home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- praying:
-
- "The practice of Christians in praying the Psalms is straightforward: simply pray through the Psalms, psalm by psalm, regularly. John Calvin expressed the consensus of the praying church when he wrote that the Psalms are 'the design of the Holy Spirit . . . to deliver to the church a common form of prayer.' People who belong to liturgical traditions (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Episcopal) have prayer books to guide them through a monthly cycle of praying the Psalms daily. The rest of us can easily mark the Psalms into thirty or sixty daily sections to guide an orderly monthly or bimonthly praying of all the Psalms. That's it: open our Bibles to the book of Psalms and pray them-sequentially, regularly, faithfully across a lifetime. This is how most Christians for most of the Christian centuries have matured in prayer. Nothing fancy. Just do it. The praying itself is deliberate and leisurely, letting (as St. Benedict directed) the motions of the heart come into harmony with the movements of the lips." (Eugene H. Peterson, Answering God, © 1989 HarperCollins, p. 7)