Liturgy

One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.” Luke 11:1  NIV

Teach us – If prayer is primarily kavvanah, then why memorize the words?  Wouldn’t it be more spiritual to simply pour out our deepest emotional expressions of devotion and surrender and forego reciting some text?  Wouldn’t God rather have our inarticulate groanings, our exuberant cries, our songs, or our tears than some profession written or spoken by someone else ages ago?  Isn’t real prayer just the intimate conversation between Father and child?

Perhaps by now we’ve learned that model prayers, no matter who created them, are utopian chants leading to the real Greek meaning of ou-topis, i.e., no place.  But does that mean they have no value?  Once again Heschel’s insight helps: “We do not know what to pray for.  It is the liturgy that teaches us what to pray for.”[1]  The liturgy isn’t kavvanah prayer—but it is the instruction of what we put into kavvanah prayer.  Liturgy is the envelope of kavvanah.  Over the ages, His children have opened so many spiritual letters that they have discovered they can determine the contents from the condition of the envelope.  Liturgy is an attempt to teach the rest of us what the envelopes look like.  And once you know which envelope to use, your “letters” to the Father arrive Special Attention.

Envelopes aren’t letters, but they are certainly useful if you want to send a message.  To circumvent the envelope is to dismiss the importance of the address.  Yes, today we have digitized messages, and in the process, made them less human.  We communicate information instead of receiving an expression of personal connection.  We are efficient at the costs of emotional evacuation.  How different it is to receive a hand-addressed, hand-written expression of human connection in the mail than it is to open your email folder!

Can I gently suggest that prayers cannot be digital transmissions?  By their very nature, prayers are not efficient, informative, or efficacious.  They are invitations for divine attention.  As Heschel notes: “Contact with Him is not our achievement.  It is a gift, coming down to us from on high . . .”[2]  The best we can do is color the envelope.  Liturgy is the human prayer coloring book.

Before you address your envelope to God, you might want to gather together all the crayons.

Topical Index: liturgy, envelope, coloring book, prayer, Luke 11:1

[1] Abraham Heschel, Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 205.

[2] Ibid., p. 199.