I love this, David. I imagine the vocalizing of this prayer, especially in the way you have invited us the encounter it anew, as a practice of ancestral reconciliation.
I encountered a sense of what ‘practice’ means for a body and a person by stumbling into a world of art and artists. It immediately felt like opening a door to endless generosity, resource and reciprocity. Frustration and altercation and wrestle too, but that at least makes it feel real and touchable. To be made both small and bigger by a thing will always amaze and delight me. I’ve loved exploring practice with you. I love how you’ve articulated it here.x
Ha, yes! Generosity with a dash of frustration. I guess the salty stuff of life happens between the two. Thank you for helping this course, and these thoughts in particular, along the way xx
Incredible work, deserving of time, space, and practice to take hold and unfold. I haven't made that time yet as much as I'd like, and I get the feeling I'll be returning to this series for a while. A million thanks for the treasure sharing, David, and all of the ways you show up.
You (and perhaps others) may find this site and in particular this page helpful. It surfaces my own practice of a daily office constructed on the pattern of the prayer.
I take your point about the Aramaic (indeed I have blogged elsewhere about the linguistic issues of supposing the commonly touted Aramaic Lord's Prayer as original) however, I have myself learned the prayer in a form of Aramaic (there are at least two doing the rounds and I've tried for a bit more Semitic phonetics in what I recite) and sometimes find it somehow helpful to recite it. I suspect that the probablly-reconstructed forms are likely to be close to an original (and let's face it there is more than one Koine form in the gospels -so maybe the exact wording isn't the point).
Hello Andii. Thanks for this article. And no shade on any of the Aramaic versions, or others besides. To re-iterate what I’ve said above, I am wary of the power claims that haunt competing quests and anxieties to be closest to an original. I would be aghast if anything I’ve been involved in is ever fought for as the more correct way of doing anything. This, for me, is about folk-art, body politics, and prayer (in the sense of attention), not so much in-house comparisons of liturgies and practices. I’m not sure I’m really in that house, as it were.
I do agree with the wariness relating to hunting the original. I think it often misses the point that a lot of modern biblical scholarship has come to: the point is to think about how the texts that we have address us and support us and challenge us no matter the history before they ended up bound into a convenient tome for us (and now that tome is a set of e-texts, of course). I think that the only thing I kind of fight for is the notion that perhaps we really ought to take what I called The Common Prayer a bit more seriously as a structuring principle/scaffolding rather than simply a recital piece. There is a kind of psycho-spiritual set of dynamics in the order that both versions maintain. That said, I can't bear the idea of turning it into a straight jacket which would disallow spontaneous prayers without that structure, for example. I'm just surprised it hasn't influenced liturgical practice in that way more.
I wish you all the best with that Andii. Like I said, I'm writing from outside the house, so I exclude myself from the 'we' you're calling upon there. Please forgive my forthrightness. Its meant with gentleness, but I suppose my task here is nothing if not to be clear.
No worries. We all have a we to speak from a community, usually several potentially. Some languages distinguish between the 'we' that includes the addressee and the 'we' that excludes the addressee -just for interest.
Yes, I speak from a liturgical community and an overlapping set of reflective and spiritual communities. I have a dialogical and sometimes critical relationship to many of them. I didn't hear the forthrightness as ungentle; I already factored in that there are so many differences and takes on all this.
Thanks David, appreciate you (and Bruce) sharing your practice, it’s a risky thing to do as something so personal, organic and situational, as you describe it could come across as all the things you’re carefully avoiding. And yet we all got here by being shared with. I’ve tried the greek words a couple of times in my own similar routine and the strangeness of the words does shift where you’re proclaiming from. Strangely I heard them last night on BBC IPlayer, in a scene in a Greek church, episode 6 of an unnerving drama called Two weeks in August 🌞
I think you're right Ruth, it feels a risky business. I've become interested in exploring the body as a political space and the intentional forms of life that might come out of that awareness, but I always feel in danger of harming the integrity of what I'm talking about by talking about it! Gradually feeling out where that balance might lie, perhaps, and the danger of too many words. Been very glad of your engagement on this course, thank you.
Yeah. It is itself a Greek word, and appears across the New Testament. Notably - with regard to the thoughts above - in Rom 12.4 where Paulos talks about the body having different parts and us all thereby having different "praxin". I've learned that Aristotle divided human activity into praxis, poesis and theoria. I'd like to think of the above as encompassing all three somehow.
Hi David. Yes I spend 20 minutes every morning in centering prayer - in silence and stillness (I had to correct autocorrect giving me silliness. I should have left it as silence and silliness!) but latterly I have introduced as a thin layer, and using my prayer rope, (what I call) the Lord's Prayer. I attempt to use 7 sections but not in an analytical way.
Without compromising the practice of CP I seek to allow the meaning to prevail and be is own interpretation. I am often amazed at how unique each session is and often never get past "our Father in heaven" which always blows my mind!
I like "he seems to see monastic Rules as something entirely separate from the keeping of laws and the policing of space. He sees monastic Rules as a practice by which people have performed their lives as art." It helps me to see more clearly what I aim any "spiritual practice" to be. Thanks for this and I hope you are keeping well. 👍
I love this, David. I imagine the vocalizing of this prayer, especially in the way you have invited us the encounter it anew, as a practice of ancestral reconciliation.
Thanks Adam. Yes, there's a kind of friendship or kinship across time here I think.
