Our next meeting will be on March 1, 2007, 7:00 p.m. We will initially meet at St. Thomas Lutheran Church, 1285 Barnes Mill Road, Richmond, KY.

Here are directions on how to get there:

• Go to I-75's Exit 87, where I-75 meets Barnes Mill Road.


• Go west on Barnes Mill Road for one mile.


• The St. Thomas Lutheran Church is located on the left side of Barnes Mill Road.

The church's phone number is 623-7254.

Once everyone gets to the church, we will all go (about a mile into the country) in carvan to the Curtis-Pike Community for Evening Prayer.

If you plan to come, please call or email Carol Poston (985-5572) casposton@yahoo.com so that she can let the Curtis-Pike Community know how many of us to expect.

You will discover your visit to the Curtis-Pike Community to be a great blessing (more about it in a later posting), so be sure to call Carol and be with us on Thursday, March 1.

The blessings of Jesus be with us all,

Andy

We met last Thursday at First United Church for our sixth discussion and Evening Prayer, and Andy was privileged to meet Steven Sells (who came the week before when Andy was absent). Steve lives in Lexington and works at University of Kentucky Livestock Disease Diagnostic Center. Steve's name, along with his email address and phone number, is now in the following list. Welcome, Steve!

Tom Bryan (328-3334) Tom_bryan@bellsouth.net
June Harnack (626-8535) rjharnack@yahoo.com
Leslie Farris (228-0277) momfarris3@aol.com
Jim Farris (228-0277) momfarris3@aol.com
Mason Smith (623-0692) mason.smith@eku.edu
Carol Poston (985-5572) casposton@yahoo.com
Fr. Birch Rambo (623-1226) tbrambo@bellsouth.net
Andy Harnack (582-3368) andrew.harnack@eku.edu
Grace Gutekunst (624-2090) gegutekunst@aol.com
Patricia Harris harlov4@cs.com
Virgil Brewer (623-5292) virgil.brewer@eku.edu
Steve Sells (859-523-0806) sfsell1@uky.edu
Stephan Locke (623-2068) slocke@uky.edu

Our discussion centered on how we best understand the Psalms as a vital part of our Daily Office. While we briefly took note of the history, numbering, the nature of psalmic poetry, kinds psalms and major themes, and possibilities for singing the psalms, the major thrust of our conversation was on how to pray the psalms. Here is an excerpt (and Select Bibliography) from the handout Andy passed around:

Many Christians go to the Psalms to find one or more that express his or her particular feelings and thoughts at the moment or for the occasion. Bibles often list such “appropriate” psalms or psalm verses as follows:

· When you want to praise God : Psalm 92:1,2, Psalm 100, Psalm 150
· When times are hard : Psalm 138:7,8, Psalm 94:17-19, Psalm 18:1,2
· When your integrity is tested : Ps.1:1-3, Ps.119:9,11,104,105, Ps.25:10,21
· When you want God's protection : Psalm 27:4-8, Psalm 91:1-16 )
· When you are tempted to hit back : Psalm 37:7-9
· When you want God's guidance : Psalm 32:8, Psalm 27:1,14
· When you need to be reminded of your dependence on God : Psalm 105:3,4

Such an approach to the psalms may be described as “individual-centric”; that is, a person chooses a psalm to fit his own personal experience. There is nothing wrong with this approach; however, it is not the approach we use with the Daily Office.

