A Commitment to Prayer

A Message from the Rector, the Rev. Dr. Christopher D. Girata

This fall, we continue our emphasis on committing to discipleship. We will continue to ask for commitments to serve and give, and this year, we will ask you all to explicitly commit to a life of prayer. By explicit, I mean that we want you to be thoughtful about how you commit to structure your daily and weekly habits to make sure prayer is an intentional part of your life. I’m fond of saying that actions create habits and habits create identity. If you desire an identity rooted in Christ, taking intentional actions to create healthy, faithful habits are necessary for our good.

We are in the third year of our four-year shift toward deeper discipleship commitments. At Saint Michael, we have identified four specific pillars of discipleship that help guide our development. By now, I hope you can rattle off the pillars: pray, learn, serve, and give. Two years ago, we emphasized giving. Last year, we emphasized serving. This year, our emphasis is on prayer.

Each year, as we emphasize a new pillar, we also ask you to make a clear commitment. That commitment is meant to be as much an intentional gift to you and your development as it is a healthy part of our practice as a church community. A clear individual commitment gives us—the whole community—the opportunity to hold one another accountable to who we hope to become.

Put another way, God calls each of us to use our gifts in the world and to practice our faith in ways that help us deepen our discipleship. If left alone, we might find ourselves going off track, succumbing to the temptations of the world.

When we commit to discipleship in a community, the community can help us stick with the goals we set for ourselves.

When we stick with our goals, set faithfully in response to God’s call, we grow in significant ways over time.

Prayer is a way of life that shapes us and defines us over our lifetime, and it can become our deepest spiritual root. “Through prayer, we deepen our relationship with God as we engage with Him in our daily lives.” That’s the description you’ll find on the prayer page of our website. It’s a very simple introduction to a highly impactful way of life.

This year, I want you to make a commitment to pray. The commitment to prayer can look like many things and can theoretically be as unique as each one of us. That being said, there are some fundamental ways to commit to prayer that I’d like to suggest.

First, a commitment to prayer can be fully corporate. As Episcopalians, we believe in the power of corporate prayer. We have a saying: Praying shapes believing. From the very beginning, the Anglican reformation was anchored on the idea that worshipping communities should be able to worship in their own language. Thomas Cranmer was the Archbishop of Canterbury when the Church of England separated from Rome, and he is credited with authoring the very first Book of Common Prayer in 1549. That first BCP was an explicit English-language liturgy to replace the Latin liturgy of the Roman church. From the beginning, Anglicanism was rooted in the conviction that corporate worship was critical to our identity as followers of Jesus, and facilitating worship in the common language was a foundational step in the right direction. One way to make your own personal commitment to prayer this year is to commit to being present and participating fully in our corporate worship. You can define that commitment in many ways, but a simple way would be that you commit to being physically present in Sunday worship every week you can be. We like to say that attending worship can be easy: If you’re in town and not sick, show up.

The second way to commit to prayer is individually. Prayer is always personal, but there is a different personal experience of prayer when you’re with a group than when you are alone. Individual prayer can be more meditative and unique. Every person is different, and that means that every person can resonate differently with different prayers. As meditation, prayer can separate you from the pressures of the world and help you to feel God’s presence and to hear God’s voice in powerful ways.

One of the challenges of individual prayer is simply getting started. Sometimes individual prayer can feel like a blank page. You know you’re meant to write, but you just don’t know how to start. As simple as it sounds, the best way to start is to just start. We share a very rich prayer tradition, and if you feel a bit intimidated by individual prayer, I suggest you begin with one of the traditional prayers you know by heart, such as The Lord’s Prayer. Give yourself a gentle runway to begin your meditation with familiar words that will warm you up. I believe you will find that once you begin, you will feel more comfortable shifting into prayer in your own unique way.

Which takes me to one of the secrets of individual prayer: you can pray your way! As Episcopalians, we can be lured into thinking that there is a right and proper way to pray, but the truth is that prayer is as unique as you. I hope you will rely on the gift of our Anglican tradition to help create a sure foundation for you, but like any set of boundaries, once you know them well, you can bend them. The boundaries of our prayer tradition are not meant to hold you back, but rather they are meant to help you flourish. You have been created in God’s image, and you are called by God into a life-giving relationship. Trust that God is ready and waiting to connect with you and that prayer is one of the best ways to make that connection transformative.

This year, in a booklet that will be mailed soon, you will be asked to deepen your commitment to your discipleship. We are growing together, and being nudged into a deeper way of being is good for all of us. I ask that you trust this community—trust your church—and allow God’s Spirit to work deeply in you and help you grow into the person God created you to be, one step at a time.