Presby-Musings

I'm not that good at just sitting down and praying for more than a few minutes.  My mind wanders, I get distracted too easily, and sometimes (if I'm attempting a bit longer prayer time) I find myself drifting off to sleep.   I spent years beating myself up about my prayers struggles.  It didn't help that I had memorized a verse years ago that would invariably come to mind when I was feeling poor about my inability to sit and pray for any length of time.   The verse is from James 5:16, and it reads: "The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective."    When I was feeling poor about my prayer life, I would think things like, "A righteous  person doesn't start thinking about what he wants for dinner, or what meetings he has later in the day when he prays.   A righteous person doesn't fall asleep after he's been praying for five minutes."   Two things happened that changed my attitudes about prayer:  First, I finally figur...

I don't typically pray in conventional fashion.  I pray when I journal every morning.  I pray in conversations with other people.  I pray in silence while driving in my car.  I pray by reading prayers or poems by people who write the best prayers or poems.  And I pray the Lord's Prayer quite often, or read from the Psalms, or prayers and poems written by others when I can't think of what to pray.  I had to give myself permission to change my prayer life years ago when I realized that my efforts prayer weren't really working.  I always felt kind of bad that when I would set aside time to pray (just me, a place to sit comfortably or sometimes to kneel), I would doze off about halfway through all of my petitions to God. Sometimes it even happened when I was praying with other people. I'd be praying along, "Lord, I just want to you bless my family, shower us with your bountiful goodness. I pray that you would grant me more patience and peace, especi...

The first short story I ever read written by Flannery O'Connor was " Good Country People ."  I think I read and re-read it five times that first sitting.  It was so thoroughly Southern and shocking--so full of religious imagery and violence. I couldn't shake the feeling that somehow it was a story about me--even though such a thing was impossible.   " A Good Man Is Hard to Find " soon followed, and I was confronted with O'Connor's uncanny ability to take a thoroughly irredeemable character and then somehow redeem her through suffering, shame and degradation.  As I read, I found myself in turns glad that Joy/Hulga was getting her comeuppance, then full of pity afterward.   There was something about the way O'Connor wrote that resonated with my often self-loathed Southernness, and made me almost proud of it in ways I could not fully describe.  Proud in the way that one might show a scar from a particularly nasty accident that almost t...