It is easy to complicate prayer. Especially in communal, liturgical, and ritual prayer, the temptation to add more words, sounds, and gestures can make prayer feel more like a heavy package than a treasured gift. Over time, the packaging of prayer can feel more like heavy, burdensome baggage and less like light, life-giving sustenance. This is the shadow of carrying prayer our time in a tradition – it can become too heavy to pass on easily from one generation to the next.
Personal God and Relational God
In my early twenties, I went through a quarter-life crisis. Studies in theology and peace turned my entire worldview (including my sense of the Sacred!) upside down. The anthropomorphic, personal images of God, to whom I prayed in my journals at least twice daily, began to lose their ability to help me make sense of the world and my place in it. At the same time, I began to sense the Sacred in new and unconventional places.
Topics:
Contemplative Practice
The Flow of Prayer
In different times and diverse places, people notice and name the Divine in a variety of ways. Polytheism, monotheism, pantheism, atheism, and non-theism traditions are just a few examples of the many ways to identify God. How we name the Holy One will impact our experience of prayer.
Topics:
Contemplative Practice
