Praying the Collects...

Do any of you pray the Collects from the Prayer Book by themselves? I find them so beautiful, and I try to keep the Collect of the Day for a week with me, and contemplate upon it. As far as my own personal spiritual life goes, I have only memorised one Collect so far:

Be present, O merciful God, and protect us through the silent hours of this night; so that we, who are wearied by the changes and chances of this fleeting world, may repose upon thy eternal changelessness; through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.​

I am in love with the Collects, and I almost wish they were all collected into a devotions book!

 

I do. I add them in when I do the family morning/evening prayers: http://commonprayer.org/offices/family_n.cfm

 

I do what Lowly Layman does too. I also pray one of the Collects at noon everyday.

 

I make the Collects and the Psalms part of my daily worship...

 

I am trying to commit them to memory so that I can pray them without the need of my Prayer Book. Which is your favourite?

I find that since the Prayer Book is so integral to Anglican spirituality and culture, I can imbibe the cadences and rhythms of the Cranmerian prose through my own memorisation. Lex orandi, lex credendi! It is only missing those Marian elements... but it makes for a Prayer Book that any one who confesses to be Christian can pray from it!

 

I just found this beautiful essay by this woman named Katherine S. Oliver from 1950, called "SANCTIFICATION OF TIME: The Purpose, History, and Use Of the Sunday Collects."​

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The first paper is absolutely brilliant! I want to share one of her marvelous insights regarding the Collects, calling them 'golden cups of incense' of the saints:​

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"These are some of our most beautiful prayers, they have been called sonnets of devotion. They might almost be said to scant, they are cadenced prose: wonderful for reading aloud, easy to memorize. They teach us humility, repentance, resolution to amend our lives, obedience to our Father, reliance on the Holy Spirit to fulfill His purpose. They form a treasury which belongs to us all. But they are like trunks, very tightly packed and the stores of devotion which they hold, must be unpacked by each of us individually before we can make them our own."​

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http://anglicanhistory.org/women/oliver_sanctification1950.html​

 

Adding to my 'read later' bookmarks folder.
Thank you for this.

 

I love these collects!!

 

Actually they are, check this out http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0802817599/ref=redir_mdp_mobile

 

Aye, though I was hoping more of something entitled "Short Christian Prayers," and arranged by devotional topic!