Electronic Morning Prayer

Last weekend I was with the Community of the Holy Spirit at their new, beautiful, green convent in Harlem. These Episcopal nuns, so aware of the currents of our world’s needs in so many ways, still gather in their chapels in Harlem and at their convent in Brewster (where the sisters and the friends of the community are organic farmers) for the ancient liturgies of the hours. The liturgies of the hours are times of prayer and meditation throughout the day and the night, intended to make our daily rounds holy.

I love the Community of the Holy Spirit, both for who they are as remarkable individuals, and also for how they both hold to ancient patterns of prayer in this very committed, gathered community, and how they are open to how the Spirit is guiding them to serve in new ways.

I am a married man and a bishop of the Church. The sisters of the Community of the Holy Spirit and I are great friends, but our lives in many particulars are wildly different. Yet I too seek to make holy the hours of my day. I use my smart phone and a specialized app to do so. This is what my morning practice looks like:

• Read the Psalms appointed for the morning in the Book of Common Prayer. The Psalms are psychiatrist couch material — reading along with the anonymous Hebrew poets wrote takes you in the cave of the heart. All your longing, for love, for revenge, for help, all your praise and abjectness — all of this, of which we may not be fully aware, is brought blazingly to the surface, laid before God. It is like a sacred living inside of Django Unchained.
• Read the Gospel for the coming Sunday. I use an app that let’s me read it in Greek. I read the same Gospel for the seven days leading up to Sunday Eucharist, preparing for the Christian Sabbath.
• Begin the meditation app for my yoga practice. An opening bell sounds, and three more sound over the next 30 minutes, so I can pattern the flow of the asanas, the ancient postures. I am holding phrases from the Psalms and Gospel in my mind, as well as meditating on the spiritual meaning of the postures (Cobra::resurrection) as I do this yoga practice.
• A beginning bell sounds to signal the start of 20 minutes of silent prayer
• At the end of the silence, the app asks me if I want to journal. I enter and save a few phrases that I can go back to and see what themes have developed over time.
• Then I look on the app home page to see who else in the world has been meditating at the same time I have been. I use a local/international filter to connect with these people. If there is someone meditating or praying in a non-US country, I send a message saying, “Thank you for meditating with me.” If there is a person meditating in the California Bay Area, I send the same message. If that person replies, I send a “friend” request. In this way, we have created an online community of people supporting each other in our prayer and meditation practices. I am part of an intentional online meditation network of a little over 100 people.

I love the fact that I am part of this group of online pilgrims, so incredibly diverse. Many of the people in my network practice Hindu or Buddhist meditation. There are a fair number of Christian contemplatives. We share not only encouragement but also resources from our traditions: book references, descriptions of our practice, etc. As I said, it is a long way from what my friends at the Community of the Holy Spirit experience each day, but I suspect that at the core they would recognize these international and California meditators as their sisters and brothers.

+MHA