Tuesday, April 23, 2013

The Virtual Abbey

One of the challenges for any pastor is to maintain a daily prayer life.  As a pastor interested in Benedictine spirituality, it has been a long time goal of mine to try to pray the daily office, and I have made a commitment to pray the daily office.  However, for a long time, I found it  difficult to pray the office with any kind of regularity. That changed this year when, by happenstance (or divine intervention perhaps?) I was asked to consider tweeting daily prayers on Twitter through an established account, The Virtual Abbey - @Virtual_Abbey.

The Virtual Abbey already had nearly 5,000 followers, so it initially seemed like a daunting commitment.  After four months of tweeting daily prayers, though (typically Morning Prayer and Compline) I have been able to settle into a routine.  Sometimes, life intervenes and I don't get to it, but I have been able to maintain that schedule almost every day.  Due to the space limitations of Twitter, I can only pray parts of the office there, but it has been a joy and a blessing to do it, particularly when I get feedback from the many people who follow (now over 5,300) and pray along.

3 comments:

  1. Thank you for sharing the Daily Office. It helps me to focus on my spiritual life in the midst of the chaos that sometimes is twitter. God bless!

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  2. Divine Providence which led to human intervention. Pretty amazing experience, isn't it? Love seeing the grateful tweets in my Twitterstream.

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  3. Nadine - thank you for your kind comments and for praying with us. And Meredith - it has been an amazing experience, so thanks again for all the work you've done for the Abbey and for allowing me to be involved!

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