A film critic I like says that an artist lives a life somewhere between “the mundane and the marvelous.” I believe that’s true of most of us. It certainly is true of people who pray.
I have spent much time over the past few years studying, thinking and talking about the practice of fixed-hour prayer. To pray this way is to throw down the anchor of your prayer life somewhere between the mundane and the marvelous, between the daily and divine.
At some point, all of our high-minded intention and discussion about the life of prayer has to work its way into the daily of our lives. It has to be stuck in and around the schedules and chores of our days. At some point we need to move away from talking about it and move into saying our prayers.
If the marvelous that is possible in prayer is to have a chance to appear, it will most likely be because we have done the mundane. The appearance of the Divine is often dependent upon the attention to the daily.
Today we remember Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux , d. 1153. This message was adapted from “Between the Daily and the Divine” written by Robert Benson that first appeared in the July/August 2010 issue of Lutheran Woman Today magazine, (now Gather) magazine.