I’ll never forget the excitement and energy in the room after Rowe’s election was confirmed by the House of Deputies, and he was welcomed warmly onto the floor by Julia Ayala Harris, the deputies’ president. After his initial comments of thanksgiving, he reflected on his history of growing up in a family, a region, and in industries that absorbed massive changes. Many of them were forced to change or, in the case of businesses, close completely. In some cases, the crisis in his part of the rust belt yielded a resolute desire to change precisely for the sake of preserving and transmitting filial love and friendship, a passion that translated quite naturally into Rowe’s ecclesial laboratory, in which he has led others in an “experiment for the sake of the gospel.” Rowe’s story relates remarkably well to the existential crisis that is manifestly present amid various challenges and changes before us as Episcopalians. Indeed, this, in addition to his manifold talents, likely played no small part in why he was elected on a first ballot — thanks be to God for how the Holy Spirit worked in the House of Bishops. But this same God is “calling us more deeply into the unknown,” Rowe was quick to affirm.

What might this unknown reality look like, and what clues might we take from his words at General Convention?

Rowe’s address to the Convention flagged how it is possible to be both resilient and resistant to the changes that are needed for flourishing and long-term viability. Let the reader understand. He is clear to affirm his bona fides as a Michael Curry Episcopalian who wants to talk about Jesus, and who is grateful for the threefold platform of creation care, evangelism, and racial reconciliation. Rowe already embodies a leadership that is at once born of a commitment to the gospel and open to aligning institutional realities to the needs of the moment (and the future).

However, if we want a roadmap of his vision, then we can look to his remainder of his address to the deputies, in which he outlined three modes of change and renewal: structures, budgets, and relationships. The degree to which this vision is nascent or fully baked in his mind is unclear, but we have reason to believe Rowe is ahead of the curve, and has deeply considered (more than most) the changes that are necessary for our future. He has stared into the abyss of our problems, and has stepped forward as a priest, a bishop, and a leader whose track record indicates he is up to the challenge, by God’s grace. How are we to understand the necessary changes in these three areas, and does Rowe give us any clues?

“We must reform our structure and governance so that our essential polity, in which laypeople, clergy, and bishops — all of us together — share authority, does not collapse under its own weight,” Rowe said. In other words, Rowe called for fidelity to our polity while urging flexibility within our structures, “leaving room for the Spirit to work among us in this next triennium.” Rowe envisions this as a matter of faithfulness to the gospel of Christ, for as he noted in his homily at the Eucharist, we have an “idolatry of structures and practices that exclude and diminish our witness.” We may expect streamlining of committees and interim bodies, and a stronger commitment to the governing principle of subsidiarity in our church.

“It’s time to reorient our churchwide resources — budgets and staff — to support dioceses, congregations on the ground where ministry happens,” Rowe said, “to build on what dioceses and diocesan partnerships already do better than the churchwide structure and use churchwide resources to strengthen those ministries.” Rowe believes it was good that both the House of Deputies and the House of Bishops rejected C008 (a call to lower diocesan assessments to 10%), perhaps because more spaciousness is necessary for the conversation to be fruitful. Rowe clearly desires a premeditated plan before such a change is imposed upon the fiscal commitments of our denomination, many of which have significant ethical import. Nevertheless, we can expect to see him trimming the fat of unnecessary expenditures, as we have already seen in capsule form with his service of installation.

We must commit to creating a Beloved Community in which we can disagree without shaming or blaming or tearing each other apart. And here’s an idea: let’s use our anger at injustice instead of turning it inward and our desire to bring about God’s realm to forge a strong and respectful community of leaders. It might be nice if we took one more step toward behaving as if Jesus’ teachings of forgiveness and reconciliation are not just words, but the way we order our lives and our relationships with one another.

