Is there anything more boring than repetition? There is no feeling, no emotion, no uniqueness, no life in the parroting of what has always been done. In things of the church, in the life of the Christ follower, this redundancy can seem to be almost deadly.
although …
As a girl, my church had, for so many years, a call to worship hymn … every Sunday. If I heard Thou Art Worthy once, I heard it hundreds of times! As kids we mocked it, ignored it and allowed out eyes to roll sarcastically in our heads.
Yet now, forty odd years later, when that song is sung, tears fall from my eyes and my knees wiggle to bend, for the repetition as a teen caused an inner chamber of my heart to hold those words more closely than might have appeared at the time. Those words were written on my heart by the same repetitive, boring means that I mocked.
I love the story of Joan Chittister, who, as a Benedictine nun, was introducing a new group of nuns to the community. She asked them,
“why do we pray?”
The women responded similarly to how you or I might …
- we pray to grow close to God
- we pray to confess our sings
- we pray to share our burdens
- we pray to ask God to answer our prayers
After awhile, a nun dares to ask the question that they all have poised on the lips,
“why do we pray?”
To which Chittister responds,
“we pray because the bells ring.”
“Bell” by Serhii Korniievskyi
To be obedient to the bell, to the ritual of praying (just) because the bell rings, is to ensure that we do pray, that we are obedient beyond desire … for desire can be fleeting, for we can be fickle. To be obedient to the bell is to ensure that whatever mood, whatever circumstance,
we pray.
Perhaps it is time to set a new reminder on my phone.
“To pray only when it suits us is to want God on our terms. To pray only when it is convenient is to make the God-life a very low priority in a list of better opportunities. To pray only when it feels good is to court total emptiness when we most need to be filled. The hard fact is that nobody finds time for prayer.”
– Joan Chittister
itsawonderfilledlife 