The February podcast is up (a week late) after our technical glitches were fixed. Thanks to all of our listeners. This month, we play Worship Sans Worship, Who Said It and we spend some time focusing on February’s topic of Prayer. Jacob got a little out of control with segment intros and the phrase “the size and volume of the chunks blown by Christian music” might now be a permanent addition to the show.
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Peace and Grace!
Jacob and the Nonpropria.com team
nonpropria 
I like how you discussed the value of some of the old traditions such as prayer beads and rosaries. As with anything one does, the value comes with the thought behind the action. There is certainly no meaning to rambling through a bunch of rote prayers without any thought behind them, but there is great value to having a string of beads in your hand, the physical caressing of which helps to bring those remembered prayers forth through a brain, heart, and soul that is so mired in grief, depression, and turmoil that even remembering to breathe is arduous. It is in times such as these that the prayers and scripture we were forced to learn as children (before we understood the words, before we could comprehend the need for the comfort those words could offer) are the hands that hold and rock us because we don’t have the wherewithal to put two of our own thoughts together. I have experienced times when my need was greater than words and I believe that my silence and my need were sufficient supplication. Just as when a broken-hearted child comes to you in tears you don’t need an explanation to begin comforting them, you just take him/her in your arms, let him sob, help him relax, THEN hear him out. God does the same when we are unable to entreat him. Back to the beads, though. They are a tool which can help me to calm my shattered self, force me to focus on something outside of myself, even if it is the cool, smoothness of the bead between my fingers. Which then makes me think about which prayer is supposed to be recited at that particular bead, and the entire process which eventually calms me and leads me to what I consider personal prayer, but it was the memorized scripture and prayers that carried me through the turmoil to reach the calm. There have been times when I can visualize my catechism book and the location of certain prayers on the pages and those words that I learned as a child are all that I have to offer, but when I think about those times it isn’t me offering those words to God, it is Him offering them to me. Sometimes it isn’t prayers or scripture, but lyrics of long ago hymns (which are actually prayers). So, I know this is long and repetitive, but I guess what I am hoping it conveys is something that leads into next month’s topic of how do you teach. My point being that I tend to think that it isn’t important to teach what a child isn’t ready to fully understand, but I think that is an error on my part. Teach the children big things that will help them throughout life. What they take from it in their youth will be different than what they receive from it in their future. For example, the Lord’s prayer. As a child I fully thought that I would never go hungry because I asked God for daily bread…..that’s a pretty good thing for a child to think, no need for a child to know the rest of the story until they are ready. I was with my mother while she sat at the bedside of her mother during her last nights of her long and storied life. At age 100, while she was sill able to speak, the prayer that crossed her wrinkled lips was “Now I lay me down to sleep”
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