Prayer and Worship
Everything we do at Mucknell Abbey is underpinned by the daily and seasonal round of the Eucharist, Divine Office, lectio divina and personal contemplative prayer. The Benedictine charism also emphasises manual labour. For us, prayer is work, and work is prayer.
In the Eucharist, we celebrate God's presence with us and give thanks.Through God's goodness, we have the bread and wine to offer 'which earth has given and human hands have made', and these become to us the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Through giving thanks each day, we learn to experience everything as gift.
The Christian year is based on the cycle of Jesus' birth, death and resurrection, which mirrors the natural cycle. In Jesus' incarnation, God embraces the material world. We celebrate Christmas just as the sun starts to return and the days get longer, symbolising the coming of the light into the world. At Easter we use the rich symbolism of new birth, singing of Christ coming again as 'grass that springeth green'. There are also a number of special days during the year. In spring, we celebrate Rogation, the blessing of the sowing, and in the autumn we celebrate Harvest. Environment Sunday falls on the Sunday before the start of Lent. The Season of Creation is a recent introduction, running during September to the feast of St Francis on 4 October.
The Divine Office is based on the book of Psalms, many of which express the psalmists' delight in the creative works of God. The Office also contains many other biblical texts which celebrate creation, such as the Song of the Three. Through a regular pattern of recitation, these texts become incorporated within us.
In lectio divina we chew over biblical texts to extract God's word for us today. From the creation stories in Genesis, to the description of the new heaven and the new earth in Revelation, the bible is full of natural symbolism. For example, Jesus' parables of the Kingdom of God are rooted in a deep appreciation of the natural world and the agrarian community in Judea. Our understanding of lectio has recently been expanded to include reading the 'big book of creation'; seeking to know the Creator through contemplating the creation.
In contemplative prayer, we use our senses, intuition, mind, heart and body to seek and wait on God. Through developing our relationship with God, we grow more into ourselves as human beings, and draw closer to each other, and to the rest of creation.