Holy Ground
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Too often we turn prayer into well-intentioned patterns of our own making. Too often we assume prayer is primarily about words. Sometimes there's an almost magical understanding that if we get the words right, if we trust enough or believe enough, God will «answer.» But most of us know that God is not a divine magician or our own personal valet and that prayer is much more than our feeble attempts to make God pay attention to what God already knows. Using the alphabet as a template of descriptive words and actions, Holy Ground: An Alphabet of Prayer invites reflection about prayer as paying Attention, looking for Beauty, showing Compassion, practicing Devotion, celebrating Enthusiasm–all the way to the end of the alphabet and discovering Wonder, X as mystery, and Z as Zeal. These reflections will help readers experience prayer as a place, an action, or attitude, a stance for recognizing and acknowledging God's presence in the midst of ordinary life–something like the sigh of the shoemaker, too busy to drop his worn shoes and kneel in disciplined prayer, but not too busy to sigh his prayer of gratitude. Prayer is so much more than words.
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An Alphabet of Prayer
Julie K. Aageson
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The prayers I learned as a child were bookmarked by Scripture: daily readings, family devotions, worship. Because I am steeped in the rich biblical traditions of a liturgical church, patterns of biblical prayer are rooted in my psyche. Early on, I found the stories of the Bible to be multilayered, complex, enigmatic—a way of listening to a mysterious God. Over the years, these encounters with Scripture continue to challenge and engage. Listening to God in Scripture is part of my habit, part of my history. But Holy Ground: An Alphabet of Prayer is not meant to be a theological or biblical description of prayer. Holy Ground reflects some non-traditional ways of thinking about the spirit of the living God and how God’s spirit might be heard in ways or places or acts often not associated with prayer. This book reveals my wrestling with a God who makes the ordinary holy. “Cleave the wood and I am there,” says Isaiah in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. “Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.”
Those twenty-six columns written for GATHER, revised and rewritten for book format, are the basis of Holy Ground: An Alphabet of Prayer. Readers will find here a collection of reflections about prayer as Attention, Beauty, Compassion, Devotion, Enthusiasm, Faith, Gratitude, Hospitality, Imagination, Joy, Kindness, Listening, Mindfulness, Nurturing, Openness, Play, Questing, Reverence, Stillness, Thanksgiving, Unity, Vision, Wonder, X signifying mystery, Yearning, and Zeal. This alphabet is one way of thinking about the practice of prayer in broader, more inclusive language and practice. It’s meant to help readers experience prayer as the sigh of the shoemaker, too busy to drop his worn shoes and kneel in disciplined prayer but not too busy to recognize and acknowledge God’s presence in the midst of ordinary life. And it’s meant to celebrate prayer in the broadest of ways as together with all of humanity we yearn to know God and to be known by God.
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