As I learned more about the Eastern liturgy, I found out that this part of the service was the prayer of the faithful. The deacon would take his stole between thumb and forefinger and wave it before the iconostasis, in imitation of the seraph before the throne of the Most High. The experience did not convert me to Orthodoxy (as it did some), but it did draw me deeply to the diaconate, and to intercessory prayer.

It was in this orthodox phase of my life that I was introduced to Archbishop Anthony Bloom, who wrote about prayer. I was struck by his observation of how people would heap one need after the other onto God's shoulders just as long as Evensong lasts, then leave the service elevated by a new emotion, as if freed from any further responsibility.

He often told the story of Natalie, which took place in 1919, at the height of the civil war in Russia. A woman with two children was trapped in a city that had fallen to the Red Army. Her husband was a White Army officer, and she had been targeted by the enemy to be shot. Natalie, who had no children, offered to stay behind and take the young mother's place, knowing that she was also taking on her fate.

Natalie interceded for the young mother in the deepest sense, by stepping into her shoes, and accepting certain death.

I learned from this about the solemnity and the cost of intercessory prayer. I began to see it as an expression of service or diakonia, when we willingly set aside our own agenda and take on the needs of others. Of course, none of us can act directly on everything we pray for, nor can we assume that our prayer alone will change a situation. At the heart of all prayer, there is a mystery—why do some for whom we pray die, while others heal? We do not know what strange alchemy makes some things happen and others not.

In public intercession, there is a temptation to say too much. Often, I find the prayers of the people are lengthy, florid outpourings or self-righteous sermons, giving God—or the congregation -- exact instructions for handling every situation. Good intercessions invite the faithful to pray to God and act themselves for the people and things that are named.

Another deacon, Ormonde Plater, offers these guidelines for leading the prayers of the people:

Pray for the church, the world, the nation, the community, the suffering, and the dead. If we cover only a few categories, or pray for the same ones every Sunday, we risk losing perspective, becoming too inward looking, or seeing only what's out there and not what's on our own doorstep.

Make the prayers general, using restraint with specific names and local concerns. If specific needs and intentions are announced before the biddings, this allows people to centre themselves and to add their own intentions aloud or in silence.

Remember that intercessions are primarily prayers for relieving needs, fulfilling hopes, and remedying concerns. Prayers of praise, or thanksgivings for birthdays, anniversaries, or accomplishments have their place in other parts of the service or gathering.

Use short, easy to follow biddings such as For [person or concerns] or That [intention,] or a combination: For [person or concerns], that [intention,] ending with a cue such as let us pray to the Lord.

Use responses that are brief, uniform, and easy to remember.

The role of the leader is to address the people who do the actual praying. Leave them space to do that! When the leader reminds people of topics and asks them to pray, he or she is acting as a herald (a diaconal function), and the people pray the intercessions through silence or responses.

Intercession—stepping into the shoes of others—is part of the life work, literally, the liturgy, of all baptized Christians. It is corporate prayer, offered for the church, the world, and the nations, not just private bedtime prayers for friends and family. The Anglican tradition may not be to chant deeply, wave stoles, or bow before an iconostasis. And, God willing, we may never be called to take the place of someone marked for execution. Yet when we lead or participate in the Prayers of the People, we can become more deeply aware of the solemnity and cost of what we ask, and of Whom we are asking it. And we can leave the service, elevated by a new courage to change the world and be changed ourselves, into what is possible and desirable for God.

There is a story that Beethoven once played a newly composed sonata for a friend. When he had finished, the friend asked, What does it mean? Beethoven sat down at the piano and played the sonata all over again.

I feel something of Beethoven's implied disapproval as I stand here trying to talk about hymns. Talking implies reason, logic, thinking—everything we associate with the left side of the brain. Although they include words, hymns are firmly anchored by music to the affective and intuitive dimensions of experience, to the realm of the pre-rational. I don't mean that they are necessarily irrational, although some of them certainly are, but pre-rational, belonging to that shadowy but vital realm of thought that stands behind our logical constructions. Hymns cannot exist without music—can you imagine a liturgy in which we solemnly recited five hymn texts in spoken voice? Nor do they succeed without metaphor, alliteration, rhythm and all the apparatus of language we call poetry. As constructs of music and poetry, whether profoundly simple or highly exalted, they defy the kind of analysis we imply by the question: What does it mean?

