Praying the Hours: Prayer without the Burden of Creation

I've recently taken to praying the Divine Hours again. It occurred to me the other day how much of my energy is wasted in creation when praying. I become distracted from the point of prayer - communing with God - when I am trying to "find appropriate words." Perhaps many of you don't struggle with this, but perhaps many of you do. Hour by Hour is put out by the Episcopal Church as a text to guide the laity into the practice of praying the traditional daily prayer cycle of Christendom.

The offices are written and organized so as to simply be prayed aloud. Read word for word. Now, one can read line by line with little meaning and complain that it is not real prayer because it does not come from the heart. Or, one may approach this with a sense of liberation from the burden of extemporaneous expression. What after all do we say to God? If God is God and we are not, what are the right words? And, when life becomes so convoluted that it makes us barely recognize ourselves, how do we find words to live, let alone pray?

Somehow in praying these ancient words, it becomes apparent that prayer is a state of mind and heart and very little about the words. It is about the way we allow the Spirit to breath through us, to pray for us, to tap into our subconscious and expose our deepest and most unknown self to God and to us. It can be exorcism, exhortation, and exaltation of the self. We are dynamic beings with an eternal reality. When prayer is liberated from the necessity of creation, we are liberated to find our true self with an enormous amount of inspired introspection.

This is not to say that extemporaneous prayer is inappropriate or lacking in value; but simply to elevate the status of the highly under-rated practice of written prayer. For within the context of the Divine Hours, it becomes painstakingly clear that our most fully human self is only bolstered by the fully divine Christ within us. Without the distraction of word hunting, we are free to see ourselves as both created and capable of healing re-creation that benefits ourself and the world around us.

It becomes clear that God is not a genie in a bottle who grants wishes to deserving doters but is rather a radically dynamic force within and around who animates us when we surrender to the reality that on our own, we will never be fully human. We were created to commune with the divine in the context of the gift of our own humanity. And, as an added perk, God cares very little about how broken that gift is, as long as we are willing to continually receive the healing love that extends to every person from this side of the Cross through the other side of Eternity. This is good news, indeed.