Friday, September 29, 2006

Anglican Prayer Beads

I've been exploring different ways to pray and part of that exploration led me to Anglican Prayer Beads. Since I don't own any Prayer Beads, I went in search of them.

I ordered my prayer beads from the Solitaries of DeKoven (http://solitariesofdekoven.org/Prayer_beads.html). They are a religious order of hermits within the Episcopal church. What appealed to me was that these prayer beads are crafted by hermits who are associated with the Episcopal church and who live in Texas. Also, they use the money from crafting the prayer beads as a form of support for their community and as a vehicle to intercessory prayer.

The prayer beads arrived yesterday and they are beautiful, and for me I feel blessed that the core member prayed for me while making the prayer beads. They also included with the prayer beads four different prayers to use to "pray around" the prayer beads, which I found immensely helpful.

There's something soothing in the "tactileness" of the beads, and once I can get one of the prayers memorized I imagine this for me can be another form of meditative prayer. I was also thinking of using the prayer beads to focus on one "snippet" of Bible verse and repeat this snippet around the prayer beads and once finished then to meditate in the silence, and then to be still in contemplation - sort of a Lectio Devina with prayer beads.

One can never have too many good prayers at one's fingertips, and if anyone has a prayer they use often with their prayer beads I hope you will share. There are two out of the four that came with my prayer beads that I'd like to share, but I don't have my BCP with me (that's where I placed the pamphlet containing the prayers) hence I can't post them here today. But I will post them either this weekend or on Monday.

2 comments:

Lee said...

Hi JS,

A set of prayer beads was given to me when I did my Cursillo. They were one of the many small gifts which all the candidates received. The paper that came with them has something like 6 prayers on it. I liked one that was Celtic. There are others for different purposes. I'll see if I can find them for you.

Peace.

jsd said...

Thank You Lee. I wonder if we have the same Celtic prayer. I'm going to post the two I have prayed with today.