Prayer and Posture

During Lent I have been trying to focus on physical penance a bit, not so much flogging oneself, but fasting and physical postures, as a part of prayer, it is one of the reasons I posted the pictures of the Carthusians (see below). Another of the reasons is that it is terrible unfashionable but is very much part of the tradition. I have never invited a group of children to kneel down and pray, althoght I get annoyed when people cross before the sanctuary without geneflecting.

We have been taught to make prayer merely cerebral, I think there is a touch of the Manichism creeping in somewhere, along with iconoclasm of modern Church design, echoed in the Catholic home bereft of iconography. I think this is one of the reason many priests celebrate Mass without bothering about the gestures.

Prostration, kneeling, standing are all biblical postures for prayer, sitting seems only for meditation.

I remember meeting an old Russian lady who told me that she always got distracted in verbal prayer, she could no longer remember the psalms and the hymns she learnt in her childhood, after the revolution, in Paris, so all she could do was her 25 genuflections, three times a day. I asked her why, and suggested it must be painful, she was in her 70s. It was painful she told me "... but it helps me to remember and share in the Good Lord's sufferings". I remember saying that I would have thought the last thing that God would want was for her to suffer more than she already did. She just smiled at me, and just said, "you will understand".

It is only now, I suspect, I begin to understand what she meant, as I myself find it increasing difficult to genuflect. She, I am sure, made up, as St Paul says, "in [her] own body whatever is lacking in the sufferings of Christ" . It wasn't so much God wanting her to suffer, but she who loved Him wanting to share in his Passion, even if it meant a little physical discomfort, what old Irish lady's also knew when they spoke of "offering it up".

I fell asleep in the Church the other day, I had wrapped myself up in a cassock, confessional cloak and even a hat, the heating goes off after Mass. I woke really because of the cold, I really was stiff and shivering. I suspect that throughout most of history that would have been the state in which most religious celebrated the Divine Office. Think of the lack of heating in those huge monastic Churches, waking up halfway through the night, being hungry most of the time because fasting took up half the year, look at the pictures medieval Cistercians and Carthusians.

Are these two ideas connected? Yes, because they are about uniting ourselves, in our flesh, to Christ. "Raising one's heart and mind to God", is a good definition of prayer but it seems to fail any identification with the idea of God coming down to us in a human body and suffering, and even dying, in his flesh for us. "Penitential prayer" is the recognition of God's descent, even to accepting death and uniting Himself to human suffering, pain and penance.