Praying Together Between Sundays

Dear All Souls,

Whenever the Church talks about discipleship or spiritual formation, we are always walking a quiet line.

On one side is the recognition that our relationship with the Living God is deeply personal. God meets each of us in the particular places of our lives, in our joys, questions, wounds, and hopes. Faith is never mechanical or impersonal. It is the living encounter between a person and the living God.

But there is another truth that the Church has always held alongside it. Our life with God is never only personal. It is also shared.

In more recent years it has become common to imagine the Church as something like a support structure for our individual spiritual lives. In that picture the primary relationship is between “me and God,” and the Church simply helps facilitate that relationship.

But the older and deeper vision of the Christian life is different. In the New Testament and in the long tradition of the Church, our life with God is inseparable from the life of the Church itself. We do not simply have parallel spiritual lives that happen to meet on Sundays. We are joined together into one Body in Christ.

Because of that, our prayers are not only our own prayers. When we pray, we pray with and for one another. The Scriptures we read are not simply texts we choose privately, but the shared story that forms us as a people. Even our repentance and intercession are communal acts, offered on behalf of the whole Church and for the life of the world.

One of the simplest and most beautiful ways the Church has lived into this shared life of prayer is through the Daily Office.

For many years at All Souls we sent out what we called the Weekly Reader, an email that included the Daily Office readings for the week ahead. These readings follow a two-year cycle used by Christians around the world. Every day millions of people pray these same Psalms and read these same passages of Scripture.

These readings are meant to bridge the space between Sundays. They allow the voice of Scripture and the prayer of the Church to accompany us through the ordinary days of the week, shaping our hearts and imagination little by little.

Beginning this week we will be resurrecting the Weekly Reader.

If you would like to receive it, you can sign up using the link below. Each week it will simply include the Daily Office readings for the coming days so that you can pray along with the wider Church. It also includes a simple rhythm of prayer that grew slowly out of several streams of prayer in the life of Israel and the early Church.

For those who prefer something tangible, we will also begin providing printed copies of the week’s Daily Office readings starting this Sunday.

Our hope is simple: that the prayer of the Church might accompany us not only on Sundays, but throughout the week. That the Scriptures we hear together on Sunday would continue to echo in our lives in the days that follow. And that, in small and steady ways, we might grow more deeply into the shared life we were given in our baptism.

Peace and all goodness to you this Wednesday,

Bliss +