|
Our current worship series, Christ With Us, includes the song, “Christ Be Beside Us,” based on St. Patrick’s Lorica. A lorica was a prayer of protection prayed by Celtic Christian monks. It asked for the protection of Christ all around whomever was being prayed for. If you listen closely to the words in “Christ Be Beside Us,” (the opening song for worship each Sunday) you’ll notice that it places Christ above and below, in front of and behind, in sleeping and waking…. It is a way to acknowledge that God can be all around us, and in fact, is around us all the time. It is in God that we live and move and have our being. (Acts 17:28)
The lorica is a type of prayer called a circling prayer. Another type of Celtic circling prayer is called a caim. The caim is an embodied prayer in which the person praying extends the index finger of the hand toward the ground as if to draw a large circle around oneself. The prayer is prayed in a clockwise motion, and the individual praying turns in a circle, pausing at each direction (north, east, south, west) to pray. Once completed the prayer has symbolically encircled the person praying.
The caim is bigger than just one person. I like to think of a caim as rippling outward, like a splash in a pond. The prayer can expand to include those in a family, a neighborhood, a city, state, or country. Both the caim and the lorica remind us that God/Christ/Spirit are not just present in church on Sundays, but are interwoven through our lives in everything that we do.
As we live through the current pandemic Celtic circling prayers are a practice that can bring peace of mind to our own lives and our communities as our prayers remind us that we are surrounded by God’s love, grace, and peace.
May Christ be above you, below you,
before you and behind you,
now and always,
Donna
|
