This Week from Mitch
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
The opening prayers (known each Sunday as the Collect) that we use during Lent are, in my opinion, some of the most beautiful and poetic in our Prayer Book. These prayers are, in many cases, expanded forms of prayers found in earlier versions of the Prayer Book. The Collect for the Third Sunday is a great example of this. In the 1928 Prayer Book, the opening prayer is just two lines asking God to look upon our “hearty desires,” and asking for his defense against all of our “enemies.”
The current red Prayer Book reads, “Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body and all evil thoughts that assault and hurt the soul.”
Our 1979 Prayer Book was written with a few aims in mind. The first goal was to refocus on Baptism and the Eucharist as the primary sacraments of the church. This renewed focus hinged on the importance of the Paschal mystery of Easter and also the daily life of the church. This second focus calls each of us to a vocation of service to God. This week, as part of that vocation, we are reminded to pray.
First, we are reminded to pray for physical things that may hurt us, some of which we have control over and others we do not. This first part of our prayer is akin to the simple prayer of asking God to keep us safe.
In the second part, however, we dip into some deep theology. We are reminded that we do have control over those things that we think, and some of those things have the ability to hurt our souls. Our evil thoughts and malice do not harm the ones we are thinking of, nor do our thoughts of lust lead to love. Our thoughts of envy do not make our lives better, nor do our greedy thoughts make us wealthier. Rather, these ways of thinking only hurt ourselves. I would argue that evil thoughts reduce and objectify others, causing us to shrink in creativity, how we see the world, and how we respond to it.
On the other hand, when we see the world through the lens of the abundance of God’s love, our world expands along with our possibilities. I believe it is this sort of love that led people like Mother Theresa to spend their lives working to correct the injustice of world hunger. This sort of love led her to once famously say, “If you can’t feed a hundred people, just feed one.” All while she was feeding millions. In my mind, a growth mindset is a mindset of love. When we have it, we increase our capability to live into God’s call, our vocations, and our baptisms.
In Christ,
Mitch