It’s a lovely, meditative place, and I’ll start here in my reflections on the relational affects of our practice of corporate prayer. Something in the very environment communicates to us and evokes a response. Imagings and palpable messagings come to strike the heart in their wordless ways of divine love and we of the “little flock” lift up our responses in prayer, returning our love. For the ritual of our corporate prayer attaches itself to a sense of place and that sense of place so profoundly affects us, we come to realize it is of a piece with the ritual itself—good ritual, not dead ritual, for it breathes and exudes life. In these places God whispers lovingkindness and provident care to us, and we know what it means to sing “This is my Father’s world and to my list’ning ears, all nature sings and round me rings the music of the spheres.”

Places of prayer are many, mind you, and each has its own imagings and messagings in the grand semiotic bearing God’s love to His creatures and in particular to His redeemed people. Augustine, that granddaddy of Christian rhetoricians, contended this: a thing in nature is never just a thing, for it also functions as a sign which carries a message from the Creator. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” says the psalmist (19:1-2), “the heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech; night unto night reveals knowledge.” But while Black slaves met in forests and Celtic Christians also met under trees (hearing, perhaps, as “the trees of the field will clap their hands”) or at the coast to hear the words of the waves, others met in richly symbolic cathedrals and sparsely symbolic meeting houses or even in homes, each place bearing its environmental word to the praying people.

The First Level

I want to argue this elemental factor of corporate prayer, this human-to-world relationship, becomes a first level of relational affect we may experience. Whether it’s a natural environment or a built environment and whether it happens subconsciously or consciously, the place has a communication of its own which evokes affective responses of God’s people at prayer. Light comes beaming in the window or through the dappling leaves of a tree saying “God is light” and “He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good” (Mt. 5:45) and our hearts warm to the Creator’s purity and grace: the Holy One in whom is “no darkness” yet smiles on us and even cleanses our sin so we can “walk in the light as He is in the light” (1 Jn. 1:7). Or consider this: is it any accident that both Eden and Gethsemane are garden places in which we see profoundly intimate and impassioned prayer evoked? In one the first Adam walks and talks with his beloved Father in the cool of the evening with undarkened bliss. In the other, the second Adam kneels and sweats as if it were blood in the dark night as He cries out agonistically to the same Father. A draped cross, a tree, a stained glass nativity, a howling coyote, a raised pulpit, an ebb tide, an advent wreath and myriad other signs will charm and call to us in the person-to-world relationship that stirs wonder, awe and love. This way we learn to love God through his world.

We had sung—praying, as I like to put it, with notes attached—for an undefined while that evening as again we witnessed the passing of twilight and brightening of the stars and moon. The “we” was a ragtag bunch of mostly university students, members of a handful of different churches. Some who met in our kitchen those times before and after we would “ascend the hill of the Lord” ended up married; some bonded in ways that have lasted over the years; some have become involved in missions to the far corners of the earth like Ethiopia, China and Nepal.

The songs continued, then a time of spontaneous spoken prayer happened and we bore our hearts before the throne on behalf of one another. Then another song or two broke out before it happened. In the gap between songs a one-anothering occurred over a familiar favorite: “I think we should hear Hazel do ‘Wayfaring Stranger,’” said our friend Chris, and a clamor of affirmative voices ensued. Now Hazel, my dear wife whose voice is simply seraphic, usually tries to get out of this assignment because it’s a very demanding piece for a serious vocalist like herself. So she counteroffered: “I’ll sing it if Charity will sing with me.” Concord having been reached, I started the familiar picking pattern on the guitar and the two women began to sing. None of us wayfarers that night even dreamed how it would end.

