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 November 2nd, 2022 as a short teaching at our online weekly prayer sit.
Many of us imagine, perhaps even hope for, the big moments of transformative prayer. We suspect that visions, insights, and intense emotions might be the best spiritual tools for the traumas and trials of life. Often enough, though, it’s the small, ordinary components of prayer that most consistently work on us. It is the slow, steady accumulation of the small habits formed in prayer that most shapes us.
I recall when I first noticed that my “sacred word” from Centering Prayer—the short phrase I repeat hundreds of times as a symbol of my intention to consent to God’s presence—started to spill over into my regular life activities outside of prayer. Worried about someone, sacred word; nervous about a meeting, sacred word; doubting myself, sacred word.
Formative prayer not only fills up the prayer session proper; but it also spills out into real life. Piles of twenty-minute sits turn into deep, peace-bearing sighs before reacting or judging in a personal conversation. More recently, I’ve noticed how the embodied prayer of prostration, practiced daily, also shows up in the ease and humility I can bring into my interactions with others.
Prayer is powerful when, over time, the accumulation of small, life-bearing habits infiltrates the grounding of ordinary life. Prayer as formative is certainly not the answer to hopes and visions of “big moments” in prayer. Nonetheless, it is no less powerful, and even transformative. May the weight and stability of prayer as formative keep us grounded as we walk the pathways of transformation!
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