Mar 23 2019

Suffrages

Give peace, O Lord, in all the world;

For only in you can we live in safety.

I have really come to enjoy my practice of Morning Prayer, reflection and writing. One of the great benefits I’ve found is some of the lesser known components of liturgical Morning Prayer, which is based on prayers established in the 1500’s. Repeated daily, these prayers could sound or feel old. But instead, I find they’re seeping into my soul, precisely because they are always with me.


I remember in college, talking to a non-religious friend who absolutely could not understand why I’d be involved in a tradition that said the same prayers. I’m still grateful for the question and the opportunity to ponder my why.


My why has to do with my active analytical brain. I have a very high-functioning – arguably overactive – left brain. That, coupled with a need for some certainty in my world means that I’m always plotting, or planning, or scripting, or considering. Someone once described liturgy to me as the verbal version of ritual. We say the same things regularly because they mean something. In any case, liturgical prayer – those prayers that we say in the same form at the same point in a larger structured prayer time – these prayers allow my overactive analytical head to relax, and just pray  My head knows what’s coming next. I can pray the words, because I don’t need to look them up, don’t need to fret with what’s next. And while my left brain is low-level occupied with liturgical prayer, my right brain prays. Freely. Without constraint, or worry, or planning. It’s sort of like knitting while I’m at a conference. Or doodling while listening to a lecture. My brain is just busy enough to stop its incessant activity.



The Suffrages are prayed every morning and come in the form of call and response. Give peace o Lord in all the world. Response?  For only in you can we live in safety.



This morning, I’m struck by the relationship to peace and safety.

Give peace O Lord feels like an incredibly personal petition these days. This doesn’t feel like a cry for the kind of peace that is the opposite of war. To be clear, I’m not trying to describe what it means empirically, or what it means to you. In my current place, this is what it means to me. Give peace to all of our insides – our souls and hearts. I’m not sure why it feels so internal and personal, rather than external. Maybe it’s the use of the phrase, “Only in you”. This feels like it’s about me and where I rest.



Or maybe this is about which comes  first – peace then safety or safety then peace. It’s not that I’m simply petitioning God for peace, and then reminding God and ourselves that when God gives us peace – then we can live in safety. I think I hear it the other way. When I live in God’s safety, then I am granted a deep peace. The peace comes as the result of my conscious and active and consistent choice to live in God’s safety. If all of us made that choice, to live in God’s safety, I do believe we would then see peace in the world.