A while back Dom posted on his blog about his “Father’s Liturgy of the Hours.”
Father told an anecdote in his homily about a friend of his who set his cell phone to beep on the hour every day to remind him to pray for his wife and kids, wherever he happened to be.
I like that idea. I would like to be able to pray the Liturgy of the Hours every day, marking each of the hours of the day with readings and prayers, like religious and priests do. Unfortunately, there just isn�t the time for it. I�m often in meetings or deep in a project and by the time the end of the day rolls around I can�t believe 8 hours has passed.
I thought it was a great idea at the time and was so touched by this ingenious method which my tech-geek husband had found to keep us in his prayers all day. But I was already doing my own thing and had no thought of joining him in this practice.
But recently I’ve been trying to find ways of being more intentional as I go about my day. And ways of keeping in mind all the prayer intentions that come my way so that I actually remember to pray for them. Add to that the tension of being better at praying for strangers than for my nearest and dearest. So I’ve got a new plan—and it’s very new so I’m not promising that it will work especially well—to set up reminders on my phone to pray for one member of my immediate family at the top of each hour. And reminders for my other intentions at the quarter hours.
Think of it, if I just schedule every quarter for twelve waking hours, that’s almost 50 intentions I can remember in the course of a day! And if I miss the alarm the reminder will still be there and I can double up on the ones I’ve missed. Still better than forgetting them altogether.
We’ll see how it works.
How do you keep track of your prayer intentions and how do you remember to pray throughout the day?
And I think it might follow that there is an individual neurological aspect to that sensitivity and need for security. IOW it’s not just a nurturing thing since it would differ in the individual’s own distinctive natural need.
Persons with fibromyalgia which is thought to have a nerve ending oversensitivity to stimulation of all types is of course another distractive condition.
Then there is the creative aspect that creates in others the reactive need to bridle due to concern for coping in the real world which could cause its own insecurity in the creative child!
Very interesting insights.
Wow!!!!!!!! Thanks for posting this. Amazing.
Kris, The book does address (though only in passing) the physiological aspect of sensitivity. He doesn’t go into the specifics of the neurology, which I would find very interesting.
I actually meant to post this passage and then forgot:
“People with ADD are hypersensitive. That is not a fault or a weakness of theirs, it is how they were born. It is their inborn temperament. That, primarily, is what is hereditary about ADD. Genetic inheritance by itself cannot account for te presence of ADD features in people, but heredity can make it far more likely that these features will emerge in a given individual, depending on circumstances. It is a disorder that is transmitted not through heredity but through sensitivity. In most cases ADD is caused by the impact of the environment on particularly sensitive infants.
Sensitivity is the reason why allergies are more common among ADD children than in the rest of the population. It is well known and borne out again and again in clinical practice, that children with ADD are more likely than their non-ADD counterparts to have a history of frequent colds, upper respiratory infections, ear infections, asthma, eczema, and allergies, a fact interpreted by some as evidence that ADD is due to allergies. Although the flare up of allergies can certainly aggravate ADD symptoms, the one does not cause the other. They are both expressions of the same underlying inborn trait: sensitivity. Since emotionally hypersensitive reactions are no less physiological than the body’s allergic responses to physical substances, we may say truthfully that people with ADD have emotional allergies.”