Global Centrum: Chicago, J.W.M., Global Priors Council
December 9, 1974
Long ago on the Long March of Church Renewal, I recall
being offended at Methodist and Baptist worship services where
the service began in full Praise, without the office of Confession
and Absolution. I think I knew all the while I protested, however,
that the service was fine, but somehow, on the wrong track. When
I began to take seriously the Office of the Hours, I was struck
by the fact that they were doing, in principle, what I thought
was off-track Sunday mornings.
In talking about "I believe" previously,
I used an analogy without stating the second half of it. It comes
off as temporary belief, or blind faith in some temporal given.
When the Orthodox Church says, "I am a believer," they
mean belief in something unique in existence.
"I believe" fundamentally means belief
that the Creator is the Redeemer. There is nothing abstract in
the statement that my being has a particular relationship to the
Redeemer who is the Creator. In one sense, that is all you can
put your hand out about. However, you do not put your hand out
about the statement, "I believe that the Creator is the Redeemer."
As a matter of fact, if you put it that way, you may as well not
say, "I believe." For you are dealing with temporality,
which is a propositional statement. "I believe" always
comes in concretion.
I have said "I believe." I have said "I
care." I am not sure you can ever say "I hope"I
really do not think that exists. Hope emerges when you are in
a state of "I just believe: I just care."
Buber said that all men live by faith in something.
When you have faith in that beyond which there is not
in the Mystery one's relationship of faith is not
only qualitatively but quantitatively different. Buber is right.
Calvin is very clear that, abstractly, The Creator comes to be
The Redeemer, but, in terms of devotion, it is a phenomenological
experience. The Redeemer is always prior to the Creator.
Interestingly enough, "I believe" has to
do with the Creator who is the Redeemer. "I care" has
to do with the Redeemer who is the Creator. When you look into
your own experience you grasp that when you deal with Faith you
deal with the Redeemer. When you deal with Love you are dealing
with the Creator.
The Morning Office is the rehearsal of the great
act of Redemption. Before the Redeemer, you are dropped into prayers
of confession. Evening Office has to do with the Creator. Before
the dynamic of the Creator, you are dropped into intercession.
I thoroughly believe that no man's devotional life is complete
unless he participates in the great eternal drama of redemption
and the great march of creation. That is why our prayers are so
crucial, and why we must be very careful! We are not a religious
order, whatever we are; we are in the midst of building a religious
order. When dealing with the Redeemer, you begin with prayer as
Confession. It is in the midst of whosoever confesseth that sin
is forgiven. In that moment, you break forth into Gratitude.
In that great moment of belief your God cares about
you; he forgives you, he receives you as his own, and dresses
you in garments of purity. It is your wonder about being alive
that occasions your prayers of gratitude. It is in the midst of
gratitude that you grasp the deep fragility of your life. In your
belief, you say, "Help thou my unbelief." You are aware
that something other than yourself "believed you." (No
religion in this.) Even then, ''kelp thou my unbelief." In
the rehearsal of your weakness through the dynamics of prayer
comes incredible sympathy for your brothers. And then you flow
into intercessory prayer.
Now and then I find myself not liking our prayers
in the morning during Daily Office. I am aware that the prayers
there are not like prayers in the evening and ought not to be.
In evening prayers, you are standing before the great Creator
who is Redeemer. In the morning you back into prayers. It is not
quite from that perspective. Backing in, however, is the only
way to stand before what you believe, then care. It is the AllinAll
you care for. Everyman cares. Everyman loves. But when you love
the AllinAll, there is not only a quantitative difference
but a qualitative difference in your love. Now this is what is
Meant by Universal Benevolence. You start with intercessory prayer.
I am always frightened by how easy it is to unconsciously
slip into petitionary prayer. That has haunted me. You get a little
concerned, outside your shriveled up little self, about your neighbor
and about the world; but that experience of being weakness itself
so invisibly eats you up that you slip into petitionary prayer
about your own weakness, almost forgetting that you started out
praying for your neighbor. But, this is the way it is and the
way it should be.
How, how do you describe the moment of the prayer
of Gratitude? This experience of weakness is different from the
experience of weakness coming from the other direction. The experience
of gratitude is different. It is the light. In the first, you
are bowed in confession. Your life is received, and it almost
explodes into "glory halleluia!" In the other, you are
at the bottom, and there is a quietness. Oh, what wonder in grasping
yourself on a strange, incomprehensible journey, utterly undeserving
of this unique opportunity of being born and having a chance to
die.
As you plumb the depths of that the first line in the prayer of confession is "Godly sorrow." It is the experience of grasping yourself not as individual, in one sense, although solitariness is intensified to the point of exploding beyond itself. You are overwhelmed with the sense of scandal that you ever spent one precious fragment of a second in rebellion or in misuse of this unbelievable
wT~r'1 ~
In the eventide, I like to think you should center
on intercession and let the Holy Spirit lead you as it will. However,
I believe I am one up on the Holy Spirit. I have trapped him.
It would not surprise me at all if he led you into an awareness
of unfathomable weakness, indescribable gratitude, and here the
sense of the scandal of God Himself.
In intercessory prayer it is crucial to let the Holy
Spirit have his way. You can disagree with this if you like, but
in the morning it is ridiculous not to get down on your knees
if you can: to stay there feeling like everyone is looking at
you until you feel thoroughly like an idiot inside. Let the Holy
Spirit run through your mind so fast that you feel doubly absurd
because you had been falsely told that prayer is trying to get
focus. No! Prayer is relaxing and getting out of focus, letting
the Holy Spirit "rip" through.
