Gradually there had come to Mr. Pierce a need for those very forms which had seemed to him to endanger worship; there had come an increasing feeling that, as man was both flesh and spirit, there were rituals which gave shape to worship, gave it the beauty of form, not emptily but with, indeed, beauty as an added act. He had begun to understand how traditional prayer was fuller prayer, how there was in it not only the plea but the meditation on the plea, how there was in forms not only the discipline which they imposed but the disciplined soul’s profound response to them, its freedom in their order to return again and again to an act whose meaning deepened with each return. He knew that they could become empty, that a consummate prayer could be droned or gibbered without a thought, but he was learning that the consummate prayer prayed was an act of worship beyond all of the desperate pleading of his life, was worship which not only sought God, but revealed Him. Charles Mills, The Alexandrians, pp. 33-4
If nothing else, this is an exacting bit of phenomenology: it seems to me to get exactly right the experience of coming to and of abiding in “traditional prayer”. And what a line: “…not only the plea but the meditation on the plea…”
Filed under: philosophy or religion