This was not a throwaway comment, as Rowe shared a very similar notion in his homily at the closing Eucharist: “And we must learn to have hard conversations with each other, with love and respect, so that we’re all pulling in the same direction: the transformation of the world by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.“

This third programmatic commitment was the most compelling for me to hear, and I believe it is the most foundational of Rowe’s overall vision. We will not reform our structures or our budgets without making significant headway in the reformation of our relationships. We have so far to go in learning to truly listen to one another in our denomination, to say nothing of our political situation in the United States. But imagine, what if our church actually decided to lead the way as an expression of the reconciling love of Christ we are so quick to reference in our gatherings?  Conservatives have often been too reactionary. Liberals have failed at points to truly understand those of a traditional mindset.

There are many kinds of fundamentalists, and they exist across the ideological spectrum. Even — and especially — our labels fail to capture the nuance and complexity that lies at the heart of each person. As Walt Whitman wrote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).” The Episcopal Church contains multitudes and contradictions, and I love it. However, our call is for the Church to embody something deeper and more interesting and faithful than the political and organizational cultures around it. Yet, we are all complicit in the sin of division and factionalism, of taking our organizational marching orders from the larger culture, and we desperately need to press the reset button. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

It was refreshing then to hear Rowe elaborate on this third mode of change by calling for a “relational jubilee,” which would cut across so many of our conversations. He said:

I ask you to think of the time between now and November when I take office as a kind of relational jubilee in which we can let go of the resentment, anger, and grudges that have weakened our leadership in this church in these pandemic and post-pandemic years. Too often the way we have behaved toward one another has not been a witness to the power of the Good News of God in Christ, and it has torn relationships and wasted capacity that we need for the work ahead. Sometimes I think we’ve been acting a little like churches that Paul writes about. We all profess the same faith and we are all bound by the same Baptismal Covenant, and I hope that where we are divided, we can find the courage to forgive one another and begin again. Start over for the sake of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Rowe is calling for the church to be the church, and for us to refuse to fracture along the same ideological fault lines of surrounding institutions. Even though the Communion Across Difference task force was not renewed, the posture Rowe embodied and the language he used called forth this very idea. If, as one bishop said, “The brand of the Episcopal Church should be Communion Across Difference,” then we have a Presiding Bishop-elect for whom this appears to be a programmatic commitment and a relational way of being.

Many years ago, in another part of our Anglican world, an American news reporter once had the following conversation with Archbishop Michael Ramsey:

Q: Have you said your prayers this morning?

R: Yes.

Q: What did you say in your prayers?

R: I talked to God.

Q: How long did you talk to God?

R: I talked to God for one minute. But it took me 29 minutes to get there.

It has taken us a while to get here. Rowe served on the Task Force for Reimagining the Episcopal Church (otherwise known as TREC), whose recommendations were reported to General Convention in 2015, and largely ignored. In electing Rowe, it seems we are finally ready to have the conversation we set out on having. If it took us a little longer to have it than we expected, let’s simply give thanks for a Presiding Bishop -elect who is ready and well-formed to lead us into this unknown reality. If you are looking for a roadmap for Rowe’s tenure, it appears these three commitments will form it — reform structures, reform budgets, and reform relationships, all for the sake of the gospel. This sounds like good news.

Justin was at the arena that day, his emotions wavering between courage and fear. The agony of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane continually came to his mind. He also thought back on the life that led him to this place. He had tried so many religious philosophies in a quest to fill the void in his heart. He became enthralled with Platonism, a philosophy that allowed his mind to “soar with wings” to the height of immateriality — and ultimately to God. But his life was truly transformed when he encountered the Jewish prophets, chiefly Moses, who foretold of a Jewish Savior, a Passover Lamb, a Son of God who would deliver, not only firstborn children, but the entire cosmos out of Egypt, out of exile, out of death into life. Justin recalled how a “flame was kindled in his soul” upon learning this.

