daily devotions and the Eucharist

One of the elements of my mild case of synesthesia is that I conceptualize time differently than most people: I actually see it. I'm unable to think of it abstractly. "Time" brings up a sort of complicated picture in my head and onto that I map my days and weeks and years.

The weeks look sort of like swooping sections of wires held up by telephone poles, and telephone-pole sections are the weekends. I've seen time like that as long as I can remember knowing what time was.

When I became Anglican, it was easy to see that the highest  point of the week - high literally, in my conceptualization of time - was Sunday mass. And now when I look at my weeks, it seems that communion on Sundays is really the strong structure holding the rest of the week up - my weeks swoop down from the last Sunday and up towards the next, and the grace received at each service is enough to last me through the week and the grace I expect to receive at the next service is what draws me back up from the trough of those hard middle days.

But I'm beginning to see that what keeps me open to receiving that grace through the week is my devotions - reading the Bible and praying. It’s a sort of connection to starting the week with the Eucharist. I want that peace and strength to be the line that carries me through, and it's really beginning to seem to me that prayer and Scripture reading are the practices that keep me connected to the grace that's so easy to perceive while I'm at church.

Which makes sense, because prayer and devotional reading are a kind of worship - or the obedience that properly flows out of worship.

I know this is all sort of obvious, but it's such a good thing that I wanted to think about it a bit more through writing.

Songs too. The Psalms and hymns and praise choruses - especially the ones with lots of scripture in them - I think these remind us through the week that we are, as some pastor or other put it, "Sunday people". We're the people of the Resurrection. And we can see that most clearly when we're all gathered together worshipping on Sundays, but it is true during the week too. And prayer and Scripture and songs help us to remember.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell