bathroom, write it on a piece of paper and put it in your pocket so that every time you reach for your keys you are reminded to say it. # 1 is great start. (See BCP Eng: p.814, Span: 704.) Here we see the value of Creation in the eyes of God, our proper response, and the wonderful truth that gratitude should lead us to service. And then the spiritual benefits: Carefully crafted prayers are like well-written prose or poetry, capable of driving us deep into the reality of our own souls, rooting out the lies that we so quickly tell ourselves, and setting us on the right track again. Prayer is, after all, always much more about changing us than anything else, about us learning to have the mind of Christ. They bear repetition just because we do not fully comprehend them the first time, and we need re-exposure to be drawn into the depths of them. They are there for your use: Use them to express how you really feel, use them to let God change you where you most need it. The discipline of repetition takes control of our oft-undisciplined wills. Like a buzz saw that cuts a straight line through the log regardless of the bends and flows of the grain of the wood, it cuts a straight line to the truth, and demands of us our very best. I commend the discipline to you this Lenten season: Pray the Psalms, pray the Prayers, and let your mind find light, your heart find peace and your will find the Path to eternal life. Fr. Paul Moore+
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