“Show us your mercy, O Lord; and grant us your salvation.”

Psalm 85’s verses echo throughout our prayers during Morning Prayer. We say the suffrages—a twenty-dollar word for prayers—as the Office’s form of the prayers of the people. And just like on Sundays, sometimes they become rote. Do we pay enough attention to the prayers as we say them? All of them? Or are we waiting for the ones that matter most to us and then lock in?

As someone whose mind drifts here and there at times I can attest to my own guilt of mechanical prayer. I grew up in the Episcopal Church; these prayers are not new to me. Having memorized the majority of the Daily Office and the Eucharist, my mind sometimes wanders to other things, even as I’m saying words. Lately, I’ve been much more intentional with my attention, but I still wander a bit. Do you?

The best way I’ve found to commit myself to paying attention is through reading along, to be honest. If I look at what we’re reading, I’ll also think about what it means. For instance, showing us mercy and the granting of salvation…what exactly are we asking for? Didn’t God already show us His mercy and grant us His salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ? The answer is yes…but we forget that these Psalms were written at a time when Jesus wasn’t yet made manifest in human form.

We forget that the people then were craving the salvation we so wantonly disregard with meandering minds and thoughts.

Holy Week comes. It is the pinnacle of the Jesus story; next week is the culmination of an entire year’s worth of worship, readings, study, prayer, and liturgies. Will we treat it as rote? Will we show up on Palm Sunday and then skip services—not out of necessity for work or obligations, but out of desire to simply stay home? I hope that you and I will be intentional about our worship and attendance next week. Not because we want to bolster numbers, but because we want to bolster our relationship with God.

Then, the following ‘low Sunday’ I hope we don’t stay home and think the race is won. It starts over. It never ends.

Just like God’s love.

Faithfully,

Fr. Sean+