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Praying about the flow of time: All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day

Lynne Baab • Tuesday October 29 2024

I was looking forward to researching this post. I don’t know a lot about the history of All Hallows Eve (which has morphed into Halloween) and All Saints Day (November 1). After reading a very long Wikipedia entry and a few other websites, I am more confused than ever. Did these two holidays originate with the Romans? Celts? Germans? Pagans? What a mishmash of traditions formed our current practice of Halloween. I did learn that Halloween is a major revenue source for many businesses—not a topic I would usually write about but perhaps something to pray about!

I do know that Christians have...

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Spiritual practices and “life-giving, non-cerebral prayer”

Lynne Baab • Tuesday August 29 2023

After my first post on Christian meditation, where I discussed the purpose of meditation for Christians, I got an interesting email from my friend Viv. She describes herself as “an ‘active senior’ Presbyterian minister who has also served in the Baptist movement." In Viv’s email, she said she “lives in the cognitive” and is a “studious introvert whose main pathway to the sacred is thinking and sorting.” Viv wrote that she has learned that many spiritual disciplines can “lift me into God's presence in life-giving, non-cerebral prayer.” She believes that too often we look to spiritual practices to help us live in a...

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Christian meditation and prayer

Lynne Baab • Tuesday August 15 2023

I’m in my late 30s, and I’m talking with a Christian man I know slightly. He’s telling me about his pattern of meditation. He says he begins by emptying his mind of all his concerns so he can focus on a sacred word or verse from the Bible. I argue with him a little. I tell him I can’t empty my mind just like that. Instead, when I try to engage in Christian meditation, I try to identify the things on my mind and give them over to God, perhaps by using some imagery like putting them in Jesus’s hands or...

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Silence and prayer

Lynne Baab • Tuesday August 1 2023

When you think of praying in silence, what comes to mind? Walking in a beautiful park? The dark, quiet hours in the middle of the night? Reading a passage from the Bible and praying in response to what you read? Praying a written prayer like the one at the end of this blog post or a prayer from the Book of Common Prayer or another collection of prayers?

A month ago, when I started pondering the spiritual practices of silence and solitude as they relate to prayer, I saw silence and solitude as practices with a lot of overlap, but I wasn’t...

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