I’m a baptist. We abhor liturgy. Anything that smells like vain repetition, like rote activity is quickly dispensed of. Last year around the blogosphere several began discussing prayer and the fact that for most of us, our prayer like stinks. I concurred.

This week I began reading Scot McKnight’s, Praying with the Church, and became interested in the morning, afternoon, and evening prayers. Scot gives good evidence of how this was applied in the Old Testament and the New, in the life of a good Jew and in the life of Jesus. Then I saw how the problem with my prayer life: my spontaneous prayers, meaning prayers that I didn’t read, but just sat down to pray, were themselves becoming very rote. I was saying the same things over and over - my “spontaneity” was actually rote. And I hate it.

So I took an example from Scot and ordered a copy of Phyllis Tickle’s “The Divine Hours”. It has prayers for morning, afternoon and evening and there are different books for different times of the year. Right now, it’s “Prayers for Springtime.” I’m looking forward to starting this practice tomorrow.

In the meantime, I recalled that Paul Littleton had a post on prayer and a tool that he was using called The Daily Office. I began this week using it, and have to say that I found the morning and evening prayers very refreshing. It was a beautiful thing to read the Psalms and to have a confessional prayer. And the variety was a joy.

Just as an experiment, this morning I went back to my old ways. It was a chaotic time. It was sputtering, lacking direction and any semblance of meaning.

My books came today. I look forward to engaging in the ancient-future praying.

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