Spirituality and JVC – Communal Prayer by STEPHEN HOYLAND

One of the most difficult parts of the JVC year is communal prayer. There are many reasons for this. It might be that one person finds personal prayer difficult or never prays. Perhaps a common way cannot be found which suits all house members with their diverse religious cultures. There is often a reticence around the kind of sharing, which prayer together involves, so that it is easy to let it slip. The absence of communal prayer does not spoil the JVC ethos because the presence of God does not depend entirely upon explicit religious practice, yet if ways of praying together can be found, the community’s life is enhanced and everyone’s JVC experience enriched.

Prayer in common may respond to all of the challenges listed above. Often prayer with others is easier than prayer on one’s own. The community supports the individual. This is not unlike the experience of being unable to study except in a library when surrounded by other people engaged in the same project. The person finding prayer difficult might be pleasantly surprised by how much more it flows in company.

If a JVC member does not really see the point of prayer but is committed to community then so long as the models used are appropriate it can still work.

This brings me on to a discussion of models or ways or praying together which allow people of different traditions to find common ground in a way which is not irksome and awkward. Let’s invent a hypothetical household that might find it difficult to pray together: Martha is a traditional Spanish Catholic who has never heard of Anglicans let alone Evangelicals and is rather shy.
Lucy is an English Evangelical who just loves to share.
Hans is a lapsed Lutheran agnostic hippy with poor English.
Benedict is an English conservative Catholic who changed his name by deed pole after the last papal election and prays the Divine Office in Latin.

OK, the prospects for the kind of communal prayer that is going to last more than one sitting for this spiritually dysfunctional JVC family might be bleak. What are the prospects?

Each person could take their turn at leading a way of praying that suits them individually. This is likely to be embarrassing and unappealing. “Now then, Lucy”, says Benedict, “This is a rosary. . . ” Or imagine Lucy’s face as Hans reaches for the incense sticks and rolls up a ‘peace pipe’. Lucy takes her revenge with her prayer of exorcism as she sings in tongues, hands raised. Martha wonders how quickly she can get back to Spain.

My suggestion, or one possibility, would be different. Each person takes a turn to lead. Music is played, choosing something to which no one objects. You might have a bank of CDs, which everyone can live with. This helps towards stillness. There could follow a period of silence for personal reflection or prayer, but together, in the same space. Then a short reading: something from the leader’s religious tradition or a favorite poem perhaps, but accessible and inoffensive to everyone. Another period of silence in which to reflect or pray follows. Then the leader could formally end the time of prayer/reflection in a suitable way, perhaps by playing some more music for a few minutes and fading it out gently, after which the prayer is over, or with a prayer said by that leader, or the whole group if appropriate. The whole process could take between 30 minutes or an hour. The length should be agreed beforehand. There might be a little sharing on how that was for people. It is a very good way of further building up the community.

Of course, groups might want some prayer aloud, choose to sing, or to do things differently in all sorts of ways, if that suits them. It might be that a community decides to share each other’s traditions. This can be one of the growth points of the JVC year in that different approaches to prayer are shared within the community and each person learns again that God is bigger than one tradition and can come to us in more than one kind of way.

The strength of the model described above is that it could work with any community and perhaps even in extreme cases where there is little common ground yet there remains a desire to be a fully functioning Jesuit Volunteer Community.

Stephen Hoyland is currently on the team at Loyola Hall Spirituality Centre, a Jesuit retreat centre near Liverpool. He is interested in an approach to spirituality that is truly nourishing for individuals and communities and supports the commitment to social justice and simple living. This is one reason why he likes JVC. The other is the joy of contact with the volunteers who embody those core values, and also play football with him