Sometimes evening prayers are crummy. Some idiot
reads the Psalm in the wrong voice, or the liturgist is clumsy.
You do not mind, but it just ruins the whole thing for you. On
days when this sort of thing does not happen, something inside
of you says, "Today, I want to pray. I am going to take some
time here today." You are hoping that the liturgist is not
one who "thinks you should only be there three minutes and
rings that bell. Then you think, "What on earth should I
pray about?" So many things come to you; and if you are like
me, due to false early training, you try to latch onto one thing.
But, no! Remember the people you criticized in your lifeusually
they were old clergymen, saints of the Church, who would start
praying and would never cease. (I once visited a place where the
clergyman finally said, "Now, while Brother Martin finishes
his prayer, let's turn to Hymn Number 4.") I have gained
a new appreciation for those people.
Evening prayer should express what I described as
happening in the morning. You cannot possibly finish because when
prayer happens to you there is no end to it. I am suspicious of
someone who focuses on one thing in the evening. But even that
is wrong; who am I to judge whether or not the Holy Spirit is
going to focus you on one thing? Just let Him pray through you
the way He will. Here is the place where the leader has to have
his intuitive faculties way out. If he does not pray before he
goes in there himself, he is in trouble. The first liturgist is
not running things. He is trying to let the Spirit that is present
be present in whatever form that takes. He should not try to be
there thirty minutes or try to leave in five minutes. I think
you should push toward brevity. But, when the Spirit breaks loose,
you have to know it. Let it go.
I want to say a series of practical things. I am
not too happy with the Psalms. In 1971, we counted a total of
2,460 verses in the Psalms. This is an average of 7.3 verses between
normal breaks within the Psalms or at their conclusion. This breaks
them into about one Psalm per day. I remember once someone read
two Psalms. Now, I know I am eccentric, but I just about went
through the roof. My spiritual being is not capable of taking
any more spirit images than you have in one poem at once. I would
suggest that if the selection is over eight verses, just read
until a natural break. It is crucial to read only a brief selection.
The reader's style is crucial as well. Parts of the
Bible must be read in lowkey drama. We missed a lot in between
the words of our Luke readings, because people did not read with
interpretation. The Psalms, however, need to be read devotionally.
How do you read in devotion? Not very loud, but you must be able
to be heard. "The Lord is My Shepherd. I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside
still waters." You have to read it, each in your own way,
but in a devotional mood. If the word devotion bothers you, as
it does me, then in a reflective mood.
The liturgist's voice must be one in charge in the
way a guru's voice would be. The time for public voice is in the
morning. There should be no public voice at all in the evening.
There are places, very few and very short, where you speak together.
I do not even try to speak together. If my speaking blends in
with somebody else's, that is fine.
"Life up your hearts." I like that. I would
leave out the "Let us hear the appointed reading of the day,
Psalm 26, Verses 18." I think the second liturgist
should continue with the third part, which is the Gloria. He should
introduce that: "All the days of my life I shall dwell in
the house of the Lord forever." Then, "O Praise the
Lord," followed by the whole group saying the Gloria. Get
away from the cultic here. The whole group, quietly, no chanting.
no public voice, says: "Glory be to the Father
and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning,
is now and ever shall be. World without end. Amen." That
is included for the same reason the Gloria is behind the Psalms
upstairs in Morning Office. Then, the first liturgist says, "Let
us pray."
I have thought a long time whether or not you say,
"The appointed Collect of the day is the one on such and
such." I think not. It was distracting at first trying to
figure out which one it was. But it does not bother me anymore.
You should do it any way you want to.
The first liturgist says, "Let whosoever is
moved by the Holy Spirit lead the people of God assembled here
in intercessory prayer for the world, the church and our common
calling." I do not worry about "common cause,"
because of John Gardner's organization. I mean "calling."
God has a cause, but I am not too sure these days what my cause
is. I am, however, much clearer than ever before on what my calling
is.
The liturgist ought to save his own prayer until
the very en unless he feels moved by the Spirit to pray before
then. But, at the end he ought to offer a prayer and say, 'Amen
," and then, "The Lord be with you: And with thy spirit.
Amen. Amen." Then the tinkle of that bell.
liming is crucial. The room itself is very important.
A1tnough some houses cannot have the luxury of a separate room,
you need to have a space set aside. The arrangement in Chicago
Centrum is very good, although I think we should have kneelers
for everybody. They are more important than you think. The church
did not invent those for show, nor die they invent them for comfort.
They invented them for what a certain kind of comfort enables
you to do.
I have been delighted with experiencing undisciplined
discipline. I visited the mean, old, wealthy president of a corporation
in Honolulu. We had a lot riding on it, and I was scared. While
riding there in the car, I took a great deal of effort to figure
out just who was in prayer at that hour. Sitting in his office,
it dawned on me that I can no longer escape in any of the twenty-four
hours a day from being under the "guns" of prayer. Isn't
that something now?
I went to lunch with the Mayor of Bethlehem not long
ago. He reminded me that prayers continue in their chapel around
the clock.
That reminded me of the many Roman Catholic orders
and other believers in the world who are at prayer. After several
months in our midst, a person is very foolish not to decide to
BE at prayer every day. This has nothing to do with attending
or not for one day or six months. It has to do with
deciding to BE at prayer.
Oh, what a fine adventure it is to be with a group
of people with the guts to move into the most frightening place
I have ever been into the land of prayer
to search it out. Have you seen from NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC the map
of the bottom of the ocean? Our experience in prayer together
looks something like that. I never thought I would participate
in such a fine adventure in my lifetime.
Joseph W. Mathews
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