If you’re like most people, you collect something (whether it be toys, books, photographs, or even memories). The Church also collects something: prayers. In fact, for the last 1500 years (and probably earlier), the church has collected prayers.
I’m not sure about other traditions, but the Lutheran tradition prays “the collect of the day” every Sunday. With elegance and brevity the Collect collects the thoughts of the entire congregation into one prayer even as it summarizes the Scripture readings for the day.
The five parts of the collect are: 1) invocation 2) basis for petition 3) petition 4) purpose or benefit desired 5) the doxology.
Here’s the collect for Christmas Dawn:
Most merciful God,
You gave Your eternal Word to become incarnate of the pure Virgin.
Grant Your people grace to put away fleshly lusts,
that they may be ready for Your visitation;
through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives an reigns with You and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and forever. Amen.
I find it meaningful to pray the collected prayers of fellow believers and it helps me accomplish what Walter Wangerin Jr. asks in his book Whole Prayer, “Does God as God receive as much attention and detail as your grant yourself in your prayer?” It’s too easy to let my personal prayers and our corporate prayers slip into mere requests for me/us and away from praise and glory to God.
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1 comment:
The 5 parts of a collect sort of model the Lord's Prayer, how Jesus teaches us to pray.
The Psalms are the prayer book of the church. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said something to the effect that we should use the Psalms to pray because then we are praying out of the richness of God's Word instead of the poverty of our own hearts.
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