One-anothering like this characterizes good corporate prayer wherever it breaks out. Friends in Christ begin to own the concerns and the gladnesses of others. Vulnerability sets in, and mutual enjoyment—even laughter in prayer! We become one in heart as Ephesians 5:18-20 pictures: notice the filling of the Spirit leads us to “speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” and yet we make music in our “heart” (singular) to the Lord. Sometimes Hazel and I, praying in song like Paul talks about, simply reach a blend of voices that transports us to the court of heaven—and not us alone. Others have been transported also: one friend said “When you and Hazel sing, I live through you.” This oneness of God’s people takes hold during jubilant worship processions (Psalm 42) and also in times of lamenting as during the Babylonian captivity (Psalm 137). And Jesus says anything we disciples ask for in His name we will receive and our joy “will be complete” (Jn. 16:19-24). Corporate prayers of petition are directly connected to corporate affects of joy, our Lord teaches.

My friend Mac does not know Hazel and I are present in his congregation one particular Sunday morning. The people of his church, Keystone Baptist in Chicago, begin a time of corporate prayer before the Lord’s Supper gets served, one African American voice and then another speaking out their praises and supplications that rise as incense before the throne. Sometimes the incense is more shouted than spoken so perhaps it rises a little faster. Then Mac, “a White guy with a Black heart” as some of the folks would say, begins his prayer and about two sentences in, his voice starts to tremble. A prayer of corporate lament and confession he offers, his heavy-burdened heart choking its way out through his throat as he adds to the incense phrases like “we love You so much, Lord, but we’re just poor children who fall so short of Your righteous will. . . . We’ve sinned against You and we need Your mercy! . . .” We the rest of the flock that morning, I’m sure, lived through Mac by feeling and thus owning the weight of our acknowledged sin—and certainly no less, the lightness of our absolution in Christ! What a healing “magic” settled on our souls, let me tell you! One heart with him, we confessed and we were freed.

The Second Level

This way we learn, loving God, to love each other—and through each other, to love God. We become friends around such rituals—friends in Christ. This second level of corporate prayer affect, then, we’ll call human-to-human relationship. It’s about loving God’s people, about one-anothering in joy and sorrow.

So my wife, Hazel, and our daughter, Charity, began to sing the soulful Black spiritual with one another—“I am a poor, wayfaring stranger, a-traveling through this world of woe. . . .” A rather odd turn this seemed, with mother leaning on daughter after all these years; soon we’d realize both in actuality were leaning on Another beyond us all and yet in the midst. Charity did not join us every week, often opting for time with her boyfriend. We her parents had come to know the familiar distance well, though something was afoot lately to give us a modicum of hope. She’d received Jesus by faith as a child, but now had been running from Him for nine years. She’d hung out with druggies, been through rehab, given birth to a son out of wedlock, broken our hearts again, again, again. “. . . but there’s no sickness, toil nor danger in that bright land to which I go. I’m going there to see my Fathe . . .”

Hazel and I had become acquainted with grief and quite familiar with “groanings which cannot be uttered” (Rom. 8:26-27). Strangely, we had known the holy collusion of this level of prayer—the experience of crying out of the depths to God for our precious daughter, now worded, now wordlessly, now only choking out “Jesus, oh Jesus!” and somehow finding Another, indeed the Comforter Jesus sent, joining us in our groanings born of helplessness. Just so, Paul’s text says “the Spirit helps us in our weakness” even when we haven’t a clue what we ought to pray: the verb “helps,” a word picture in the Greek tongue, literally means “takes hold on the other side” as a strong man picking up the other end of a log far too heavy for just one to carry. Have you not known the intimate power of this ministry of divine partnering before our Abba, Father, when a river flows through you, a solace takes hold of your heart, a saintly friend who “dreams dreams and sees visions” gives you a personal word they got from the Lord?

The Third Level

This third level of affect in prayer, then, we’ll call the human-to-God relationship. It draws us into Trinitarian movements of relating: “in Christ” (to use that richest of Paul’s phrases) we pray as Son-to-Abba, having by grace entered the Triune “family circle.” This deepest level is about loving God, our All-in-all, above all. When in prayerful affection we learn to love God’s world and also to love God’s people we always end up here, learning to love God’s very Being.

The author: Dr. David Livingstone Rowe is Dean of Spiritual Life at Salt Lake Theological Seminary, serving there in partnership with Missions Door. He is the author of I Love Mormons: A New Way to Share Christ with Latter-day Saints.