|
About Responsive Prayer
A community leader prays aloud a series of
petitions to God. The people complete each appeal by responding
to it in unison. The response might be a simple affirmation –
Amen. It might be a plea for God’s attention – Lord, hear
our prayer – or for intervention – Good Lord, deliver us.
The response might be different for each petition, completing
its thought:
Leader: We pray for all who govern and hold authority …
People: That there may be justice and peace on
the earth.
The response might include a moment of silence. In all cases,
the back-and-forth of petitions and communal response is what
makes responsive prayer.
Age-Old
Practice of Making Community
The practice of responsive prayer is ancient and common to many
religions. The Amidah or “Eighteen Blessings,” the
central prayer of the Jewish synagogue, pre-dates Christianity
by about five centuries. It is prayed individually, and it is
also prayed responsively whenever a minyan (ten or more
worshippers) is present, with the congregation responding
Amen to each blessing. Jesus would have prayed the Amidah
at the temple, and some scholars have suggested that the Lord’s
Prayer may be his distillation of its three main themes: praise,
petitions, and thanksgiving.
Early Christian responsive prayers were used in public
processions to beg for divine protection from natural disasters
or aid for good crops, using the Latin response
Christe eleison (Christ, have mercy upon us). Also called
litanies, these prayers competed with and finally replaced
earlier pagan processions and prayers that had filled the same
social needs.
Responsive prayer is essentially social in nature. It draws
people together to express their relationship to God as a
community. When praying alone, my focus is often on my own need.
Oh God, save me! In responsive prayer, the pronouns are
always plural, and the petitions call for the welfare of the
community and the world. Responsive prayer turns my attention
away from myself, joins me with others, and draws me into the
world.
After a strong start, the practice of responsive prayer in
Catholic worship declined over the centuries as the role of the
clergy expanded, drawing more of the liturgy away from the
congregation to be spoken by the priest alone. The decline
continued in the new liturgies of the Protestant Reformation:
Protestant leanings toward the individual’s personal
relationship with God and against fixed liturgy left little room
for responsive prayer. The practice has made a comeback only in
recent generations, as the laypeople’s role in worship
reemerges.
Lifesavers
and Suspense
In the Methodist church of my youth, we sang hymns at Sunday
services and listened to scripture. Then at some point before
the sermon, the minister said out loud a prayer that was both
long (to my young ears) and, as far as I could tell, written by
him. I usually blanked out during that time, or daydreamed, or
paged through the hymnal for an especially bloody hymn to read,
sucking on the lifesaver that had miraculously risen out of my
mother’s purse. Ditto for the sermon. After the sermon, we sang
another hymn, and then we were released.
Occasionally, maybe one Sunday in five, something different
happened. The bulletin directed us to a number in the back of
the hymnal – a big number, way up in the 500’s or 600’s – and we
all stood for a responsive reading. The text was usually a Psalm
or other passage of scripture. Lines read by the minister were
interlaced with lines in bold to be read by us, the
congregation. The back-and-forth rhythm filled me with suspense.
What would he say next? How would we answer? I heard and read
the words with an attention no sermon ever called forth. It took
only a few encounters with responsive reading before I was
searching the bulletin first thing every Sunday morning, hoping
for a really big number.
So after I grew up and left church, then grew up some more and
returned to church, I was happy to find responsive prayers in
the Episcopal liturgy, both the relatively brief Prayers of the
People and the majestic litanies for special services or holy
days. And even happier to find clergy who encourage lay people
like me to write new ones.
Many
Leaders, One Community
The responsive prayers on this web site are original, with
liberal borrowings from scripture and the Episcopal Book of
Common Prayer. They’re written to be prayed in community.
They can be prayed traditionally, with one leader saying the
petitions and the people responding. Or, the role of leader can
be shared. For example, when praying one of these prayers in a
small group, each petition might be read by a different person
around the circle, with the whole group saying the responses
together. In a larger congregation, you might assign petitions
to individuals as they arrive so that the appeals can be heard
from all parts of the room. Again, the whole congregation
responds together.
When I’m praying one of these prayers alone, I still try to see
myself as part of a larger community, expressing to God our
needs, desires, and intentions for each other and the world.
Sources
Prayer of the Faithful, Walter C. Huffman,
Augsburg Fortress, Minneapolis, 1986, 1992.
Commentary on the American Prayer Book, Marion J.
Hatchett, The Seabury Press, New York, 1980.
The response “Lord, hear our prayer” is common to
many prayers. The response “Good Lord, deliver us”
is part of The Great Litany, found on page 148 of The
Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church. The
response “That there may be justice and peace on the
earth” is from one of the Prayers of the People in
the same book, page 387.
Christians can find a good introduction to the Jewish
Amidah or Eighteen Blessings at
www.hebrew4christians.com. For a more in-depth
discussion of the history and practice of the Amidah,
see
www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org.
|
