Transforming Through Prayer: Reflections on Praying the Daily Office

Alex Swain, Corps Member 2019-2020

Beginning on the first day after our arrival, I have been praying the Daily Office five days a week, Monday through Friday, with my Beloved in the Desert compatriots! We begin Morning Prayer on Mondays through Thursdays at 7:00 AM and Fridays at 9:00 AM. We end our weekdays at 8:00 PM with Evening Prayer and both services occur at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, lasting approximately 30 minutes each.

Very rarely in my life have I ever spent 30 minutes in a state of dedicated prayer and never, ever have I so consistently and so dedicatedly participated in prayer, particularly prayer in community! Doing a tad of math, I realized that we spend about five hours each week, one hour a day, steeped in prayer and community in front of the altar of God. An hour a DAY in prayer! We are washed in prayer before we go out into the world to our placement sites at non-profits, and re-washed when we return in the evenings to close out our day. 

These prayerful oscillations defining the mornings and evenings create, for me, an air electric with the breath of the Holy Spirit. It produces a sort of deeply Christ-centered circadian rhythm. Day after day we kneel confessing our sins, acknowledging the necessity for petitioning the Lord, the Maker of Heaven and Earth, to forgive us the many grievous actions we have done (and the grievous actions we have done by leaving things undone). We are reminded of our absolution by God’s grace, we praise God, we bless God, we offer God thanksgiving. We continuously return to the altar of God, praying with mind and body and soul; bowing during the Gloria Patri, kneeling for confession, standing in praise. These oscillations around the altar of God have begun to mold my mindset into keeping the presence of God Almighty at the forefront of my mind. The command to “pray without ceasing” is becoming much less of an ominous task in my day-to-day and morphing into a deep wellspring of desire to commune with the Eternal and Living God. I am entering more fully into the process of turning away from the distracting and ungodly items in my life and, slowly, orienting this life of mine towards God. I suspect we are living more fully through these actions into metanoia, often translated as repentance, in the New Testament.

While we are physically oscillating to and from worshipping at the altar, we are simultaneously orbiting around the Psalter. At first, this emphasis on the Psalms was a bit strange for me. For much of my life the Psalms have been little more than spiritualized poetry. The Psalms now, from spending so much time with them, are beginning to inculcate themselves into my mind as prayer, as my prayers. Praying them is becoming less of a recitation of what I am reading and more of a recognition of a deeper reality that resounds in my soul as an “oh my, this is exactly what I need to be praying right now.” I am learning to relax into the Psalms, and I cannot wait to see how the remaining time with Beloved in the Desert will transform me and us as a community through prayer. Thanks be to God!