So now, Justin stood in front of a Roman prefect, Junius Rusticus, who charged him, ironically, with atheism and idolatry. It wasn’t that Justin didn’t believe in God — that is not why they called him an atheist. It was that he no longer believed in more than one god; the gods of the Greek and Roman pantheon. You see, Justin had met a man who would become a dear friend, a man named Polycarp.

Polycarp had himself been led to faith by John — the Gospel writer, and one of the disciples who walked with Jesus. As a young Christian, Polycarp had been encouraged by a giant of the faith, Ignatius of Antioch, who passed through his hometown, and encouraged him to never deny his faith in Christ. Ignatius told him this as he was on his way to Rome, where he would be killed in the same coliseum, martyred mercilessly by the empire. And so Polycarp, who sat at the feet of the apostle John, and was mentored by Ignatius, would himself mentor a new generation of Christian leaders, including Irenaeus of Lyon (a Smyrnean who would go to France with the gospel), and Justin, also from Smyrna.

Justin’s faith that led him to the arena was anchored in his vision of the servant’s self-giving love of God in Christ through the Eucharist. In fact, one of Justin’s best-known contributions was to clarify what his mentors and those apostles and first disciples came to believe about the Eucharist, otherwise known as Holy Communion, or the Lord’s Supper — that they received nothing less than Christ himself.

This vision drove Justin to the arena to give his body for his Lord, who likewise said, “This is my body given for you.” In giving his life, this Messiah started a movement of martyrdom that would fuel a church whose main purpose would be to give the body of Christ to the world.

This changed the course of human history. Nobody has captured this as well as the British priest and monk of Nashdom Abbey, Dom Gregory Dix. In his book, The Shape of the Liturgy, he writes a lengthy and wonderful reflection on Christ’s command to “Do this in remembrance of me,” detailing the living legacy and linkage of Eucharistic fellowship through the ages:

Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.

What a beautiful image this is of people receiving the body of Christ, so that they can be the body of Christ.

Jesus died as a servant — showing us true power, true leadership, true authority, a true kingdom. This king discipled John, who discipled Polycarp, who discipled Justin Martyr, and down through the ages discipleship spread all the way to my family, and then me, and perhaps you?

Our deaths will likely be much less dramatic than Justin’s. But when we gather, we participate in the same meal of cosmic fellowship they received from our Lord. A meal of the past, a meal of the present, and a meal at the end of time, which we celebrate proleptically, caught up in the very banquet of heaven.

For when we eat this bread, and drink this cup, we remember Christ, and all who are caught up in his body. This is a meal with those who have gone before.With your grandmother, your departed child, your college roommate, your old dear friend, your lonely neighbor.

And yes, even with those you don’t like so well.

This last point, to me, is always the rub. I love having meals with friends. We all love table fellowship with those who are of our tribe. But there is a deeper way, a holier way, a redemptive way, a Christological way; a way to a table that is set, which cuts against our parochialism. Consider again the meal of Jesus. Consider those whom Jesus gathered at his table: a tax collector, a zealot, enemies!

Consider Judas. Isn’t it difficult to understand how Jesus could sit at a table with one he knew would betray him? Imagine looking into the eyes of the one who has most treacherously betrayed you — and then imagine saying, “I come not to be served, but to serve. I come to give my life, even for you.”

The meal of Jesus is confounding.

Until I realize that I am not simply Thomas, whose doubts run right alongside his faith.

I am not simply Peter, who denies Jesus time and again (although I do).

I am not simply like those disciples who fled and lacked courage when their friend was in trouble.

I am Judas. I am the one who betrays Jesus, daily even. And you are too.

When I realize this, I feel not condemnation but relief, a flame kindles in my soul, and I feel a release from shame, for God’s love is stronger than my shortcomings. Indeed, God’s power is stronger than our past.

At the Cathedral of Durham each Maundy Thursday, the dean and several members of the chapter commemorate this truth, as each person takes a sip from the Judas Cup. This tradition dates to the 14th century, but the story has now been shared around the world through social media.