Hymns are actually ritual events. They do not really exist in hymn books. They do not consist of paper and ink. Hymn books are only containers for the tradition. Hymns exist when people sing, whether a congregation on Sunday morning, a solitary performer in a Sikh Gurdwara, or myself alone in the shower. A hymn is there for as long as the singing goes on, providing like all rituals do, a bridge of passage from one moment to another, a bridge of passage that is illuminated by the combination of words and poetry to give expression to the significance of the moment. The passage of the moment may be only from one part of the liturgy to another, but it may also be from one state of mind to another—from cynicism to rejoicing, from indifference to repentance, from forgetting to remembering (as on Remembrance Day) from raw grief to healing lament. Hymns grasp the moment and open the way to opportunity beyond it.

Some of the oldest collections of hymns are from the Indian subcontinent. They are called the Vedas. Some of them are hymns of praise, but others are actually ritual formulas to be recited by a priest who is offering sacrifice. Some of the psalms of our tradition are not dissimilar. The earliest description of Christian worship by a non-Christian, the letter of Pliny the Younger to the Emperor Trajan, may imply a parallel understanding of the Eucharist prayer. He said it was the custom of Christians to gather before dawn on a fixed day and to sing a hymn, a carmen, to Christ, as if to a god. Whatever Pliny had been able to discover about the fabric of our worship, the ritual nature of hymns was secured at an early date in our history. Phos hilaron, the hymn to Christ at light, was sung to mark the passage from day to night, and even some of the hymns in the New Testament may have a similar use.

Of course our oldest hymn book is the psalter, which came to us with the rest of the Jewish Bible. If one sifts out some of the wisdom and history psalms, the rest of the collection is about two-thirds praise and one-third lament. I haven't done a detailed count in Common Praise, but I suspect our collection is similar, that roughly two-thirds of our hymns are praise and thanksgiving and one-third are expressions of longing and lament. I think this is a healthy pattern. We are most ourselves, most open to grace when we go beyond ourselves in praise and thanksgiving. This is fundamental to our faith tradition. Our primary act of worship is called Thanksgiving albeit in Greek. On the other hand, there is much to lament—our personal failures, our social hardness of heart, our destruction of the environment, the homelessness of people in our streets and parks. It is appropriate that our hymns capture this dark side of our human condition as well. However, it is also appropriate that, like the psalms of lament, they bend back to praise. The purpose of lament is not self-flagellation but repentance and conversion, and the purpose of conversion is transfiguration. This is one of the passages our hymns invoke.

One of the greatest strengths of hymns as we know them is that they are popular—they belong to the people. When Guru Nanak wanted to promote a religious synthesis beyond the conflicts of Hinduism and Islam and beyond the isolating violence of caste, he led people out into the forest to sit in a circle and sing hymns.

Singing hymns on the eve of the Sabbath is an important feature of Hasidic spirituality. Hymns mobilized the Wesleyan revival, providing people with gut-level access to theology. This popular dimension of hymnody has a dynamic two-way aspect. Hymns are not just an instrument to put ideas into the heads of the unsophisticated. They are a way in which the church as a living community can try out new ideas, new trends and at a popular level.

For example, prayer for the dead almost vanished among Anglicans after the Reformation because of the excesses and superstition of medieval piety. However, after the First World War many people felt a need to express in prayer their continuing love for those they had lost. Long before it would have been possible to insert prayers for those who had died in any Prayer Book, they were tried out, almost experimentally, in hymn collections. I believe it was the presence of such hymns in our 1938 Hymn Book that made it possible to include modest prayers for the dead in our 1962 Prayer Book.

Similarly, Canadian Anglicans were content to sing And now, O Father, mindful of the love, with its setting forth of the sacrifice of Christ, long before they could have contemplated similar words, what we call amamnesis in their Eucharist prayer. It is in this spirit that Common Praise reflects a broader and more inclusive use of images of God, a sharpened sense of justice and responsibility, a deeper commitment to the equality of the human family, a recognition that the kingdom is truly already even if not yet.

