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Drawing near with Desmond Tutu: God’s love is the foundation for prayer

Lynne Baab • Tuesday August 30 2022

You have probably heard of South African archbishop Desmond Tutu, and you may know he died last December. In the 1980s he was the Anglican bishop of Johannesburg and then served as the archbishop of Capetown for a decade, in both cases being the first Black African to hold the position. He was also an antiapartheid and human rights activist and an eloquent speaker and writer. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his non-violent opposition to apartheid.

I am most familiar with Archbishop Tutu from his collection of prayers from all over Africa, An African Prayer Book. I’ve been...

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Draw near: A favorite prayer about peace, freedom, and much more

Lynne Baab • Tuesday August 23 2022

“O God, the author of peace and lover of concord, to know you is eternal life and to serve you is perfect freedom: Defend us, your humble servants, in all assaults of our enemies; that we, surely trusting in your defense, may not fear the power of any adversaries; through the might of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” —The Book of Common Prayer

This is my second favorite prayer from my childhood. (My favorite is described here.) The Book of Common Prayer laid such a profound foundation for me on Sunday mornings in Episcopal churches with my family. I believed in God until I...

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Draw near: Confessing sin without wallowing

Lynne Baab • Tuesday August 16 2022

Esther de Waal, in her book The Celtic Way of Prayer, writes about the sense of guilt that bedeviled her childhood, the feeling of never being good enough, of failing again and again in trying to measure up. In Celtic Christian prayers she found something different, a complete absence of that kind of self-focused guilt, and a joy in Jesus’s gift of forgiveness. She writes that in the Celtic poems and songs,

“I have found sorrow, deep sorrow, many tears, an outpouring of grief, but it is never turned on itself, never the kind of sorrow that becomes inward, self-destructive guilt, feeding...

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Draw near: Feeling unworthy as an obstacle to prayer

Lynne Baab • Tuesday August 9 2022

“For many years I believed I couldn’t even approach God in prayer until I had dutifully catalogued a litany of the sins I had committed since the last time I had prayed. Quite often the process of prayer made me feel unworthy, unholy, and exhausted by my own inadequacy. And I was taught, and indeed believed, that these were the things I was always supposed to feel – inadequate and unworthy – so that I could be properly grateful for the extension of divine grace. The consequence was that sometimes it simply felt better not to pray.” —Britney Cooper, professor at Rutgers...

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