November, 2007 Calendar In This Issue: For All Souls Day Body Prayer: A Consideration A Short Form of Self-Examination To everything, there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven Breath Prayer The Real Santa

by The Rev. Hartshorn Murphy

"They who pray do with the members of their body that which befits suppliants; they fix their knees, stretch forth their hands, or even prostate themselves on the ground"
    − St. Augustine of Hippo

So, I've been thinking a bit about "attitudes" of prayer. By "attitudes" I don't mean opinions or biases. This is not about having either a good or a bad attitude but rather it is about what might be more broadly called body prayer; the attitudes our bodies assume while in worship.

When I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church in the late 1950's, I was required to learn the catechism, which taught that there were three postures for corporate worship. We "kneel for prayer, sit for instruction and stand to praise." Summarized, this meant in practice that we knelt most of the time, with a brief interlude for bible lessons and sermon when we sat and we would stand for the hymns and the Creed, which was itself considered to be a "festival hymn", with its own body rituals of bowing and genuflection at particular phrases. This was basic; this was universal.

What this meant was that most of the time in worship was spent on our knees. Kneeling was the basic attitude of prayer for the people of God until the late 1970's. During the liturgical renewal movement which began in the 1970's, liturgists, advocates of change, reminded us that kneeling was a later development in corporate worship, although quite common in private prayer practice. (For example, the practice of kneeling during the Prayer of Consecration in worship was not introduced until the Middle Ages.) Ancient people stood to pray. This fact became startling real to me on my first visit to Jerusalem.

On the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is the modest monastery and church of the Ethiopian Church. Having failed to pay their share of the taxes for the upkeep of this central shrine of Christendom, the Ethiopians were exiled to the roof of the church hundreds of years ago, where they remain to this day. But if you worship with this ancient orthodox sect, you will experience a very long service in which all the monks stand − which is reinforced by the lack of any chairs or pews of any kind; just an empty sanctuary. When entering, you are given a stout chest-high staff to lean on, which takes the weight off the hips and lower back.

Re-discovering these older prayer attitudes, the reformers encouraged congregations to discourage kneeling altogether in favor of the more ancient practice of standing. Kneeling, they argued, tended to over-emphasize individuality at the expense of the corporate. Unfortunately, clergy of my generation trained in the midst of these paradigmatic shifts, embraced these changes but did little to educate a reluctant laity to understand why. A resistant worshiper was far too often only given to believe that their life-long practice was "wrong" or "out of date". A succession of trial liturgies did not help. Everything felt a bit provisional and uncertain and to some, as "change for change sake".

But behind the shift was something substantial and real: a shift from an emphasis on personal piety to corporate worship. Whereas the body prayer of the church of my youth (1950's-60's) suggested that Sunday worship was about my personal experiences of, and relationship to, God; the church of the 1970's and beyond has stressed the communalness of worship. And that is a shift of paradigm indeed. Whereas once the emphasis was on a group of individuals gathered together for personal prayer; now the emphasis would be on the people as the Body of Christ. No more dramatic example of this shift exists than the re-drafting of the Nicene Creed from the first person singular pronoun ("I believe") to the plural "we". So visceral was the negative response that the first "new" prayer books prior to the final new edition of 1976, had to be amended to include both the so-called contemporary "we" and the traditional (read: antiquated) "I." (See pg. 326, 327). Thus the creed was being recast as a statement of what we the Church believe irregardless of what you accept or reject.

The shift in pronoun − reflecting a larger shift in emphasis from the individual to the corporate - has been now, a generation later, universally accepted. The same can not be said of the Confession.

Let's be clear. The confession has always been a corporate confession. It is the prayer of the Church Catholic (universal) for the sins she has committed and the good deeds she has omitted. It is an acknowledgement that "no man − or woman − is an island." You may be a very moral, righteous person but you live in a society and world which is corrupt and disordered. And so, while in the General Confession, I bewail my individual contributions to a fallen world; the emphasis is on this: "We confess that we have sinned…"

One of our members some months ago complained that s/he resented the emphasis of the Church on groveling; on making people feel guilty all the time when "we're all doing the best that we can." Without debating the "best we can do" claim, the issue is primarily not what this individual may or may not have done in the week since his or her last confession but is rather on my need to own responsibility for the world we daily uncreate.

