The Prayer Thread is a collection of teachings and practical prompts to help as we learn to pray in community. This text was originally delivered on June 8, 2022 as a short teaching at our online weekly prayer sit.
To refer to something as biblical is to acknowledge the collective memory of sacred meaning-making across generations. The Bible is a revered text passed from community to community as a bond that tells the stories of both God and the people. The implicit assumption across all theist faith traditions is that God is involved in the story of creation and that humans have the capacity to recognize and then proclaim as to how they experience God as manifest in reality—God as revealed and involved.
When we read the sacred texts, with their diverse authorship and literary purposes, we assume that the words (and images) form a sacred Word, a living Spirit that spoke in the times the text was written and continues to speak in today’s time. It is in this sense, within the assumption of the sacred bond of connection over time, that we recognize prayer as biblical.
Sure, we can study the structure, and form, and audience, and context of ancient texts. But we can also sit with them; we can let them speak to us. We can be assured that we are neither the first nor the last to ask big questions, to face the overwhelming scope of reality and not feel a bit lost or disoriented.
The stories of sacred texts assure us that there is a pathway and there are a people, and we can tap that hard-lived wisdom and apply its life-giving patterns to our own times. Biblical prayer is ancestral and communal. To call out, “help!” or “thank you” or “guide me, ” in the biblical sense, is to both proclaim and receive the Word simultaneously.
