|
Dear Ones of Christ Church,
In last weekend’s sermon, I spoke about how Jesus gives us the Lord’s Prayer as one form or way of praying. Another form of prayer that is an essential part of our Anglican and Episcopal tradition is the collect. A collect, pronounced (a bit pretentiously) “COLL-ect,” is a form, or container, for prayer that literally collects a group’s or individual’s prayers.
Like a sonnet or a haiku, the collect has a form. Poet, writer, and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama describes the five-part form of the collect in his book Being Here: Prayers for Curiosity, Justice, and Love:
1. Name the one you’re praying to
2. Unfold the name of the one you’re praying to
3. Name one desire
4. Unfold the desire you’ve named
5. End with a doxology (brief hymn of praise)
To put it in even more basic terms, Ó Tuama gives us the structure as:
1. Address
2. Say more
3. Ask one thing
4. Say more
5. Bird of Praise
I love his description of the doxology as a “bird of praise,” as it reminds me of the Holy Spirit—and as Jesus reminded us in the last verse of our gospel reading last weekend, it is the wild presence and action of the Holy Spirit that we invoke, ask for, seek out, and receive when we pray.
As an example, let’s look at the five elements of the collect in the familiar Collect for Purity:
1. Almighty God,
2. to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid:
3. Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit,
4. that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy Name;
5. through Christ our Lord. Amen.
The collect is a container for prayer that can collect and hold a lot!
While we always pray collects in our communal life of public prayer and worship, how might you use this form, this container for prayer, in your own family, household, or private devotional life?
It is good to explore the treasure trove of collects for various occasions and circumstances in our Book of Common Prayer. And it is good, if we are feeling called to a creative written or spoken practice of prayer, to write our own collects or re-write familiar collects, filling this holy and spacious form and container with the prayers of our personal and communal hearts and lives.
Click here to listen to an interview with Pádraig Ó Tuama on the podcast On Being, during which he speaks about the practice of writing and praying collects.
Yours in Christ,
Melissa+
| 
