Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

Recently, they’ve been demolishing a building near my building, floor by floor, with a jackhammer. This has been going on for weeks now for a few hours a day. Sometimes I can tune it out; sometimes it makes me feel like I’m going crazy.

Last week was a little more of the latter. It was also a week filled with numerous tedious tasks and interruptions, and at one point I found myself in an elevator on my way up to my office with my eyes closed and repeating a one-word prayer. This was my adaptation of a contemplative prayer technique I learned on a recent church retreat. It helped. I felt more centered by the time I reached my office.

My days so easily fill up with noise—the actual noise of my podcasts and mp3s and jackhammers, and the metaphorical noise of social media and to-do lists and the stacks of papers on my desk. I’ve realized recently that I can’t work and I can’t live without occasional silence.

Really, I’m talking about prayer—taking a moment to listen for the still small voice that helps me put my day in perspective.

I have to fight for these silences. I have to fight my own inclination to put my headphones on during my commute and watch television whenever I have a free time, and fight the temptation to work through lunch when it’s not really necessary. It’s a fight, but it’s necessary for doing the work of the church and for living in this world at all.

Pausing for prayer and quiet shuts out the noise for a few moments, long enough to connect me again to the God and the larger community of believers I am a part of. It puts everything else in perspective, including my own relatively small and fleeting anxieties.

For those of us who work in a church, it should be easy to find quiet moments for prayer throughout the day, but it isn’t always, and for those of us who don’t work in a church, it is still necessary and helpful to reconnect occasionally to God and ourselves between Sundays (and sometimes between meetings).

These moments of prayer don’t need to be long and they don’t need to be in a chapel. Even elevator prayers can remind us who we are, and perhaps give us a moment of that peace that passes all understanding.