Most of us have a mental resource of memorised prayers.
People involved in church-going - and those of us brought up in church-going homes but no longer joining a parish on a weekly basis - still have prayers, often learnt back in our childhood.
For many people these prayers are very deeply buried and only come to the surface in times of crisis.
Usually those prayers were learned at an earlier age - a period in our lives when our understanding of life, and our relationship with our God, were less mature.
As I have come to a better understanding, I have re-written some of my old prayers so they stay meaningful to me. Several years ago I re-wrote my favourite Act of Contrition - a prayer I had absorbed from the Stations of the Cross liturgy of my childhood. It is one of my normal memorised prayers. My version is
Oh God, I love you with my whole heart and above all things
And with all my heart I am sorry
for the times I have tried to live without you in my life.
May I never miss the mark again.
May I love you without ceasing,
and make it my delight to do in all things your most holy will.
There are only two significant changes from the version I learnt 60 (!) years ago - but they have made the prayer something I want to say every day.
First: I have come to understand that, for me, there is only one thing that I (and I think, most people) need to apologise to God for: all the little things we have tried to do with our own strength, for our own purpose, aiming at our own good. That is why I say I am sorry for the times I have tried to live without you in my life.
I know there are evil people (although not as many as the media would have us believe). But nearly always when most of us get it wrong in life, it is because we have not allowed God into our hearts - or into our decision making process. Only then are we capable of selfishness and arrogant disregard for the needs of others.
But I have also come to see that when I get it wrong on my own, it is just about always because of my own fears or resentments. These two emotions can cause me to attack others, hurt others, manipulate others. These emotions can lead me into alienating others, objectifying others (treating them like objects rather than as fellow-creations of our God), and marginalising others (pushing them away from me and the warmth and comfort here at the centre, into the cold insecurity and poverty on the margins).
Fear is why I ignore the lilies of the field, and accumulate wealth and worry about safety, and why I struggle to build security.
We live in a world where fear and resentment elect unethical politicians, and where even ethic leaders bow to the groundswell created by fear and resentment as they generate our public policies.
That is what happens when I try to live without God in my life.
It NEVER happens when we allow God to be active in our lives - it never happens for individuals when they do it - and does not happen for countries when they do it.
The second change in my childhood prayer is changing the translation for the word "sin". In an earlier post I looked at the origin and meaning of that word "sin". I said that "sin" is a word that separates a lot of people from organised religion.
In translation from Hebrew and Aramaic into Greek and then Latin the original meaning for the idea was lost. The original meaning was a metaphor from archery and means "to miss the mark". We all miss the mark all the time (nearly always because we have stopped being aware of God in our lives).
So in the prayer I use today I have been explicit about that meaning.
In my version of the prayer I have deliberately kept the focus on "my heart" and I have kept the ending. The ending is what initially drew me to the prayer - that sense of euphoria and delight when we KNOW that we on the right path, the sense of satisfaction when our arrow thuds into the mark. That's what happens when we live with God in our lives.
May I love you without ceasing,
and make it my delight
to do in all things your most holy will.
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