A Red State Mystic.

ONE OF THE most glorious parts about being unemployed is that I get to read a lot. I've been working my way through Kathleen Norris' Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks and a Writer's Life. I have experienced personally her description of Acedia, I just never had the word/concept to describe it. To use a worn-out metaphor: its like I've been putting together a puzzle of my sins and failures (numerous, they are!) without a big picture of what they mean. I heartily recommend it to everyone, even though the beginning is a bit academic.

ANYWAY, SHE GIVES the best definition of how Prayer works that I've ever read:

"As a writer, I must begin, again and again, at that most terrifying of places, the blank page. And as a person of faith I am always beginning again with prayer. I can never learn these things, once and for all, and master them. I can only perform them, set them aside, and then start over (185)."

AND THIS IS exactly what we do every evening when we pick up our Prayer Books and say, "O God, make speed to save us" or on Sundays and other times when we hear, "Almighty and everlasting God, unto whom all hearts . . ." Each of these are not built upon the previous times we heard them, but a fresh start at prayer. Some might call this a new creation.

PERHAPS THIS IDEA of prayer being like work is lacking in that we clock in and clock out and spend x number of hours in prayer each in succession. Milligan students put it as "getting your card punched for heaven" for your little devotions. Hours upon hours, all built on the previous experiences. With this understanding there are masters of prayer who know its greatness and its pitfalls, who know how to make it work. There are beginners who stumble.

NO, MAYBE THE idea of prayer is that it is more of a garment. Something we wear for a moment, then take off. Then we come to it afresh and wear it again, then we take it off. In prayer, there are no experts, no long hours of experience, but simply one moment of prayer that all of us come to again and again: we put it on and we take it off. We are born anew to when we come to that moment. We are born anew when we leave that moment. In this being born again, we are transformed into the likeness of Christ, our Lord.

OF COURSE, TS Eliot (a devoted Anglo-Catholic, by the way) said it better than I ever could:

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time (Little Gidding)."

I DON'T KNOW about you, but I find this all entirely refreshing!