What a great week it has been (lectionarily speaking) for prayer! The Lord's Prayer being part of Sunday's Gospel set off waves of reflection (at least for me, having managed to hear now 3 sermons (of varying enjoyment on my part) on the subject.)

But also we have the Saint's Day for St. James - and I just today stumbled on this wonderful little story about him:

James, the brother of the Lord... was nicknamed “Camel-knees” by the early Church. James had been so slow of heart to believe that his brother, Jesus, could possibly be the Christ, that, after he was brought to believe, he was never off his knees. And when they came to coffin him, it was like coffining the knees of a camel rather than the knees of a man, so hard, so worn, so stiff were they with prayer, and so unlike any other dead man’s knees they had ever coffined.

From Lord, Teach Us to Pray: Sermons on Prayer by Alexander Whyte, D.D., LL.D. (London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., 1922), 2.6.

Regardless of the "true-story" aspect of this, what a wonderful illustration of that emotion of more-than-doubt, that sheer personal willfulness to deny the obvious, our refusal to consent to what lives right beside us, that kind of stubborn heartedness we all have - and what happens when it is converted into love. To finally give way to incomprehensible truth and let that now carry us passionately forward.

I wish us all camel-knees of the heart, lives of continuous prayer life that mark us, mold us, change us so that prayer is our default position, the way our selves know best how to live: suffused with love and laughter.

peace and joy, dear ones,
Alison

I love it, Alison! Thank you. My new prayer is for camel-knees. God knows my heart has been slow to open up and I feel that I, too, have much catching up to do.

Alison, thanks for sharing about prayer. In my mid-fifties now and am just learning about prayer, somehow skirting around it since I became a christian in 1973. I discovered a spiritual bankruptness without the communion in prayer with the Father, and enjoy His presence as I prayerfully go about my day. Again, thanks for your post as it encourages me to press on! Blessings, HH.