When praying all the psalms, one after another, we necessarily find ourselves praying without regard to our personal circumstances or feelings at any particular moment. When entering a lamentation, for example, initially we may not feel a personal need to lament. Indeed, life might well be going along rather nicely. When praying the psalms in the Daily Office, we therefore leave a good bit of ourselves behind and forget, for a time, our personal idiosyncratic feelings for a space and time larger than ourselves. We enter what may be described as variously as “prayer of God,” the intercessory prayers of our High Priest, the prayers of His Body, the Church, and the prayers of all people throughout the world. When entering the Psalms we open ourselves to the Lord Jesus praying before His Father within us (Hebrews 4.14-5.10), we allow others in the Body of Christ to use our voices, and we open ourselves to the articulations of a suffering world. Listening to the Spirit crying “Abba” within us, we cry and pray with the Paraclete, everyone’s Advocate before the Father. When praying the psalms we prioritize our corporate identity with the world, the Church, and the Holy Trinity so that words, thoughts, feelings, concerns, and passions (not originally our own) become our own in prayer. We become the articulation of God and the voices of the voiceless, the poor and suffering whom God loves and wishes to save and for whom he desires justice.

This way of praying the Psalms accords, confirms, and reinforces the way our Jewish and Christian ancestors approached “the prayer book of the Bible.” They memorized and sang the psalms as pilgrims to festivals; they sang the psalms with musical accompaniment in temple worship; they memorized and chanted the psalms in family settings; Jesus knew them by heart, and while walking muttered them (as Psalm 1 recommends) and while teaching referred to them over and again (e.g., Luke 20), and while dying cried them out in anguish. When clarifying recent events on the way to Emmaus, he opened the psalms to his disciples so that they could see the will and way of His serving Lordship (Luke 24). Our Lord prayed and lived out the Psalms. With Him, so do we.


Praying the psalms is for us God’s way of changing our lives so that, no longer preoccupied with our personal needs (important as they are) we see, hear, and speak the world from God’s point of view, from within the “mind of Christ” (Philippians 2), so that in the psalms we become more human, more like Christ.

SELECT BIBLIGRAPHY

Athanasius, “Praying the Psalms,” A Letter to Marcellinus, in On the Incarnation. Translated and edited by A Religious of C.S.M.V. New York: Macmillan, 1946.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Meditations on the Psalms. Translated and edited by Edwin Robertson. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002.

---. Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg P, 1970.

Brueggemann, Walter. The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg P, 1984.

---. Spirituality of the Psalms. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress P, 2002.

Lewis, C. S. Reflections on the Psalms

Pius Parsch, “Praying the Psalms,” from Der Wochenpsalter des Römischen Breviers, available at http://www.breviary.net/comment/commentpraypsa.htm

Reardon, Patrick Henry. Christ in the Psalms. Ben Lomond, CA: Conciliar P, 2000).

Our Thursday night meeting (Feb. 8) of the Daily Office group assembled at Our Saviour Episcopal Church. We changed our tradition slightly this week by opening with a service of Evening Prayer from The Book of Common Prayer, led by Fr. Birch. We then discussed "The Shape of Daily Prayer" based on Dwight Vogel's article of the same name. (This article is available elsewhere on this blog.)

The discussion also involved a little history of The Book of Common Prayer, and the efforts of its principle author, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, to create a book that would center itself on readings from Scripture. In particular, we discussed Cranmer's collects, which are tiny gems of prayer that have influenced generations of English-speaking Christians.

We closed our meeting with a Compline service taken from the New Zealand Book of Common Prayer. This service was beautiful, but somewhat different from the standard prayer offices we've been studying. Fr. Birch led this also.

We look forward to seeng everyone at First Presbyterian Church on Thursday, February 15.

Stephan Locke is bringing a friend to the Daily Office. Last evening Stephan (that's with a final a in his first name) Locke handed me a wonderful gift: the business card of Stephen (that's with a final e in his first name) Sells, to whom Stephen had given Robert Benson's Daily Prayer, along with some CDs. Stephan then told me that Stephen would like to come to our meeting tonight and perhaps join us in Daily Office fellowship. Both Stephan and Stephen work at UK's Livestock Disease Dignostic Center. Please be sure to welcome both Stephan and Stephen tonight!

This evening we all (well, except for June and me who will be in Nashville this afternoon) will met at The Episcopal Church of Our Saviour. Mason will be leading a discussion on "The Shape of Morning and Evening Prayer," and afterwards Fr. Birch will take take into his parish's new sanctuary and carry us through Evening Prayer. If you have time, either before or after this evening's discussion, you may wish to visit The Shape of the Daily Office. Have a blessed evening!

