Great Prayers of old dead guys (and girls)
Thinking of starting a bit of a series on here called "Great prayers of old dead guys (and girls)."
My reasoning is fairly simple- I think liturgy can be a beautiful thing. I'm not an especially big fan of responsive reading, it often sounds like a bunch of robots repeating something they were programmed to say, but I do think liturgy rightly used is one of the greatest gifts that past Christians can give to the church today.
C.S. Lewis often spoke of the value of reading old books, one of those being that the errors in the thought of the 1600 are not the same as the errors of thought in 2006, and as a result we are less susceptible to making the same mistakes as the men writing in 1600. Furthermore, much is to be gained in reaping from their wisdom b/c their understanding of the world is so radically different from our own. It seems that, and perhaps I'm just being nostalgic for the past, but it seems that many the Christian world-view found in many saints of the past was much more God-centered than the world-view of Christians today. The value of reading their prayers then is that it enables us to further see and appreciate the god-centeredness of the saint as well as our own need to make our lives more centered on who God is.
That said, here is part 1 of the series, this is a prayer of Ignatius of Loyola, a Catholic saint from the time of the Reformers.
“Take, Lord, and receive all my freedom, my memory, my intelligence and my will-all that I have and possess. You, Lord, have given those things to me. I now give them back to you, Lord. All belongs to you. Dispose of those gifts according to your will. I ask only for your love and your grace, for they are enough for me.”
I will either try to post a small mini-biography of him in the next few days or, if I lack the time to write one, I will provide a link to one.
