| Anglican Fellowship of Prayer – May 2008 |
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Of the writing of books on prayer there is no end, nevertheless, I want to share with you a recent book that I have read on and found very helpful. It is Prayer Among Friends by Herbert O’Driscoll and published by Path Books. At least some of the chapters included in this book originally had their genesis as reflections written for the AFP Newsletter.
I found this book immensely nourishing spiritual reading, written in O’Driscoll’s always engaging style, he writes openly and honestly about his own challenges with prayer. As he says in the preface:
Not being very good at praying, is as good a reason as any for writing a book about it. In fact, few of us are good at praying–whatever that means–and so writing a book about prayer may help a great many people! That is my hope and my intention.
I am sure that this prayer of O’Driscoll’s will be answered. Indeed, that is the value of this book. In the twenty-one reflections that follow he invites us to reflect on all the ways in which our everyday lives are already brimful of prayer, the difficulty is that too often we fail to recognize this.
Perhaps the following paragraph from the reflection entitled Possibilities of Prayer can demonstrate this.
We need to consider the realm of prayer that exists between dallying with a certain prayer because we find it interesting, and wrestling with those moments of agony when we cannot bring ourselves to do other than pray. Between these two points lies a vast world of possibilities of prayer. We discern that world when we realize one simple truth about God: God is all in all. God is not the God of something called religion. God is God, utterly, totally, always, which means that everything is---to use a beautiful Greek word---entheos. Everything exists within God.
As I read this book I found myself growing in this aspect of prayer, I found myself recognizing prayer in a walk with my family in the park, at least until the accident in the puddle. Or in the midst of a conversation on the phone with a friend going through a difficult time, for those of us whose lives are already full being able to recognize prayer and God in the midst of our daily lives seems to me an essential habit to cultivate.
Tel: 727-3393 • jdolloff@mts.net