It was Pastor Rollin Tarter's birthday yesterday, and last evening at First Presbyterian Church, after we wished pastor "Happy Birthday" with songs and gifts, we passed around various copies of the Daily Office and shared with everyone what the Office means and does for us. Stephan Locke was especially eloquent in his winsome gentle way as he spoke of his listening to God in the "dawn-breaking" Morning Prayers. And Pastor Rollins told his parishioners about his participation in the Company of Pastors and how important it is for him, as a morning person, to begin each day with the Office's quiet and contemplative reading of Scripture. And then Grace Gutekunst, so loved by everyone present, held up her Worshipbook and told the story of her coming to the Daily Office many years ago and and how each evening and morning she opens and closes her days with its guidance. Afterwards a number of people, both men and women, had many questions and were given promises of guidance as they too indicated that they wish to enter the rhythm of the Church's ancient and every-new prayer life. Our thanks to everyone who enjoyed the supper, the fellowship, the birthday celebration, and the quiet witness to the blessings of the Daily Office--the day-by-day prayer practiced among us.

In spite of the cold and light snow, this evening's discussion and Evening Prayer was exceptionally warm--might we say, "toasty with the Spirit of God" as we met at First Presbyterian Church. Within our conversation on lectio divina or Sacred Reading, Tom and Stephan introduced us to (if Andy has remembered it correctly) "African Lectio," the practice (at the Episcopal Church of Our Saviour) of reading Scriptural verses from various translations, pausing after each reading for silent reflection, and then sharing what each translation brings, as it "brushes up against another," to our appreciation and understanding of God's Word for us. A wonderful way of doing "sacred reading"! Andy passed around "The One and Only Book," Christopher de Hamel's review of Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayer, 1240-1570 by Eamon Duffy (Yale UP), noting that for centuries Daily Office books were the single most popular books for millions of our spiritual mothers and fathers. Look, Professor Dufy says, at Holbein's sketch of St. Thomasas More and his family "at prayer, all holding copies of exactly the same book, doubtless identical printed Books of Hours [i.e., the Daily Office], so that all are praying together from the same text at once" (NYRB, 15 Feb. 2007: 42-43). Today we too hold ourselves together--as a small ecumenical family--in later additions of the Daily Office.

After our discussion, Grace Gutekunst introduced us to and led us in Evening Prayer with the Upper Room's Worshipbook, a particularly attractive evening liturgy. After slowly and quietly speaking the Phos Hileron, we listened to the psalm and the reading from the Gospel of Mark, offered intercessions (and in silence lifted up personal petitions), joined our hearts in the Our Father, and blessed each Person of the Holy Trinity before returning home.

We were especially blessed with the presence of Pat Harris, whose name we add to the list of our community. Here, in review, are all of us who are coming together in the prayers of the Daily Office:

Tom Bryan (328-3334) Tom_bryan@bellsouth.net
June Harnack (626-8535) rjharnack@yahoo.com
Leslie Farris (228-0277) momfarris3@aol.com
Jim Farris (228-0277) momfarris3@aol.com
Mason Smith (623-0692) mason.smith@eku.edu
Carol Poson (985-5572) casposton@yahoo.com
Fr. Birch Rambo (623-1226) tbrambo@bellsouth.net
Andy Harnack (582-3368) andrew.harnack@eku.edu
Grace Gutekunst (624-2090) gegutekunst@aol.com
Patricia Harris harlov4@cs.com
Virgil Brewer (623-5292) virgil.brewer@eku.edu
Stephan Locke (623-2068) slocke@uky.edu

Andy asked that as many as possible come to next Wednesday's meeting at First Prebyterian Church for 6:00 supper so that afterwards we might share with our Presbyterian friends what the Daily Office means to us individually and in community.