The dean drinks wine from the cup, and then turns to each chapter member, saying, “One of you will betray me.” Each chapter member replies with “Surely not I,” mirroring scenes from the Last Supper.

Theologian Douglas Davies’s research claims the chalice used in the 14th century featured the face of Judas at the bottom of the bowl, so when monks drank from it, they could see their faces reflected onto that of the traitor, for they too were Judas.

The church has always proclaimed, as Jesus did, that we not only need to be redeemed from our sins, but we need to be redeemed from our self-righteousness. When we realize that we are Judas, we realize the imperative of sharing mercy, for we too live, breathe, and thrive only because of God’s mercy. When we understand this, we see there is room at the table even for the one who would betray me. Why? Only the radicality of this kind of love can change the world to its core, for it is the love that birthed the world in the first place.

It is the love of which George Herbert wrote in his poem, Love (III), depicts profiles a dialogue between the love of Christ and our reticence to receive him in a meal. It reflects the tension we feel in receiving what we may become, by grace. It is the meal to which even the traitor is invited to taste and see that the Lord is good.

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lacked anything.

“A guest,” I answered, “worthy to be here.”
Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I?”

“Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
“My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”
So I did sit and eat.

Until recently, however, the chapel, just off of our Nave, has remained largely under-utilized, except for two liturgies and a children’s chapel service on Sunday (all of which are wonderful). During the week it sits empty, like a fireplace without a fire, and I have longed for it to pulsate with the heat of God’s presence of prayer working through his people. For this reason, among others, my parish is committing to praying the daily offices of Morning and Evening Prayer starting this Lent and lasting, I hope, until the kingdom comes.

Why would we do this?

Anglicans have always thought it not only salutary but necessary to breathe with both lungs of the spiritual life — the Bible and prayer — which are brought together in harmony in the daily offices. If our conversion extends throughout our lives, which I find to be tacitly true (we are saved on the cross, we are being saved, and we will be saved on the last day), then our imaginations and desires must be converted as well, and this happens through saturation in sacred Scripture and attentiveness to the grace of God and his gospel, unearned and unmerited.

To be sure, there are many expressions, gifts, and practices related to the entire body, as Paul uses the metaphor in 1 Corinthians 12, which are important for the church to be the church. However, these are all utterly dependent upon and governed by our encounter with God through Scripture and prayer (including the Eucharistic Prayer). Breathing with both lungs of Bible and prayer delivers the most spiritual oxygen and support to the rest of the bodily functions, making our corporal works of mercy, care for the poor, the sick, and the imprisoned effective and delivered with spiritual muscle and vitality. For Anglicans throughout history, the principal way we have breathed with both lungs of prayer and Scripture has been through inhabiting the daily offices. Inhabiting such patterns of prayer precedes the development of passions that fuel the rehabilitation of communities.

Prayer and study of Scripture stand theologically prior to other critical and missional expressions of the Body of Christ in the same way a fountainhead directs the movement and flow of water in a beautiful fountain. “Faith is the fountain of prayers,” St. Augustine said. Why then do our fountains run dry? Is it because we forsake the very practices of faith that ensure that channels of living water still flow?

The spiritual synergy formed at the intersection of prayer and Scripture was certainly a principal concern of the reformers’ vision, especially Thomas Cranmer, whose leadership and faithfulness is embedded in the prayer book tradition. This vision is evident in the Preface to the 1549 Book of Common Prayer:

There was never any thing by the wit of man so well devised, or so sure established, which (in continuance of time) hath not been corrupted: as (among other things) it may plainly appear by the common prayers in the Church, commonly called Divine Service. The first original and ground whereof, if a man would search out by the ancient Fathers, he shall find that the same was not ordained but of a good purpose, and for a great advancement of godliness: For they so ordered the matter, that all the whole Bible (or the greatest part thereof) should be read over in the year; intending thereby, that the Clergy, and especially such as were Ministers of the congregation, should (by often reading, and meditation of God’s word) be stirred up to godliness themselves and be more able to exhort others by wholesome doctrine, and to confute them that were adversaries to the truth. And further, that the people (by daily hearing of Holy Scripture read in the Church) should continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God, and be the more inflamed with the love of his true religion.

