Praying Selflessly

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Life Together reminds us that we practice selfless prayer when we pray the psalms:

The psalms teach us to pray as a fellowship. The Body of Christ is praying, and as an individual one acknowledges that his prayer is only a minute fragment of the whole prayer of the Church. He learns to pray the prayer of the Body of Christ. And that lifts him above his personal concerns and allows him to pray selflessly.

To pray selflessly means that we practice a letting-go of many seemingly important personal needs. In the psalms we let the egocentric desires of the self recede into the background and eventually learn to let them go entirely. We enter the lives of other people, especially the poor. As we practice letting go of ourselves, we learn learn that our emptiness is filled with the suffering of others and the active Presence of God. We enter the place and space where "no things" weigh us down and we are lifted up with and for the world in Christ's Body to God the Father. This is the work of a lifetime, but it may surely begin and continue whenever we enter God's gift of the psalms.

_____

Image: Dean Mitchell, Rowena