A Solid Prayer to Start Our Day
My first beginning and my last end
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Dear reader,
This is a follow up to Wednesday’s video. It’s a prayer that you might find to be a great addition to your own life if you’re wanting some help.
Writing this, In my mind’s eye are those who don’t have a lot of energy for prayer or are engaging it for the first time. If that’s you, simply starting the day with this would be a great step.
In Wednesday’s video I shared two short traditonal prayers that have become a meaningful part of my life. I read them Manual of Prayers Third Edition that is produced by the Midwest Theological Forum and The Pontifical North American College.
The former is based in the US and publishes theological material and organises courses. The MTF has a longstanding partnership with the latter, The Pontifical North American College, a seminary in Rome.
Manual of Prayers is a collection of cherished Catholic Prayers, though many of the prayers are relevant for people across the spectrum of Christian faith.
Before I go further, I’m aware that some readers may not be familiar with using books to pray. For some, prayer may have only ever been seen as a spontaneous thing… or maybe occassionally written by the person praying, so the idea of reading prayers in a book may feel foreign; weird even.
To connect it to something else, think about the songs we sing in church services. Usually they are addressed to God. They are prayers written by someone else. They just happen to be expressed musically. What’s significant about them is that they shape the nature of our prayer in that moment; they shape our intention as we engage them. They give us words to express that we might not otherwise have. They have the power to take us to a place, mentally, emotionally, reflectively, that we might not have otherwise gone to ourselves.
Prayer books act in a similar way.
For millennia the Psalms in the Bible have been the mainstay of the prayer life of the Jewish community and the Church, and over the last 2000 years the Church has built up a wonderful storehouse of meaningful prayers for all aspects of life and faith.
As I was reading throught the Manual of Prayers on Thursday, this one struck me as particularly good and worth adopting as a daily morning prayer in my own life.
You ma also find it helpful.
