Becoming A Prayer

 

Since entering into the Eastern Orthodox Church years ago my theology has taken a different shape because I have taken a different shape. I am continually being formed by our prayers and the mysterious love and peace of God in my life. If you have never been to a Divine Liturgy, I highly recommend attending one, but what should be known is that it is a prayer service by which we spiritually pilgrimage together before the throne of God where a table has been set to nourish us. We prostrate, venerate, light candles, incense and bring our whole selves as a prayer before God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit). Our prayer is never separate from our theology, but are inseparable and pertinent to uniting us with God and forming us into a community with the character of faithfulness to Christ and to each other. What becomes equally important is that we are people of prayer after we leave as well. Our lives should live in a constant interactive flow between God, ourselves and our world.

            I say all this to say that I want to spend more time in the coming months posting outside of my typical writing. Right now, it seems, the world needs something more edifying and hopeful in a time that has embraced its hate, blame, violence and hopelessness. So, I will be posting more prayers, hymns and poems that are nourishing for the human soul and mind. And I want to begin by offering this prayer:

From “The Prayers of Saint Isaac the Syrian”

As my soul bows to the ground, I offer to you with all my bones and with all my heart the worship that befits you. O glorious God, who dwell in ineffable silence, you have built for my renewal a tabernacle of love on earth where it is your good pleasure to rest, a temple made of flesh and fashioned with the most holy oil of the sanctuary. Then you filled it with your holy presence so that all worship might be fulfilled in it, indicating the worship of the eternal persons of your Trinity, and revealing to the worlds which you had created in your grace an ineffable mystery, a power which cannot be felt or grasped by any part of your creation that has come into being. In wonder at it, angelic beings are submerged in silence, awed at the dark cloud of this eternal mystery and at the flood of glory which issues from within this source of wonder, for it receives worship in the sphere of silence from every intelligence that has been sanctified and made worthy of you. (Prayer 1)

O mystery exalted beyond every word and beyond silence, who became human in order to renew us by means of your voluntary union with the flesh, reveal to me the path by which I may be raised up to your mysteries, traveling along a course that is clear and tranquil, free from the illusions of this world. Gather my mind into the silence of prayer, so that wandering thoughts may be silenced within me during that luminous converse of supplication and mystery-filled wonder. (Prayer 7)