Prayer Books

Because Lent is coming our church is doing a group of home studies on prayer again. This time we are reading "Becoming Jesus' Prayer: Transforming your life through the Lord's Prayer." I picked up my copy on the way out of breakfast at the fellowship hall.

Yesterday's poetry workshop was held in the church library. While there I tried to talk about "Genesis Meditations" by Neil Douglas-Klotz. Not remembering his name, I went looking in the card catalog just in case we had a copy. We didn't but we had another book under his name. "Prayers of the Cosmos," which I have sworn to get around to reading, is translated by him and has commentary too. The description of the book on the dust cover says it has body prayers that will, "take us beyond reading and understanding the teachings of Jesus by teaching us to experience the sound and feeling of Christ's words." This sounded so enticing to me that I checked the copy out from the library, not being able to wait through the task of purchasing a copy of my own. Because the material in this book are copyright protected I feel awkward about even typing a sample here. Instead I am sending you off to read the Amazon site where you can "look inside" the book and read the first prayer here.

Because, as I've mentioned, things sometimes come to my attention in threes, I think it is significant that I am now enmeshed in three prayer books. I have the Book of Common Prayer, the Lenten study book "Becoming Jesus' Prayer", and "Prayers of the Cosmos." It seems to me that my prayer life will be taking a step forward. It has been rather sporadic of late even though I know that I need prayer daily to keep my connection to God vibrant. I hope that the upcoming weeks and studies of prayer will encourage better prayer habits in my spiritual life and daily routine. If you are reading this and have any good prayer books or individual prayers you would like to share I hope you will. Peace! Hope! & Joy!