we mark week after week, we are challenged to celebrate the good times and grieve for the bad, to recall our joys and confess our failings. This rhythmic passing of time is one which the monastic tradition understands profoundly. The monastic life of regular prayer and worship, often in places of outstanding natural beauty is, as Esther de Waal notes in her book The Spiritual Journey, designed to help anyone ‘become more conscious of the sacredness of time and place’ (E. de Waal, The Spiritual Journey, St Bede’s Publications, 1993, p. 49). In other words the monastic life draws people deeply into ordinariness though the passing of time in a particular place and it is in that ordinariness that they encounter God.
Many people today are beginning to rediscover the value of monastic living, whether through its traditional forms or through ‘new monasticism’ which seeks to use the insights of the monastic tradition both in modern day communities and in everyday life. One of the aims of new monasticism is to take the principles of monastic living and to make it applicable to modern life. Even so the particular principles that arise in monasticism are not for everyone. The challenge for each one of us it to find a rhythm that works with our personality, our home life and our working pattern.
One of the complexities of this is that, when you have found the rhythm that works for you and you have done it for long enough, then the rhythm carries you. I have often heard the people who say Morning and Evening prayer regularly, reflect on the fact that no matter how bad your day is, how unprepared for worship you are, how distracted you are by the many competing demands of life, the service itself carries you along. It is a little like steering into the current of a river. Once there the rhythm does the rest, pulling you closer and deeper into the presence of God. The problem is getting into the rhythm in the first place. It takes discipline, practice and sometimes pure grim determination to get over the hump of boredom, distraction and busyness into the rhythm beyond.
Finding the rhythm of your own soul
For some, saying some form of daily office allows them easy access to the deep rhythm of the soul. There are a wide number to choose from, ranging from those that have arisen from particular monastic communities like Celebrating Common Prayer from the Anglican Franciscans (Continuum, 2003), or Celtic Daily Prayer from the Northumbrian Community (Collins, 2005) to those that are more denominationally focused like the Church of England’s Morning, Evening or Mid-Day prayer (now available online and in a beautifully produced soft leather binding called Time to Pray) or the Jesuit podcast Pray as you Go, which can be downloaded to an IPod or MP3 player.
For others the rhythm takes the form of daily Bible study (with or without notes), or weekly prayer groups or Bible studies, or meditation alone or in a group. The list could go on and on. The form that the rhythm could take is almost limitless, the challenge that we each face is simply finding out what the rhythm of our own soul is at any one point in our life.
I learnt this lesson (again!) when my children were smaller. The two most influential rhythms in my spiritual life before I had children were daily reading of the Bible (or to be more honest aiming for daily and hitting a few times a week) and the saying of Morning or Evening prayer. Both of these went out of the window when I had children. Neither fitted easily into my life and I got to the stage of assuming that I had to give up on spirituality for a while until the children grew up.
If I’m honest this wasn’t a new struggle, simply a new form of the old one. I’ve always struggled with praying. The problem is that I’m an extrovert. My best thoughts come when other people are around. I think out loud. I’m closest to God when I’m doing something with my hands. Over the years people have suggested to me that I go on silent retreat to deepen my spirituality. I’ve learnt through bitter experience that this is a path of unremitting torture. When I do go on silent retreat, I get depressed and obsessed with my own inability to pray alone. Rather than bringing me closer to God it alienates me from myself … and so I’ve given up trying. I deeply respect – still even envy – those who can pray alone for hours on end, who enjoy silent retreats and need time by themselves to be with God but have given up beating myself up (most of the time at any rate) about the fact that I can’t do it myself.
Given this aspect of my personality and the stage that we had reached in our family life, it is hardly surprising that all sense of rhythm, prayer and spirituality went down the tubes until I realized that I was looking at it the wrong way around. Instead, with the help of a wise and wonderful friend, I began to work out what my own deep rhythms were, or to put it another way where I felt closest to God. Very much to my surprise, I discovered that I did have my own deep rhythms; they were just not what I thought they should be. The time when God draws closest in my life is ordinary times: when I’m spending time with my family; when I’m digging, planting and harvesting on the allotment; when I’m making things; when I’m reading and writing. My life, I discovered, was packed with deep rhythms of the soul, I just hadn’t allowed them to be counted as such.
Without these times my life grows thin and my inner reservoir runs dry. The challenge for me is to make these my ‘ordinary time’, the measured, rhythm of life in which I expect to – and often do – meet God. These are the places in the river to which I must learn to return again and again, until the undercurrent lifts me up and draws me along. They are my ‘ordinary time’ but that does not mean that they will be – or indeed should be – everyone’s. Many Christians need silence and aloneness, just as I need noise and company. The key is to find what yours is, and then to find its rhythm.
This also does not mean I never read the Bible (I am a writer and lecturer in the Bible after all!), nor that I don’t relish church services, but that for now, for me, at this particular stage of my life my rhythm of prayer takes an unusual but rich expression. I have no doubt that it will change in the future, and when it does I will almost certainly need to learn the lesson all over again, but for now I have a rhythm that works (except for when it doesn’t).
Everyday God
As I reflected on my slow realization about where my own particular rhythm is to be found, I have been intrigued by my own assumptions. I think I assumed that I couldn’t be praying when digging or playing or cooking because it wasn’t ‘sacred’ enough, not sufficiently set apart to be holy. This seems to be implied in the following quote from Joni Eareckson Tada’s book Heaven: Your Real Home (Zondervan, 1995):
Few are skilled at holding themselves in a state of listening to heaven’s music. Ordinary Things – like kitchen pots clattering, telephones ringing and TV commercials about frozen food and dishwashing detergent – drown out the song.
While I know what she is saying here, I disagree with how she expresses it. For me, the point is that heaven’s song sings just as vibrantly in and through the kitchen pots clattering and the telephones ringing but, like R. S. Thomas observed in ‘The Bright Field’, we go on our way looking for something else, or, as I did, we assume that heaven’s song cannot be found there and so look elsewhere. Our natural instinct follows that of Peter on the mountain of transfiguration who wanted to build ‘special’ dwellings for Jesus, Moses and Elijah to mark the importance of the event. We want to preserve the moment, set it apart and make it holy. To do this we build fine buildings, paint exquisite art, sing powerful and stirring music and go aside from our daily lives into silence and contemplation or Bible study and prayer groups. All of this is the proper response to an encounter with the one who created the world, who sits in splendour upon a heavenly throne, who has redeemed the world and will come again in glory. It is a good instinct in that it recognizes the sacredness of our encounters with God and sets apart times and spaces in which we can remind ourselves of God’s extraordinariness. However, we need to guard against the assumption that God can only be found in sacred spaces and at sacred times.
The God who was properly worshipped in the majesty and wonder of the temple in Israel, was also the God who yearned for humble, contrite hearts. As Isaiah 57.17 reminds us, God dwells in the lofty places and with those ordinary, everyday
