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certainly not expected to limit our prayer lives to liturgy and
prayerbooks. The written prayers and songs of the Church don't
circumscribe my prayer life; they provide a foundation and
jumping-off place for pouring out my own heart to God: a wider, more
firmly-established launchpad than I've ever had before. The quality
of my prayers no longer depends on my subjective eloquence or
feeling on a given morning. Prayer becomes a daily act of faithful
obedience to God, and it's not so important whether I had a
particularly fervent or satisfying time of worship and prayer. Since
I am not the audience, the question I ask after prayer and worship
isn't, "How good was it?" but rather, "How did I
do?"
In a way it's nothing new
to use the same prayers every day. I've always kept a list of ongoing
prayer requests. And for many years I've used the Lord's Prayer
as an outline to keep my prayers on track so I'd remember all the
ways I mean to pray.
To my surprise, the more I
pray the same prayers daily, the more meaningful they
become. An unexpected benefit, too, of using the prayers of the
early Christians, is that in becoming part of me they are shaping
the way I think and worship at all times.
G.K. Chesterton had this
to say about repetition:
The
recurrences of the universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an
incantation, and I began to see an idea. A child kicks his legs
rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because
children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit
fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and
unchanged. They always say, 'Do it again'; and the grown-up person
does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not
strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong
enough to exult in monotony.
It is
possible that God says every morning, 'Do it again' to the sun;
and every evening 'Do it again' to the moon. It may not be
automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that
God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of
making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of
infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is
younger than we.
The
repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a
theatrical encore. I had always vaguely felt facts to be miracles
in the sense that they are wonderful: now I began to think of
miracles in the stricter sense that they were willful. I meant
that they were, or might be, repeated exercise of some will.
(Orthodoxy,
pg 60-61)
Tito Colliander said,
Frequent
repetition is important: with frequent wingbeats a bird soars high
above the clouds; the swimmer must repeat his strokes countless
times before he reaches the desired shore. But if the bird ceases
to fly, it must be content to dwell among the mists of the earth.
And close beneath the swimmer lurk dark and threatening depths.
(Way
of the Ascetics, pg 68)
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