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Current Worship Theme
Psalms as Living PrayersFor the summer of 2022, we’re exploring the practice of prayer through the lens of the psalms. The theologian Walter Brueggemann describes the psalms within the framework of orientation, disorientation, and new orientation.
Just as Brueggemann places the psalms into three categories, author Anne Lamott places prayer into three categories: “Help, Thanks, and Wow.” She tells us the “… great prayer, Wow, is often offered with a gasp, a sharp intake of breath, when we can’t think of another way to capture the sight of shocking beauty or destruction, of a sudden unbidden insight or an unexpected flash of grace. ‘Wow’ means we are not dulled to wonder. We click into being fully present when we’re stunned into that gasp, by the sight of a birth, or images of the World Trade Center towers falling, or the experience of being in a fjord, at dawn, for the first time. ‘Wow’ is about having one’s mind blown by the mesmerizing or the miraculous; the veins in a leaf, birdsong, volcanoes.” As we explore the psalms, let us listen for the intimate prayers that we hear in them. Let us consider how these words align with our experiences and tap into the joy and pain that is expressed through them. |