Showing all posts in Prayer

In GA's, Prayer

Thou hast revealed thy gospel hobbies.

Author ZiffPosted on 9 Comments

The Church announced last month that second hour meetings should now begin with prayer. Also, while on the topic, the announcement reminded us that English-speaking members need to be saying thee, thou, thine, and thy when addressing God in prayers.

Of course, the issue of proper prayer language has long been a gospel hobby of Dallin H. Oaks in particular. I can’t even guess what interesting changes he might make if he outlives Russell M. Nelson to become Church President. Perhaps he’ll add a question to the temple recommend interview for English-speaking members only that asks if they’re using proper prayer language. Or perhaps he’ll require English-speaking wards and branches to submit audio recordings of their meetings so that the use of proper prayer language can be audited and corrected if necessary.

Photo by Adam Patterson on Unsplash

As has been discussed for years on the Bloggernacle, it’s weird that we turn these words around that used to be the informal forms of address to make them the formal ones, and so turn on its head the idea that God should be close to us, and instead puts him at a distance. It’s also strange to do different things in different languages. I’m sadly monolingual, but as others who speak more languages than one have also noted, it’s common that even the Church’s own materials (e.g., scriptures) in other languages follow the convention of using the less formal words when addressing God. So it’s English speakers only who need to put God at a distance; for everyone else, he can be treated as close.

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In General Conference, Prayer, Statistics

General Conference prayer length

Author ZiffPosted on 16 Comments

When I wrote a review of Conference back in April, I noticed that the prayers were noticeably longer in this Conference than last October’s. It got me to thinking that although I have an intuitive sense of what feels like a short or a long prayer, I don’t know what actually counts as a short or a long prayer in comparison with other prayers in Conference. I was also interested to know whether there has been any trend over time in prayer length. Like maybe a new Church President sent a memo to all prayer-givers to tell them to hustle things along in their prayers, so they suddenly got shorter. And of course now that we’ve had women praying in general sessions for several years, an obvious question is whether their prayers are similar in length to the men’s or shorter (or longer!) My guess was that they would be shorter, given that men are encouraged to take up more space in every other area of the Church.

To answer these questions, I watched a bunch of videos of the beginnings and ends of General Conference sessions and noted who was praying and timed the prayers. The videos came from the Church’s General Conference YouTube channel and to the General Conference page on the Church website. Although there are videos of individual talks going back to 1971, there are only full session videos going back to about 2005, with occasional sessions or parts of sessions available for another decade before that.

As an aside, I’m serious about saying “parts of sessions.” The Church’s YouTube channel videos of full sessions are good for recent Conferences, but as you go back, they have lots of errors. There are several videos that are labeled as full sessions, but they end after five or ten minutes. There are a few that are mislabeled, which I only realized when the introduction in the video itself said it was a different year than the labeling of the video did. There’s even one video that shows the same session twice, back-to-back. On the Church website itself, there are a lot of sessions that claim to have video (i.e., there is a link to watch) but then they can’t be played. And there’s also at least some mislabeling. Fortunately, in at least some cases, the audio-only recording works. I submitted feedback on the Church’s website, but I couldn’t find a way to do so on its YouTube Conference channel. I know this is an extremely long shot, but if you happen to know how I could reach whoever is running it, I would be happy to supply a list of issues that need to be fixed.

Okay, on to the data! I noted lengths for 381 prayers between 1996 and 2020. (You’d think I would have had an even number since each session has two prayers, but like I was complaining about above, a few of the videos include only the opening prayer.) The average length was 93 seconds. This is within the range I expected, and it’s also consistent with my sense of what constitutes a long prayer, as while watching all these prayers, I typically started to feel like they were dragging when they went over about 100 seconds. It’s just unfortunate that older session videos aren’t available too, because I recall Conference prayers in the 1980s when I was a kid sometimes going on what felt like forever. Looking back, though, I wonder if it wasn’t just my age and shorter attention span that made them feel extra long.

This graph shows average length across time.

Note that the dot for 1996 is just because there were no recordings available for 1997 or 1998. It looks like maybe prayers were longer in the Hinckley years than in the Monson years. Maybe.

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In Lent, Prayer, Relationships, Spiritual Practice

Praying in the Dark

Author LynnettePosted on 3 Comments

At church today, the sermon was on healing fractured relationships. We need to go deep into the heart of these rifts, said our interim rector, describing the work of repair as something that needed to be both thoughtful and delicate. It was a good sermon, and hit close enough to home that I was joking with some friends afterward that I felt rather personally called out by it.  I was actually a little reassured to hear a few other people share similar thoughts. I doubt any of us are not struggling with fractured relationships in some context.

