Only Say the Word, and I Shall Be Healed

All these devoted themselves with one accord to prayer, together with some women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers.
Acts 1:14

So I was convinced when I started writing about prayer (and I've got two more posts on it coming, hopefully) that there was a disunity in the church catholic, and it bothered me. I spent a lot of time thinking about unity in prayer and the importance of it. I think it is very important that we don't make more of these differences in the outer forms of prayer than is absolutely necessary. It is not my design by any means to reform your prayer by what I have been writing, but only to share my prayer life with you in the hopes that we may reach a greater understanding, and perhaps, if the Spirit moves you, to show you what great richness He offers in the Church His holy bride.

Prayer is profoundly personal in that it reaches to the deepest parts of our being and draws them out. In prayer we turn ourselves inside out and offer up the torn, the dirty, the broken, the soul stirring feebly--the nothing that is everything that we have. But prayer is not just personal, but interpersonal, deeply communal. I think liturgical worship is particularly fitted to communal prayer. In such a setting each one of the faithful may offer up in total freedom and without fear or judgement the expression of faith that is the Church's over the ages.

If you and I greet the same Eternal God by the same Spirit-inspired cry, "Abba, Father!" then you are my brother, my sister, in all truth. Do not shut me out of your prayer, or draw distinctions between what I wish and what you wish, but come under the wings of Christ's holy church and learn how to pray.