An analogy: Some white people resent affirmative action because they never owned slaves, nor did their parents or their grandparents. True enough. But at the same time, 400 years of slavery and segregation have left a stain of institutionalized racism which affects American life whether the individual white person is prejudiced or not. The activist Dick Gregory used to say that: "all the white people in America could leave tomorrow, and we (as Blacks) would still be catching hell with these racists institutions left behind." As a part of that slavery/segregation legacy, white persons in America enjoy a set of privileges blacks do not. That remedies to address this corporate racial inheritance should be taken is reasonable and obvious. That no individual white person should be inconvenienced in instituting those remedies is the essential conundrum of the courts.

As individuals, we share in the burdens of the past which have shaped our present and will, unless we change, determine our future. Global warming is one such legacy of the industrial age in this, our "information age."

Returning to worship: unlike the experience with the Creed which only asked for a shift in language, many congregations- including our own − have resisted a shift in attitude from kneeling to standing for the confession. In part, this is due to a lack of understanding of the nature of corporate confession. But this is only a very small part of it. The larger context is that people want to approach the Holy, cleansed. I have a need to jettison my own stuff: my personal abuses of others and my resentment of being abused by others; my sinned and sinned against. And where is that to take place other than at the confession?

The reformers would tell you that it should have happened on Saturday night (seriously). And if you were a Roman (or Anglo-) Catholic, it should happen at confession before a priest in the confessional on Saturday afternoon.

The assumption is that individuals would do a thorough soul searching (a moral inventory) the night before, confessing these things to God in private prayer and then enter the sanctuary on Sunday ready to engage the community. In other words, Church is no place for prayer (if by "prayer" you mean individualized "me-God" conversational prayer, except for the "four spaces": the time before worship, before coming to the rail for communion, returning to the pew after communion and at the end of worship before re-entering the world). Church is for liturgy (literally: the work of the people).

So controversial was this shift, that there are no attitude rubrics before the confession. ("Rubrics" are the italicized "stage directions" in the prayer book, so called because they formerly were printed in red (ruby) ink.) This was intentional. In the decade following the "new" prayer books' publishing, it was striking to see how this act of kneeling (or not) became politicized.

I served as a deacon/curate at a trendy parish in Baltimore from 1973-75 as this shift was being promulgated and resisted. The clergy and the in-the-know avant-garde laity would stand for the confession while the resisters would kneel. Oh, did I mention that the standers would glare disdainfully at the kneelers? The absence of a rubric was understood to be "permissive" (people can either kneel or stand as they prefer). Well and good. But people prefer uniformity over chaos and so the "liturgy wars" persisted for some time.

But the reality is that our body prayer remains to this day out of sync and at variance with our corporate verbal prayer. And I would argue that such an essential conflict underscores and contributes to the discomfort a person may feel when confronted with this sentence from the confession we presently are using:

"We have cooperated with systems of injustice; we have built our prosperity upon the lives of others who suffer."

Specifically, individually, my kneeling posture informs me that while I am guilty of some rather mundane sins, I am acquitted of that one. Would saying these same words in unison with others while standing together before God and each other make a difference? Quite possibly − for of this, we stand convicted. (Much the way the accused is required to stand before the judge at verdict and sentencing; the world should stand to acknowledge our culpability before God for our abuse and neglect of God's creation and of one another).

And while a personal examination of life on Saturday night − or any time - is laudatory, the reality is that we likely should make a space for both our individual and corporate confession. Perhaps in the emerging church, people will be invited to first kneel in silence to confess in prayer their personal sins and then be asked to stand and aloud confess with the congregation gathered, the corporate sin of the Church.

Rather than being a compromise, such an approach might well acknowledge our dual nature as individuals planted in, and a product of, the human community.

Copyright © 2007 St. Augustine by-the-Sea