It is when we mention justice and responsibility that we have to remember that hymns, however sensitive, are not ends in themselves. The warning of the prophet Amos must not be forgotten. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harp. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an overflowing stream.

Paul said much the same thing when he told the Corinthians that the tongues of mortals and angels without love are only noisy gongs and clanging cymbals—whatever the marks of good hymnody. Hymnody that masks our vocation to kindness, compassion and responsibility is an abomination, or what the liberation theologians would call an ideology. We may, if we are careful, take Amos' stern words as hyperbole, so long as we take them seriously.

In this vein, I note that probably the most poignant reference to a hymn in the whole Bible is a little verse that appears almost unnoticed in Matthew's and Mark's account of the last supper. When they had sung the hymn, it reads, they went out to the Mount of Olives. The hymn in question is presumably the Hallel, Psalms 113–118, which still concludes the Passover meal. It is deeply moving to realize that we probably have the text of the hymn that Jesus and his disciples sang immediately before he went out to the desperation of the garden, to betrayal, to Jim Crow trial and to death. That hymn is full of praise, and trust and blessing.

The dead do not praise the Lord, nor all those who go down into silence; but we will bless the Lord, from this time forth and for evermore.... The Lord watches over the innocent; I was brought very low and he helped me.... How shall I repay the Lord for all the good things he has done for me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord.... I will give thanks to you, for you answered me and have become my salvation.... Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord; we bless you from the house of the Lord.... Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his mercy endures forever.

Between the fellowship of that last meal, itself an activity so characteristic of Jesus and his ministry, and his final engagement with the oppressive powers of religion and state, there is this final gesture and ritual of passage, this pause between resolution and action, which gives focus and definition to all that stands before and after. Ultimately, that is why we sing hymns and, to maintain the living tradition, why we publish hymn books.

Intention, solitude, epiphany, communion. For me, words of prayer, unlike words that barrage or barricade, are the conscious tips of hidden depths; imprints marking a path towards the dearest freshness deep down things; thresholds crossed to contemplate the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ: O gladsome Light, O Grace of God the Father's face ... joyful in your appearing.

Prayer can refer to intensely private and idiosyncratic phenomena: discrete textured moments, fingered like the beads of a rosary. But at the same time prayer has a public corporate dimension that circles like a tide around the great wide world; a labyrinth walked by an everflowing stream of pilgrims.

At dusk, en route back to Jerusalem from a day in Gaza, we stopped for prayers and a simple meal with the Community of the Beatitudes in the Church of the Resurrection, a 12th-century crusader church in the Palestinian village of Abu Gosh. It was there that the crusaders used to commemorate the events of Luke 24: the disciples' recognition of the Risen One in the breaking of bread.

As we approached the doorway to enter within the thick walls, a shofar sounded in the distance, announcing the beginning of Sabbath. Immediately, there was the cry of the muezzin's call to prayer from the minaret, and then the church bells pealed for vespers. That braid of public piety, the well-worn, woven fabric of three cultures, has provided a common carpet upon which the faithful may kneel. In a language not my own, the psalms were sung: a timeless bridge of centuries' ceaseless crossings. Afterwards we descended to the crypt and found a Roman cistern, and an ancient spring from earliest days, earliest scriptures: source of life in a desert land. I knelt to fill my earthenware pot, small vessel of circumstance.

Unexpected epiphanies such as these, sustain us and kindle our hearts as we struggle to develop contentment and gratitude, justice and compassion in an environment that may be hostile to the spiritual, and lacking in respect for the integrity of persons and creation. Such visitations are not as infrequent as we might suppose. They are from before time and forever, in forms as diverse as the peoples of the earth. I remember an Anglican group's startled joy when, having gathered by the lake with their aboriginal leader just after dawn, to offer tobacco and traditional prayers, an eagle came and circled above.

Sometimes, we are reluctant to validate our intimations of communion, our visualisations of wholeness, as prayer. Perhaps this is because we think of prayer as being more formulaic in nature, or perhaps because we judge ourselves lacking some degree of competence to approach the sacred.

