This is text from the free study guide for our free booklet, Prayer and Devotions: Lancelot Andrewes and the Life of Prayer.
The devotions and prayers of Lancelot Andrewes demonstrate, as T.S. Eliot said, the “determination to stick to essentials, that awareness of the needs of the time, the desire for clarity and precision on matters of importance.” His Prayer on Awaking asks God to grant this day “to our souls what is good and profitable, and to the world peace,” and he concludes the day with an Act of Thanksgiving where “in the night His song shall be with me and my prayer unto the God of my life.”
Andrewes similarly focuses his Act of Charity on making God the focus of our lives: “Thyself, O my God, Thyself for thine own sake, above all things else I love. Thyself I desire. Thyself as my last end I long for.” We should therefore, he cries out to God, “in the life present alway to love Thyself for Thyself before all things, to seek Thee in all things.”
How, though, is it possible to do this? In our busy lives, where our attention is frequently drawn to anything and everything but God, how can we focus on Him? As the apostle Paul says in Romans 8:26, we can do so only through the intercession and empowerment of the Holy Spirit. Still more, Andrewes says in Preparation to Prayer, as members of the church our prayer lives are strengthened by praying with and for each other. Through these, even when we seem to have little interest in praying and cannot find the words to pray, the Holy Spirit and the prayers of others can lead us and help us into lives of fervent prayer. In this way, he concludes, “we have those motions kindled in us whereby our prayer is made fervent.”
Image: The booklet cover, including the portrait of Lancelot Andrewes by Joseph Buckshorn (c. 1660) (Source).
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