Celtic prayers have undergone a resurgence in popularity. The Celtic prayers of 1500 years ago all of a sudden seem relevant to today. Perhaps because the times we live in are just as unsure, violent and unpredictable as the times of the Early Celtic Christians.
There seems to be Celtic prayers for everything. Prayers for kids, prayers for good crops prayers for good weather prayers for getting up in the morning prayers for getting a good night sleep.
Here we have the first concept of celtic praying. The early Celtic Christians felt they could pray about anything. And they did. You will notice that many of them were written down. There is good reason for that. Not all that many people could read or write, so many of the prayers we taught by the Celtic monks and priests so that people could communicate to God.
Now for us, we rarely use set prayer in our Christian tradition. We use free form prayer, we can pray about anything any where, anytime. But the Celts were a different bunch of people. They had come from a religion of set magic. Curses and words in a certain order meant something to them. For their magic to work it had to be done right.
This mentality logically followed when they became Christians. And God raised up people who could deal with this issue. The Monks wrote amazing prayers, with great integrity to their theology and with great reverence to God. Some Christian traditions still use set prayer, I actually believe we miss out on the corporate ness of verbalising prayer together. We sing together yet we rarely pray together.
This was part of the reason for the set prayers, so people could not only have their words right and theologically correct but so that they could say the words in unity. The Monks and their lay communities had a routine of prayer. They prayed up to 8 times a day.
Prime = 6am
Terce = 9 am
Sext = 12 am
None= 3pm
Vespers = 6 pm
1St Nocturn= 9Pm
2nd Nocturn = 12 pm
Lauds or Martins 3 am
That is pretty serious stuff. Different places had different forms and arrangements of this, some prayed 3 times a day others whatever. It depended on the abbott or priest in charge.
But where did this come from, Is it biblical?
Well yes, kind of.
The practice of set daily prayer, called Daily office goes back to the Old Testament. The Psalms speak of prayer in the morning (5:3)
PS 5:3 In the morning, O LORD, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait in expectation. Also in the early hours (130:6) PS 130:6 My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning. In the evening (141:2)PS 141:2 May my prayer be set before you like incense; may the lifting up of my hands be like the evening sacrifice. It also refers to prayer day and night (92:2) PS 92:2 to proclaim your love in the morning and your faithfulness at night,
Psalm 119:164 states (119:164)
PS 119:164 Seven times a day I praise you for your righteous laws.
Scripture also mentions prayer 3 times a day (55:17 and Dan 6:10)
PS 55:17 Evening, morning and noon I cry out in distress, and he hears my voice.
And
DA 6:10 Now when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home to his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Three times a day he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to his God, just as he had done before.
Emulating Jewish prayer the early Christians and here we include the celtic christians of the day, they wanted to prayer often. The gospels and Acts talk about the fact that Jesus and the disciples prayed often. Alone, in synagogues in the temple. Look at Acts 1 :14 and Acts 2 :42-47
14 They all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.
And
AC 2:42 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 43 Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. 44 All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45 Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. 46 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
We even conclude that prayers had set times.
Acts 3:1AC 3:1 One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the time of prayer–at three in the afternoon. In fact a New Testament statement which suns up the attitude to prayer is “Pray without ceasing.” Luke 18:1LK 18:1 Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. So its biblical, yeh, To a point that maybe we should be introducing more set prayer times. But the other thing is this, they used Scripture in their prayer life.The Celtic Monks were crazy on Psalms. During the prayers set in the day time only 3 Psalms were usually sung so as not to interfere with daily labours and chores. In the night sessions 12 were sung each time. The possibility is that up to 60 Psalms were sung each day. IN less than three days you could do the lot. This is on top of the Gospel readings and the Old Testament readings for the day and usually a sermon from the Abbott. This is heavy going prayer. Yes, and they made it their life. Now you can say that that was clergy, but not necessarily. People came to church or chapel daily, they recited their prayers that they had learnt on the way to the chapel. It was a part of life for them. Maybe they had more time. Perhaps, but hey if they didn’t get the work done they probably went hungry. Now with all this I got to thinking, how did they know what time it was, well here you go. Sun dials and /or standing stones. Hang on your saying, the standing stone thingys are all evil, you know druids and such. Well perhaps they were but it appears that the celtic monks would use their own standing stones to tell the time, both during the day and during the night. They used some of the skills of the previous generations to discover how to tell time by the stars. So they could have someone ring a bell at three in the morning to wake them all up. Now why am I telling you this part. Firstly, sometimes God uses what was satans and turns it into something good, secondly, Sun dials were not created by the celtic bad guys, God provided the sun and the seasons and a way of using to tell time. To everything there is a season, The celts understood this, they were very time orientated keeping time, was like keeping a promise, not wasting Gods time was hugely important to them. So Sun dials and standing stones can be used by God , most definitely. Not all used by the druids was necessarily bad, so don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Where does that leave us? With a need to look at our prayer life. Is there some things here to take away with us. Can we be more constructive in our prayer life, can some of these prayers be useful to us now? Yes, yes and more yes. Now, don’t use a set prayer if you don’t agree with it, and some of the Celtic prayers we as Baptists may not side with. More than anything, I would love to see people praying more, however it is done. One thing that The Celtic Christians seemed to really believe in was that God answers. Read some of the stories, they expected answers to prayer. Absolute faith, Now couldn’t wee do with some of that attitude.
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