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Moot Rhythm of Life Prayer Beads

Moot has now officially had a Rhythm of Life as its central spiritual focus for four months, where before the Bishop of London, we committed to it as an expression of how we should live as disciples of Christ. At that event, every member of the community were given a book for spiritual reflection, and prayer beads to assist with personal prayer – to assist in the embodiment of the rhythm into our lives.
Well, drawing on a number monastic models of prayer, the Moot Community has developed a ‘prayer journey’ using the Moot Prayer beads to allow people to immerse themselves spiritually into the ROL. The danger of creating a ROL – is that it can just remain words on a page, like a doctrine of belief. Ticked off, but not lived. This is not the purpose of a rhythm of life, which is more about being a constant challenge, something that needs to be faced, explored constantly – something that requires a commitment. A great image for this, is the idea of entering a river, and immersing yourself in the water and moving out into the current, so that the current takes you places outside of your control. We are called to immerse ourselves in the rhythm in a similar way. A way of being led by the Spirit for spiritual exploration and the belief that this enables us to become more human.

To help with this, we have created a prayer journey with the prayer beads divided up into the 6 sections of the beads. For a copy of this to down load, click here.

Last night in a workshop – we explored how to do this type of prayer meditation using prayer beads reflecting the rhythm of life. We explored the idea of focusing on one of the small prayer bead prayers in one day. So for example with the opening Prayer of Presence – prayer number (1), to explore this in the morning, explore it during the day, and exploring it in the evening – and writing down reflections as an act of prayerful response. To then move on to Presence small prayer bead (2) in day two and so on. This way you can be taken on a journey with each area of the Rhythm of Life in a whole week. Alternatively for those with very busy lives, you may want to stay with a small prayer bead for a couple of days or for a week, depending on your life style and personality type. There is no right way to do this, other than the need to engage and immerse yourself.

For those who missed the workshop, we are going to do a revised smaller version of using the prayer beads with the ROL probably on the Friday evening of the weekend away. We will be doing the workshop again for those who did not attend, after Christmas.

If you have queries, thoughts or reflections on this – those who attended – and are now trying out using the beads in your spiritual life, please do add your comments.

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POSTED 01.11.07 BY: admin | Comments (1)

One Response to “Moot Rhythm of Life Prayer Beads”

  1. On November 4th, 2007 at 12:57 am Kerry Dawkins said:

    This is interesting. I had quite a negative reaction when I saw the image of the prayer beads. I think in this country, the protestant sensibilities go deep, even when the culture has stopped being protestant, we retain some of the negative symbols we picked up at the reformation. I was shocked at my intolerant emotional reaction. What you are doing is interesting – but the symbol is loaded with ‘conform’ spirituality – which clearly you are counteracting