During this time of Pandemic, when every week seems to present a need to figure out a new way of doing things, I have discovered anew one of my favorite prayers from Morning Prayer - A Collect for Guidance:
Heavenly Father, in you we live and move and have our
being: We humbly pray you so to guide and govern us by
your Holy Spirit, that in all the cares and occupations of our
life we may not forget you, but may remember that we are
ever walking in your sight; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
While this prayer appears for the first time in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer (p. 100), it actually comes from a collection of prayers published in 1913, which attributes it to an "ancient collect" from 446 AD. So, it is truly something old and something new.
I could meditate on the opening address, "In whom we live and move our being" (from Acts 17:28) for hours. It is a beautiful profession of how the totality of our lives is enveloped in God's existence. This is very good news in a time of pandemic when we feel so disconnected with ourselves and each other. We are still not lost to God.
The heart of the prayer is for the guidance of the Holy Spirit to keep us focused on God as our grounding and center, even amidst the "all the cares and occupations of our life. . ." The hectic nature of our lives and its challenge to our relationship with God is not new. Faithful Christians were feeling this when this collect was first written 1600 years ago. Their struggles are our struggles, too.
Likewise, the remedy to these distractions is not some dramatic life change, but simply the act of remembering - remembering amid our busy-ness that God is here, too. Just that act, that casual remembrance, can bring us strength and bring us peace. And it is not even our own doing, but the work of the Holy Spirit. A random thought about God crosses your mind? That is the Holy Spirit at work.
It is comforting to know we are not alone. It also tells us that if our faith shares challenges across the centuries, so, too, does ancient strength speak to us today. The same God who moved the faithful to holy and transformative witness so long ago is still active and still moving us to holy and transformative witness today. God is at work in this time to strengthen, heal, and restore us even as God is planting seeds for the future to come.
One of the things I love about Anglicanism and the Book of Common Prayer is that our tradition continually finds connection between past and present, and our lives today are linked through our prayers with the wisdom and witness that has gone before us. We do not need to find new answers. We need to recover or rediscover the source and strength that has been there all along, but still speaks and acts in fresh ways for us today.
The Prayer Book is a treasury of such resources. I recommend just thumbing through the book every now and then and reading what pops out at you. It is God speaking through the ages. The promise is that the more we focus on God amidst our cares and occupations, the more grounded and strengthened we are to move through the maze of daily live, and the more we are able to see and celebrate God's work in the world.
Blessings always,
Dirk+