Habits of Prayer

 Because today is Ash Wednesday, I'm thinking about Lenten penances, if that is the word.   From St Benedict's Rule chapter 49:

During these days.....we will add to the usual measure of our service something by way of private prayer and abstinence from food or drink, so that each of us will have something above the assigned measure to offer God of his own will with the joy of the Holy Spirit (1 Thess 1:6).

JD Flynn of The Pillar had a couple of ideas for Lent that I liked:

 Each Lent, I try to take up the spiritual discipline of hand-copying Scripture, which I find to be both edifying and demanding — especially the needed fortitude to stick with it through the course of Lent.

I also aim to better commit to my promises of intercessory prayer for other people. I’ve always been struck by the discipline of St. John Henry Newman on this. Insisting that intercessory prayer is the ordinary duty of the Christian, Newman was good about carrying with him his long list of people to pray for, with specific intentions and requests, and about spending time with the Lord and that list every day. 

Hearing that St JH Newman kept an ongoing list of prayer requests and intentions, I looked a bit for more information and found this from a site called Newman Friends:

In (Newman's) private journals we come across lists of prayers and petitions written down and used by him from his teenage days. The Fathers of the Oratory in Birmingham still have three small notebooks, thumb-soiled and worn, which were constantly used by him and which contain prayers he said and the intentions and names of people he prayed for. The earliest prayer dates from 1817 when Newman was sixteen years old. It was composed for his first Holy Communion in the Anglican Church. The last entry is dated seventy-two years later -the year before his death. Few people preserve and use their prayers over a period of seven decades! These humble pages bear eloquent witness to Newman’s inner life of communion with God, and show us the unassuming and simple soul that lay hidden beneath the outward distinction of this famous Oxford convert. His intellectual and his devotional life were not separated compartments: they went together.

I wasn't able to find a photo of the little notebooks from the Birmingham Oratory but I did find a place on the Newman Reader where you can find digitized versions of Newman's letters and diaries going back to when he was about 3 or 4.    I'm looking through the first one now, from his first 25 or so years of life, but that's getting away from the topic of Lent and prayer habits.

The final fishing expedition was to see if Tolkien had written about his prayer habits and I found this from Tea with Tolkien, part of a letter to his son Christopher. 

"If you don't do so already, make a habit of the 'praises'. I use them much (in Latin): the Gloria Patri, the Gloria in Excelsis, the Laudate Dominum; the Laudate Pueri Dominum (of which I am specially fond), and one of the Sunday psalms; and the Magnificat; and also the Litany of Loretto (with the prayer Sub tuum praesidium). If you have these by heart you never need words of joy. It is also a good and admirable thing to know by heart the Canon of the Mass, for you can say this in your heart if ever hard circumstances keep you from hearing Mass..."

There wasn't anything I could find Tolkien saying about Lent directly, but I did come across a blogpost called The Lord of the RIngs and Lent, making comparisons between the two.    Here's a whole blog devoted to Lent of the Lord of the Rings.