When I was training for the priesthood—a course I began ten years ago—a statistic was thrown around concerning how little time the contemporary Church of England priest spends in prayer: 18 minutes a day was the figure given, although I have no record of where that number came from.
So I can, thankfully, claim to be a little above average in my devotions, though not by much; admittedly 18 minutes sound like a very low bar. However, I don’t pray more than an hour a day: I spend a rather dreamy 10 minutes in prayer with a cup of tea when I get out of bed in the morning, attend shared morning prayer online at 9 o’clock (except on Sundays), which lasts a little less than half an hour, and then I make an attempt at something more contemplative in the early evening (along the lines of Centering Prayer); however, this is often more of an aspiration than a practice. So not very impressive.
But then St Augustine came to the rescue! I came across a passage* where he describes reading Scripture as inseparable from prayer itself: to truly read the Word is already to be speaking with God. Eureka! So even spiritual reading counts as prayer – and a bookworm like me can chalk up hours a day with my nose in the right kind of book as prayer time. My average shot up!
Then last week, I came across an article that discusses blogging as a form of prayer (I’ll share that in a separate post). What? So even writing can count as prayer time?
That takes me back to one of my breakthrough moments as a teenager. I had been reading Edward de Bono’s Po: beyond yes or no (back in the late 70s every school boy was reading Edward de Bono: it’s a book that argues that our usual yes/no, logical thinking is too limited for creativity and problem‑solving, and proposes the use of “po” as a deliberate, provocative tool to generate new ideas – an exercise in ‘thinking outside the box’ ante litteram). It was during my first unaccompanied trip to London and I was travelling on the tube: looking around I saw all these people hiding themselves behind newspapers or in books and asked myself – wait for it, here comes my first conscious Po thought – ‘look at all these people reading – why aren’t any of them writing?’. And that’s how I began a life-long practice of journalling. To quote Lermentov’s advice to budding writers, Ни дня без строчки, ‘never a day without a line’
None of this is very clear nor very logical, I know, but it helps to explain why, when I came across the article on blogging as a form of prayer, I was hooked. For more on that, see the next post.
*See Augustine Confessions, esp. Books 9–10, and Letter 130 to Proba
Why the blog?