The Ash Wednesday liturgy has a long list of confessions. It’s the part of the service that seems to always leave me feeling the most shaken, and sometimes quite emotional. The words are just too true. “We have not loved you . . . We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves . . . We have not forgiven . . . We have been deaf to your call to serve . . . the pride, hypocrisy, and impatience of our lives . . . our anger at our own frustration . . . our blindness to human need and suffering . . .” There’s an awful lot in it, and a lot that is awful. I find Ash Wednesday services deeply moving and powerful, but never really comfortable. “Remember that you are dust,” they say as they trace the cross made of ashes on your forehead, “and to dust you will return.” The ashes are made from burning the palms from Palm Sunday the previous year. They make me think about human fickleness: palms waved in welcome by crowds who soon be calling “crucify him.” They make me think of charred hopes, of aspirations ground to dust. It is a sobering reminder. Read More

In Faith, Personal Narratives, Prayer

Praying Like a Mormon

Author LynnettePosted on 5 Comments

I’m in something called Education for Ministry, which is a four-year program run by the Episcopal church in which you study the Bible, the history of Christianity, and theology. (It’s somewhat confusingly named; it’s actually for laypeople. The idea is that everyone is called to a ministry of some kind, and this is supposed to help you discern and develop it.) My group has eight people, who come from a fun variety of religious backgrounds, and we meet every other Sunday afternoon. The others frequently express curiosity about Mormonism, and ask me lots of questions. One week they wanted to hear me pray like a Mormon, so I obliged and offered a closing prayer that would have sounded perfectly normal over the pulpit in a sacrament meeting. My classmates were underwhelmed, perhaps expecting something weirder. They said that I’d just sounded like a Baptist. (This amused me because I suspect neither most Mormons nor most Baptists would appreciate that comparison.)

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In Depression, Mental Health, Prayer, Revelation, Spiritual Experience

When Good Spiritual Practice Goes Bad: Prayer, Rumination, and Revelations of Damnation

Author LynnettePosted on 7 Comments

CW: brief mention of self-injury

I still have vivid memories of a particular day in December over a decade ago. I was in my second year of doctoral work at the time, and I spent an evening talking with some of my fellow students. We found ourselves disagreeing about a number of theological questions, including the topic of whether God’s justice would allow for universal salvation. I was the only LDS student in the group (in fact, I was the only LDS student in the doctoral program); the other participants represented a variety of religious backgrounds and theological outlooks. My memory is that people were trying to be respectful, but there was an undercurrent of tension, and I left feeling a little unsettled.

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In Advent, Liturgy, Prayer, Second Coming

Pay Attention. Keep Watch. A Post for Advent.

Author LynnettePosted on 2 Comments

This is my first year observing Advent. To be honest, in the past I only had a rather vague idea of what it was all about. I associated it with the Advent calendars we had in my family growing up (only one each year, which meant that if you had six siblings, you only got a chocolate every seventh evening and had to suffer the indignity of watching a sibling eat the chocolate on the other six). And I’d been to Lessons and Carols on multiple occasions. But my general impression was that Advent was just the time of excitement and fun leading up to Christmas. Read More

In Prayer, Scripture, Spiritual Experience

Spiritual Practices That Actually Work

Author LynnettePosted on 7 Comments

Okay, this title is somewhat misleading, as rather than being a helpful list of spiritual practices that actually work—which is something I’m still trying to figure out—it’s an attempt to start a conversation about the subject. I’d love to hear people’s ideas and experiences about what’s worked for them. I find that I love the idea of spiritual practice in theory (and my therapist, of all people, is constantly telling me I need to incorporate more of it into my life), but I run into a lot of obstacles. (In my case, the challenge is often How to Be Spiritual When You’re Neurotic, but I’m interested in how people have addressed other issues as well.) Read More

In Personal Narratives, Prayer, Presiding

Lost Things

Author LynnettePosted on 17 Comments

I don’t know quite what I think about petitionary prayer; once you raise those sticky questions about God intervening in the world sometimes but not others, it all gets so complicated. But I’m more than a little skeptical of any theory of prayer that treats God like a vending machine who dispenses blessings if only you can come up with the correct combination of change. Rather, I’m drawn to the idea that the point of prayer is relational, that it’s not so much about coaxing stuff out of God as about developing a relationship with him.

That’s how I like to think about prayer in the abstract, at least. But to be honest, I don’t necessarily live that way. Read More