One More from Benson

One last paragraph from "In Constant Prayer" by Robert Benson, that I wanted to offer up for consideration and discussion:

"One of the reasons it's hard for us to say the daily office is that on most days, prayer is more like weeding a flower bed for the third time this month than it is some divine and mystical experience.  The truth is that for most of the time - for all time, according to the ones that have gone before us - the office has a kind of mundane, everyday sort of feeling.  There is a blessed ordinariness to it.  The daily office is not called daily for nothing, you know.

There is a temptation for all of us to feel as though worship is not really worth much unless we are personally moved by it.  If we are not somehow emotionally touched, then our worship does not seem spiritual to us.  It helps to remember that liturgy is the work of the people, not the magic wand of God." 

(Robert Benson, In Constant Prayer, pg. 56-57)

I so relate to the temptation he mentions to feel as though worship is meaningless unless I am somehow emotionally moved by it.  As if my acts of devotion are worthless unless they carry a momentous emotional experience with them.  How easy it is for me to forget that the worship is not about me, at all, but about the one being worshiped.