It is, in part, this vision that fuels my desire to launch the offices in my parish. Now, to be fair, we have always been a praying parish, a community of people who care about prayer, and certainly long before I arrived. We have been a place fueled by programs on spiritual disciplines, which have given rise to evangelical fervor for Scripture, and a passion to invite others into being, as Søren Kierkegaard said, not merely admirers but followers of Jesus. However, in the last 14 months we have gone all in on our conviction that prayer is the fountainhead of our common life. We held a conference on prayer. I have written regular devotions on prayer. We did a small-group program on praying the Psalms, and a class on the Book of Common Prayer, and an Advent series on praying the offices. We held a women’s Epiphany dinner and a separate men’s gathering, both based on prayer. All of this brings us to the point of the divine offices and their shape in the Anglican tradition.

I suppose it is anachronistic to envision some golden age when all of England prayed the offices together. One will search in vain for such a moment, and we should be careful to avoid misreading the past. Anglican communities of prayer have always waxed and waned, depending on the fervor and faithfulness of clergy, lay leaders, and (throughout much of history) those in religious orders. How far we have come, however, from the days when all clergy were required to pray the offices by virtue of their vows, and to do so publicly so that laypersons had the opportunity to do the same. For approximately three quarters of the history of the church, praying the divine offices was an “essential function” of the job description for Christian leadership in the church in its Latin, Eastern, and English/Anglican iterations.

Indeed, one could make the argument, as some have, that the offices stretch back to Jesus and even further to the patterns of Israel, whose rhythms of prayer were rooted in divinely mandated festivals, and set times of praying at morning, noon, and night (cf. Ps. 1:2; Dan. 6:10; Acts 3:1). We know that prayer was ordered, and done in common, as the disciples and apostles are cited as frequently praying “in one accord” (Acts 1:14; 2:42, 46; 4:24). Finally, we know Jesus was given to praying at both day and night (Mark 1:35; 6:46 Matt. 14:23). This cumulative weight of piety and history stands behind Cranmer’s vision for daily prayer, which is summed up by Bishop Anthony Burton:

Cranmer drew upon elements of the eight daily offices (chiefly the versions used at Salisbury Cathedral) but the project was more than a simplifying of what was already there. He believed strongly that holiness involved entering into the Gospel. So he set about to create offices at which people could drink deeply and systematically from the Bible. At the same time he also fashioned these offices so that people would worship God according to principles of worship he found in the Bible itself. While Cranmer possessed a vast patristic scholarship, he was more concerned with the substance of apostolic worship than its forms.

We are thirsty at St. Francis in the Fields for this cool, living, nourishing, unconquerable, and sometimes tumultuous water of the Word that I hope our people will taste in the offices. Thus, we find ourselves living out a soft launch of the daily offices in our parish. We have recruited ten lay leaders and additional lectors, along with our clergy team, and we are treating this almost like a church plant within our parish. Martin Thornton would have called this “the remnant.” Either way, our launch team is learning how to officiate, and we are working out the kinks of holding daily morning and evening prayer before we launch to the wider parish in the season of Lent.

Those involved love it, even if a few of them find it intimidating at first. Our officiants span a range of ages. More than half are younger than 45, and all identify as zealous converts to the prayer book tradition. In addition to our clergy team, we have a helicopter mechanic, a hospice chaplain, a salesperson, a tech consultant, an accountant, two doctors, a social worker, and several retired laypersons who are passionate about this vision, each being trained to officiate, and each possessing varying degrees of experience with the prayer book. Some have prayed the offices for decades, and some only for a few weeks. In a very real sense, the offices are becoming the training ground and laboratory for lay leadership development, creating space for some to test a call to ordained leadership, while affording others the opportunity to express the priestly call given to them simply by being made in the imago Dei, a call that has been vivified through their plunge into the baptismal waters.