In her introduction to Every Eye Beholds You, A World Treasury of Prayer, Karen Armstrong writes in relation to such self-judgements:

We tend to equate faith with believing certain things about God or the sacred... Belief, that is adopting the correct ideas about the divine, is seen as the first and essential step of the spiritual journey. But the history of religion makes it clear that to expect to have faith before embarking on the disciplines of the spiritual life is like putting the cart before the horse. In all the great traditions, prophets, sages, and mystics spend very little time telling their disciples what they ought to believe. Faith meant trust... Faith was thus a carefully cultivated conviction that, despite all the tragic and dispiriting evidence to the contrary, our lives did have some ultimate meaning and value. Faith was thus the fruit of spirituality, not something that you had to have at the start of your quest.

I remember that in my pre-ordination interview with Archbishop Douglas Hambidge, I identified my chief concern about priesthood as being my difficulty with praying. The Archbishop wisely advised me to pray with others.

To pray with others, I've discovered since, extends beyond prayer circles. Whether we're at home alone or in church, we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses—the communion of saints: a thousand echoes from the past ... a carnival of faiths and cultures... a crowd that clamours pain and anger ... a throng of future shapes and shadows ... a rainbow host of milling children, God's varied image from all lands.

Some, in Thomas Craughwell's words, find comfort in repeating ancient prayers: their timeless formulas are a bridge between one who recites the prayer today and all those faithful souls throughout the centuries who prayed in the exact same words.

My own comfort continues to be in playing the hymns of the church, old and new, our common praise, on my grandfather's piano. My earliest church memory, as a little girl, is of the congregation singing The Lord's My Shepherd and my responding to the final and in God's house for evermore my dwelling place shall be with a great Amen—Yes! that is what I want!—welling up inside of me.

Our own prayer, whatever its nature, has a place within the prayer of the whole church.

The corporate dimensions of the church's prayer—the divine office and liturgy, the reading of scripture, the singing of the songs of salvation—are not only filled themselves with the grace of presence. The beat of their repetitions, the procession of their seasons resonate in our lives. The rhythms of lament and praise, thanksgiving and supplication, comfort and challenge, expectation and fulfilment, stay with us to shape our personal perceptions and attitudes, our work and encounters, into prayer.

There is a childlike suspension of disbelief that is called for by prayer, a curiosity, a holding ourselves in readiness to be surprised and astounded, as much by the opaque words of prayer or scripture suddenly become transparent, as by the loveliness that blossoms within the predictable daily round. Karen Armstrong's words again ring true for me:

The sheer busyness of our lives often leaves little time for contemplation. The world can become familiar to us. Prayers help us to see what is really there: a mystery that cannot be simplistically defined but that becomes apparent when we learn how to strip away the veil of familiarity that obscures it. Prayers help to hold us in the attitude of wonder, to put ourselves in tune with the fundamental laws of existence. By learning to see the sacred in the world around us, we will approach it with reverence. The world becomes what Muslims call an Èayah' (a sign) of God, not something to be exploited or greedily ransacked for our gain.

The earth, its people and other creatures, its trees and soil, waters, and air, its nations, communities and cultures are like the bush burning yet not being consumed. They call us to attend to the voice of the living God, to lift up our hearts as an offering, and then be willing to go to the place where God sends us, the place that God has shown us.

To notice the ordinary characters and incidents when they present themselves involves a self-emptying willingness to entrust what we see to God and simply pray: What does it mean to be your disciple now?

To enable such a prayer to permeate our life and transfigure our mundane routines, The Rule of the Society of St. John the Evangelist invites us to resist the tendency to restrict prayer to set times ... to aim at eucharistic living that is responsive at all times and in all places to the divine presence ... to seek the gift of attentiveness by which we discern signs of God's presence and action in creation, in other people, and in the fabric of ordinary existence ... to surrender fretfulness and anxiety in order to be available to God in the present moment.

For it is in any given moment that the small, the ordinary may be transfigured and become the icon, kissed by many before us, through which we too are caught up in communion in God.

Living God,
in Christ you make all things new.
Transform the poverty of our nature
by the riches of your grace,
and in the renewal of our lives
make known your glory.