Scraps of Prayer and Lunch

Great conversation! Let's continue: 

Several comments in last week's entry worried that we were engaged in a game of trivial pursuit. Their caution is a good one: never let arranging the hymnals substitute for real mission! As I said in my first entry: liturgical minutiae--’should the thurible be swung in three doubles or in singles?‘--is not what this blog is about. However, some of the tiniest things we do together have subtle and far-reaching effect on our spiritual development and these things profoundly shape our greater mission. It’s exactly these little liturgical creases that I invite us to pay attention to. (As Buddhists will tell you: you learn to attend truly by paying attention to smaller and smaller things, until you discover that your breath is the most profound and wonderful of them all.)

 I was a monk for seven years (Society of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge MA). I quickly learned that it was commonplace knowledge that monks and nuns of any community fight hardest about two things: worship and lunch. Standing or kneeling? Butter or margarine? The pressure of monastery living is inescapable because so many things that would normally be chosen individually are collectively decided, and there are countless times that the “I” submits to the “we” over things great and small. One of the unofficial tests of maturity and incorporation that all the brothers in a monastic community are watching for is when a new member begins to say We more than I. 

Common prayer and common meals are intimate, sacramental activities. Core human events. People who damage their relationship severely will not eat with one another. Parts of the Anglican Communion are threatening not to pray with one another. The specifics of our conflict might be trivial; the values that underlie those specifics are not. In the monastery we scrapped over those bits and pieces of worship and lunch not because we monks were trivial, but because we were aware that tiny things shape us deeply when they are sacramental —when the outward signs reflect and shape inward reality.

Monks have been at living in community and praying their lives longer than most of us, so I expect we’ll follow similar behavior: of course we’ll disagree over these little things, but we care about them because we know they have deep taproots. They reach down into that water table I talked about several entries ago. 

As long as we choose a common life no one will get everything their way, but it’s exactly at this point that community becomes worth its salt. It’s in that conversation that conversion starts to happen, where communion occurs. It’s not about unity or agreement; it’s in learning to sit in open attention to small things, and to move from the I to the We, not losing the self, but offering it.
Posted January 15, 2010
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Comments

1

Daniel, Several years ago, while working in the Roman Catholic Church, I participated in a Liturgy workshop, actually 3 or 4 sessions, a sort of school, run by a very bright Sister of St. Joseph. One of the subjects was change vs. tradition, and an examination of both. She used a story which still makes me think whenever I look at an ingrained custom. You probably have heard "The Ashram Cat," the story of a Yogi's pet cat which caused disturbance at morning prayer and had to be restrained at the end of a 3' cord tied to a stake in the ground so that she could be near her master yet would not howl as she would if she were kept away from him. The Yogi died, leaving the cat. His successor kept taking the cat to morning prayer, although he did not know why his predecessor had done so, and when the cat died, a replacement was located and dutifully tied each day for prayer. And so on for 200 years until a great scholar wrote a tome explaining the necessity of a cat for the proper observance of morning prayer.

Bill Barber on January 15, 2010

2

Daniel, The observation you shared with me last night at dinner that "small" isn't the same thing as "trivial" has been on my mind all morning. Thanks for these thoughts. The practice I learned at St. Gregory's of asking "What did you notice" after worship has stuck with me, and extends out into my daily life. If I can be open to noticing instead of walled off as I walk to and from the subway...well...the whoel world shifts! Emily stlydias.org

Emily Scott on January 15, 2010

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The Rev. Daniel Simons

Author: The Rev. Daniel Simons
Created: July 21, 2009

Worship is the single greatest investment of resources in any church's life, including Trinity Wall Street, and it is the primary lens that focuses our life together. Worship is a language that links us back through generations and yet is newly born in each moment!

This blog focuses more on primal patterns than technique --looking at how we are embodied souls needing to act out our faith. It is a reflecting pool for leaders of other congregations, for members of Trinity seeking to understand the patterns of the liturgy more fully, and for seekers who are aware of or interested in the power of ritual.

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