At times the offices are accompanied with dinosaurs, or the scribbling of crayons on a page, simply another expression of ora et labora, as children come in tow with those who are training to train others to form a house of prayer (Luke 19). My hope is that amid roars of the T. rex and strokes of Crayola, they too come to know the mystery Hans Urs von Balthasar articulated:

We must be vividly aware of [this mystery] as we pray, contemplating the word of God: that the whole compact solidity of our creaturely being and essence, and of the everyday world in which we find ourselves and find our bearings, is afloat like a ship above the immense depths of an entirely different element … namely the unfathomable love of the Father. The person who prays must experience the freedom of this love; not only the freedom which corresponds to the non-necessity, the contingence of his own existence, but the much deeper and wholly new and different freedom which accords with the Father’s “good pleasure”: we, his creatures and servants, are to be regarded and “esteemed” as members of his household, as his children and “co-heirs” with his Son. From the very outset, the coherence, correctness and justice of this logic, this way of thinking and evaluating, presupposes and embraces the whole medium of ineffable grace, a presupposition shared by even the most formal grammatical component of God’s language. Anyone who has ever sensed this fundamental mystery underlying our existence will take the necessity of prayer for granted … (Prayer, p. 43-44)

May they take the necessity of prayer for granted as well. For we have stressed all along as a parish that prayer and praying together is not one program among many, but is instead the very wellspring of our common life together, the very waters upon which we are guided to God’s New Covenant shores. It is in praying where the habituated reception of the Spirit’s indwelling power and presence is unfurled into our lives. Like a sail catching wind for the first time, and every time, the offices allow us to hoist the sails, not to speed along in our own strength, but to be precisely those who are empowered by the apostolic wind behind (and ahead of) the ark of our parish, who are sent along the waves of God’s providential workings in human history, always aware that “the Lord sits enthroned over the flood” (Ps. 29).

Breathing with both lungs of Scripture and prayer in the offices allows us to not only be inspired (inspirited) by God, but to die to ourselves daily, to be expired, so the Spirit, the breath of God, might flow out of us over the waters around us, bringing order out of the chaos of our communities.

So many of our people ride the week like a white water rapid while awaiting the lazy river that is the weekend. Nevertheless, we are testing a different approach in recognizing that each morning and evening are like the eddy of a river, where — if only for a moment — we rest in the swirling currents of grace, in order to be thrust back out again into the stream of carpool lines and surgeries, grocery shopping and conflict resolution, board meetings and Netflix. For these activities also empty into the sea of God’s purposes, who is working in all things for the good of those who love him. Conceived as such, the offices are then not a departure from how we normally live, but are a glimpse into how we should always live, attuned to the God who is closer to us than we are to ourselves.

In other words, we who are incurvatus se — the grain of whose hearts runs against the hard wood of the cross — are being tutored in being fully human before God. The cross is our rudder through these waters, Christ himself being bound to the mast, fully God, fully human.

The world has long forgotten how to be, yet alone how to be human. We are seeking to sit still, and to remember the echo of Eden. We hear it chiefly in Scripture, the lessons, and especially the Psalms. Our hearts burn within us as we see full humanity shot through with full divinity on every page of sacred writ.

As we recite the Psalms, they form within us the habits of placing ourselves fully before the God who is already present to us. Indeed, the Psalms invite us to place even those unsavory bits of our being before the God who knows about them anyway. The Psalms remind us that we were once naked without shame before God, even as we stand stripped bare before God again, as we hear in the Collect for Purity within our eucharistic liturgy: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid” (BCP, p. 323).

