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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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Prayer in solitude

Lynne Baab • Tuesday July 25 2023

I learned to pray in communal settings. As a child, the majestic and eloquent prayers I heard in the Episcopal worship services I attended with my family moved me. One of them helped the congregation approach God, and despite the old fashioned language, I loved the words as a child, and only as an adult did I realize the prayer evokes Jesus's interaction with the Syrophoenican woman in Mark 7:24-30: "Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that...

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Silence, solitude, and prayer

Lynne Baab • Thursday July 20 2023

I knew I wanted to write a blog post about the Christian myth that the most spiritual form of prayer is prayer in solitude. Throughout much of Jewish and Christian history, many believers have done a lot of their praying with others, and many passages in the Bible show the significance of communal prayer. I wrote an article for Christianity Today about this. And yet Christians also pray alone in many diverse settings, including in the “prayer closet” (literally “storage room”) that Jesus mentions in Matthew 6:6. I wanted to write some thoughts about these equally valuable places for prayer.

I wasn’t sure which language to...

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Prayer and Pilgrimage

Lynne Baab • Tuesday July 11 2023

“Pilgrimage is the practice of walking to a holy site with prayerful intention to be more than a tourist, as well as prayerful attention to the Holy Spirit’s movements within.” —Adele Ahlberg Calhoun, Spiritual Disciplines Handbook (italics in original) [1]

Example 1, which felt like a pilgrimage. I lived in Hampton, Virginia during my three years of junior high school, in three different houses. I attended two different junior high schools. In 2000, my husband Dave and I took a trip to Virginia, and for the first time since I was 14 years old, I saw the three houses and the two junior...

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