I encountered a sense of what ‘practice’ means for a body and a person by stumbling into a world of art and artists. It immediately felt like opening a door to endless generosity, resource and reciprocity. Frustration and altercation and wrestle too, but that at least makes it feel real and touchable. To be made both small and bigger by a thing will always amaze and delight me. I’ve loved exploring practice with you. I love how you’ve articulated it here.x
Ha, yes! Generosity with a dash of frustration. I guess the salty stuff of life happens between the two. Thank you for helping this course, and these thoughts in particular, along the way xx
Incredible work, deserving of time, space, and practice to take hold and unfold. I haven't made that time yet as much as I'd like, and I get the feeling I'll be returning to this series for a while. A million thanks for the treasure sharing, David, and all of the ways you show up.
My pleasure Taylor, it was fun to do! Thank you for following
You (and perhaps others) may find this site and in particular this page helpful. It surfaces my own practice of a daily office constructed on the pattern of the prayer.
https://ourcommonprayer.edublogs.org/characterising-the-flow-of-the-lords-prayer/
I take your point about the Aramaic (indeed I have blogged elsewhere about the linguistic issues of supposing the commonly touted Aramaic Lord's Prayer as original) however, I have myself learned the prayer in a form of Aramaic (there are at least two doing the rounds and I've tried for a bit more Semitic phonetics in what I recite) and sometimes find it somehow helpful to recite it. I suspect that the probablly-reconstructed forms are likely to be close to an original (and let's face it there is more than one Koine form in the gospels -so maybe the exact wording isn't the point).
Hello Andii. Thanks for this article. And no shade on any of the Aramaic versions, or others besides. To re-iterate what I’ve said above, I am wary of the power claims that haunt competing quests and anxieties to be closest to an original. I would be aghast if anything I’ve been involved in is ever fought for as the more correct way of doing anything. This, for me, is about folk-art, body politics, and prayer (in the sense of attention), not so much in-house comparisons of liturgies and practices. I’m not sure I’m really in that house, as it were.
I do agree with the wariness relating to hunting the original. I think it often misses the point that a lot of modern biblical scholarship has come to: the point is to think about how the texts that we have address us and support us and challenge us no matter the history before they ended up bound into a convenient tome for us (and now that tome is a set of e-texts, of course). I think that the only thing I kind of fight for is the notion that perhaps we really ought to take what I called The Common Prayer a bit more seriously as a structuring principle/scaffolding rather than simply a recital piece. There is a kind of psycho-spiritual set of dynamics in the order that both versions maintain. That said, I can't bear the idea of turning it into a straight jacket which would disallow spontaneous prayers without that structure, for example. I'm just surprised it hasn't influenced liturgical practice in that way more.
I wish you all the best with that Andii. Like I said, I'm writing from outside the house, so I exclude myself from the 'we' you're calling upon there. Please forgive my forthrightness. Its meant with gentleness, but I suppose my task here is nothing if not to be clear.
No worries. We all have a we to speak from a community, usually several potentially. Some languages distinguish between the 'we' that includes the addressee and the 'we' that excludes the addressee -just for interest.
Yes, I speak from a liturgical community and an overlapping set of reflective and spiritual communities. I have a dialogical and sometimes critical relationship to many of them. I didn't hear the forthrightness as ungentle; I already factored in that there are so many differences and takes on all this.
Thanks David, appreciate you (and Bruce) sharing your practice, it’s a risky thing to do as something so personal, organic and situational, as you describe it could come across as all the things you’re carefully avoiding. And yet we all got here by being shared with. I’ve tried the greek words a couple of times in my own similar routine and the strangeness of the words does shift where you’re proclaiming from. Strangely I heard them last night on BBC IPlayer, in a scene in a Greek church, episode 6 of an unnerving drama called Two weeks in August 🌞
I think you're right Ruth, it feels a risky business. I've become interested in exploring the body as a political space and the intentional forms of life that might come out of that awareness, but I always feel in danger of harming the integrity of what I'm talking about by talking about it! Gradually feeling out where that balance might lie, perhaps, and the danger of too many words. Been very glad of your engagement on this course, thank you.
Reading this, I kept thinking about the Marxist term, praxis, which had the sense of a lived, conscious, transformed and transforming life.
Yeah. It is itself a Greek word, and appears across the New Testament. Notably - with regard to the thoughts above - in Rom 12.4 where Paulos talks about the body having different parts and us all thereby having different "praxin". I've learned that Aristotle divided human activity into praxis, poesis and theoria. I'd like to think of the above as encompassing all three somehow.
Hi David. Yes I spend 20 minutes every morning in centering prayer - in silence and stillness (I had to correct autocorrect giving me silliness. I should have left it as silence and silliness!) but latterly I have introduced as a thin layer, and using my prayer rope, (what I call) the Lord's Prayer. I attempt to use 7 sections but not in an analytical way.
Without compromising the practice of CP I seek to allow the meaning to prevail and be is own interpretation. I am often amazed at how unique each session is and often never get past "our Father in heaven" which always blows my mind!
I like "he seems to see monastic Rules as something entirely separate from the keeping of laws and the policing of space. He sees monastic Rules as a practice by which people have performed their lives as art." It helps me to see more clearly what I aim any "spiritual practice" to be. Thanks for this and I hope you are keeping well. 👍
Thanks for reading Bruce. I'm pretty well thank you. Blessings