We are formed, therefore; disciplined, one might say, by the lectionary. We learn to hear passages sing together as a chorus of the saving works of God. Moreover, we learn how to feel, how to love, hate, lament, cry, remember, long, delight, listen, repent, exclaim, forgive, fume, and rejoice; in short, how to be alive to what resides under the dark waters of our souls and subconscious selves.

Of the Psalms, the 17th-century Anglican dean Thomas Comber wrote:

They are called the instrument of virtue, the marrow of divinity, the storehouse of devotion, the epitome of Holy Scripture. They contain excellent forms to bless the people, to praise God, to rejoice in his favor, to bewail his absence, to confess our Faith, to crave pardon of our sins, deliverance from our enemies, and all blessings for the Church of God. In the use of them we ought to exercise all graces, repentance and faith, love and fear of God, charity to all men, and compassion to the miserable. The composition of them declares they are fitted for men of all ages and degrees, in all estates and donditions, young and old; kings, priests, and people; in prosperity and adversity; here they may find that which so exactly suits them all, as if their condition had been foreseen and particularly provided for. (Prayerbook Spirituality, p. 153)

We are learning how to be honest about our darkness, and honest about the tragedies of our lives. I once heard Oliver O’Donovan address the moral challenge resident in Psalm 137, a psalm of mass slaughter and forgiveness. O’Donovan said, “If one has never burned with terrible loss, one can never know what it feels like to be relieved of it.” The divine offices take us there, among other destinations of the soul that stands at full spread before God.

For when we pray, we are standing at the threshold where heaven meets earth; the place where God’s kingdom is coming on earth as it is in heaven, the nexus where this inbreaking reality takes hold of our hearts (as we feel), our minds (as we know), our bodies (as we kneel), and our souls (as we give ourselves fully to God). We may feel that nothing is happening, or we may, like the Narnian children, step into the magical wardrobe and discover the life that is more real and holistically nourishing than the fumes that fuel our mechanized, excarnate and increasingly disembodied existence.

So as the church spins about creating social collaboratives, and food truck ministries, which may have their proper place, I am convicted and convinced we can grow a healthy, humble, and faithful church that changes its community most effectively by refusing to reinvent the wheel. The gifts for our renewal lie within our own tradition — ad fontes! If we have the courage to forgo the “shiny new thing,” we may just find our Lord himself, waiting in the boat, ready to take us to sea, ready to take us fishing once again; ready to take us to his fireside meal, where, having worked in the waters all our long days, we may know also the blazing warmth of his Communion, even amid the coldness and the darkness of the night.

To be a teenager growing up in this context was to be confronted with a confounding reality — a region ruled largely by conservative politics funded significantly by apocalyptic-laden evangelical preaching, yet surrounded by the rotten fruit of generations of neglect and apathy toward the material needs of the poor.

By God’s grace, I did not discover this in the church, at least not initially. My charismatic evangelical community was largely racially integrated, orbiting around “mercy ministries,” possessing a default figural reading of Scripture that would warm the hearts of any Cappadocian. And while we would never utter the words of any Catholic creed, my church did prime the pump for me to eventually become sacramental. If God shows up in the charismatic gifts, why not also the bread and wine?

Moreover, this was the community that introduced me to skateboarding, Vans sneakers, and “hardcore” music. After years of trying to be like my brother, the basketball star, I set out on my own course and embraced an “alternative” aesthetic, which was traditioned to me by older youth-group acolytes. I was happy to take on this identity, for while being a scrappy player, I didn’t have the height to excel in Amateur Athletic Union ball like my brother.

So I jumped headlong into the world of Tooth & Nail and Takehold Records, while imbibing a healthy sonic diet of, to name only a few, MxPx, Underoath, and my favorite band of the lot, Few Left Standing, which dominated the early years of Furnace Fest (a local concert series). My mother never fully bought my argument that the lyrics were deeply Christian. I suppose she had her own sacramental vision, and the seemingly demonic screams of the front man did not sufficiently embody an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. However, I loved it … Few Left Standing gave voice to the angst (and hyperbole) of teenage suburbia, even if it was overly dramatic at times.

