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Spirituality in the midst of activity


It's been a while since the last post because life. Life was full - so full it sometimes felt like we were going to get overwhelmed. Or that, you know, we were like the car in this picture. It was, frankly, more important to find time to pray than to write about it. I did, however, spend time reflecting on what spirituality looks like amidst busy-ness.


It's fine for monks, isn't it? Their communal life is oriented around prayer. As more ordinary followers of Jesus we're often told to do the same - and all it leads to, in my experience, is a heap of guilt when life refuses to bend itself to whatever the latest iteration of the Rule of Life is. So my aim in this post is to be realistic about life while offering ways of thinking about prioritising prayer. Feel free to let me know what works and what doesn't. But above all, DON'T FEEL GUILTY.


1. If you put a printer on your desk, the papers, pens & post-its will accumulate around it. If you put a moment of prayer in your day or in your week, life will swill around it and that space will stay if you guard it (and don't, as it were, start putting files on top of the printer). However, if you fill your whole desk with printers and scanners and laptops there will be no room left to work - and in the end you'll be forced to clear your desk leading to no printing etc at all. So advice one is to mark a moment for prayer: regularly, in a pattern, in a timescale that works for your life (daily, every other day, weekly, whatever). And guard that space - even if "all" you do is sit in silence with God for 5 minutes. Then be ok with the rest of the day / week / month being crazy busy.


2. Work with the grain of your life as you work on ways to pray alone or with your family. Can you only manage one family meal a week because of extra-curricular activities? No problem. Just commit to saying grace at that one meal. Or doing a round the table examen-style conversation. Or everyone offering a thank you and a please each. Or just counting blessings like the 'I went to the market and I bought...' game. Honestly, whatever works.


3. Bedtimes, like meals, are another unavoidable fact of life and so offer another window in which to pray. It doesn't have to be long and it doesn't have to be fancy words. "Thank you, God, for this day, especially for... Please be with me tomorrow when..." Or the Examen, or use some or all of Compline, or get the kids to pray however they want, or (again) whatever works.


4. Which brings me to point 4: feel free to get creative (or steal other people's ideas). Ask God to show you how to add prayer to your family life - and feel free to get a little help from the internet if you would like to. Or to adapt things you read about so they work for who you are. And where you're at in life.


5. Nicely leading to... life has seasons. Circumstances change, children grow up, their needs and yours change, the rhythms of life change (I now miss the days of 7pm bedtimes like crazy: no more alone time for the husband and I now that there are teenagers wandering around). So what worked last year might need to change, and change again. Or even last week. Or yesterday. And that's totally ok. If there was a magical correct answer we'd all know it and do it by now. A bit like parenting really. We're all muddling through as best we can in the messes and majesty of life, trusting in a loving God who holds it all.


6. All that said, St Paul does enjoin us to 'pray without ceasing'. And since we (probably) almost all fall short of that (well I do), the only result can be a feeling of inadequacy and that pesky paralysing guilt. But context matters. And so does our understanding of prayer. This is what Paul actually says: "Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you." So first of all I think this is a description of the Holy Spirit's transforming work in us as much as it is a command. And the three - rejoicing, praying, giving thanks - are simply different angles from which to understand what God desires for us. Namely, to be rooted in Jesus and aware of it, so that we cannot help but rejoice and give thanks, which is prayer. It's about pulling apart the space between stimulus and response, so that whatever the stimulus (circumstance), we are able to recognise that in the power of the Spirit we are able to respond by turning to God, trusting the Spirit to bear the fruit of joy and gratitude.


But it's also about how we understand prayer. If prayer is only ever a string of words (and Anglicans are rather wedded to words) then it's impossible to pray without ceasing. But if prayer is more about the awareness of the Divine in the whole of life, then regardless of busyness, we can tune into that Presence that goes before us, comes alongside us, and mops up after us: thanks be to God!


Photo by ahmad syahrir from Pexels

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