One song that has remained with me to this day became something of a mantra for me: “Kneel Down and Fight.” This phrase mapped onto my Pentecostal imagination, marinated as it was by John’s apocalypse and a healthy dose of revivalism. I have come to believe, however, that this song title captures in capsule form so much of what I have come to believe about prayer as an adult and an Episcopal priest.

The fuel and fund for our life in Christ is found in kneeling, in learning to live now as we will live then. “One day every knee will bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,” Paul writes in Philippians. The night before Jesus died, he also kneeled to the Father, in prayer and humble abandonment to the Divine Will. About this posture, Pope Benedict XVI writes,

The gesture: Jesus assumes, as it were, the fall of man, lets himself fall into man’s fallenness, prays to the Father out of the lowest depths of human dereliction and anguish. He lays His will in the will of the Father’s. … He lays the human will in the divine.

When we kneel, we also are caught up in this story. We kneel, in other words, to be raised up by the one who carries us to the Father. The Shepherd kneels to take up the lamb on his shoulders. The King kneels, only to be crowned with thorns on the cross. Like Solomonic kneeling with arms spread toward heaven (1 Kgs. 8; 2 Chr. 6), his arms also were splayed open, yet, on the hard wood at Calvary. Thus, like the leper who kneels before Jesus, we kneel, and pray, “Lord if you are willing, you can make me clean” (Matt. 8:2). Kneeling embodies the reality of prayer — it is a movement that happens in us, and one that happens to us.

Indeed, in his book The Contemplative Pastor, Eugene Peterson reminds us that prayer, properly construed, happens in the middle voice. You will likely know that with respect to grammar, voice refers to the form a verb takes in relation to the subject when it acts or is acted upon. So your elementary school English teacher would say “I act” is the active voice, whereas “I am acted upon” is the passive voice.

We could equally say, “I pray” is in the active voice, or “I am prayed for” is in the passive voice. The point is that either we are acting or being acted upon. The middle voice covers those times when the speaker actively participates in the results of an action that another initiates. The vision is that two wills operate, “neither to the exclusion of the other, neither canceling out the other, each respecting the other” (p. 103). Peterson fleshes this out in the following terms:

I do not control the action; that is a pagan concept of prayer, putting the gods to work by my incantations or rituals. I am not controlled by the action; that is a Hindu concept of prayer in which I slump passively into the impersonal and fated will of gods and goddesses. I enter into the action begun by another, my creating and saving Lord, and find myself participating in the results of the action. I neither do it, nor have it done to me; I will to participate in what is willed. Prayer and spirituality feature participation, the complex participation of God and the human, his will and our wills. We do not abandon ourselves to the stream of grace and drown in the ocean of love, losing identity. We do not pull the strings that activate God’s operations in our lives, subjecting God to our assertive identity. We neither manipulate God (active voice) nor are manipulated by God (passive voice). We are involved in the action and participate in its results but do not control or define it (middle voice). (pp.103-4)

This might seem like a thin distinction, but nothing could be further from the truth. To pray is to learn that we align our wills to the will of God, who wills in us to pursue him in the first place. To pray is to learn that my will often prays for what is wrong, and God wills to draw me into what is good and right. Indeed, Romans 8:26 says nothing less: “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”

Prayer is, then, a joint venture, a relational partnership with the God who is present to us even when we are not present to God. In kneeling, our hearts also learn to kneel with and in Christ, who kneels to the Father on our behalf: “And he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, and he knelt down and began to pray” (Luke 22:41). Hence, this is where the battle is won. If the Christian life is anything, it is first and finally an act of submission in a world that hates this very word. But submission to God is an act of love and hope, for it is indeed a surrender … a surrender to grace. So I encourage you: Kneel down and fight.