Now I Lay Me Down……

The old prayer “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep……” we all know it.  We all recited it at some point.  Perhaps not as a nightly prayer but certainly in passing at some point or other.  Father Stephen recently published a post about this.  He gave the full prayer, an old english prayer.  I have quoted  the full prayer as he wrote it below.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,

Bless the bed that I lie on.

The are four corners to my bed,

Four angels round my head,

One to watch, and one to pray,

And two to bear my soul away.

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

It seems that as protestants we only learned the last four lines.  Presumably to avoid invoking saints.  But reading this prayer it occurs to me that we do not have any scriptural basis for a personal guardian angel.  We all believe we do though.  We accept that via tradition of the Church.  And assuming we do have a guardian angel why would we not wish to ask that angel for protection, for him to pray to God for us, to thank him for his service to us, etc. ?

This is at its core the basis for the invocation of angels.   And the invocation of saints is not far off from that.  If we believe that the saints are really in heaven, that they are really before the throne of God, etc.  We do not attempt to bring them back to this earth, as a spiritist.  But we certainly would believe that Paul was a Holy Man and if we met him we would ask him to bless us and pray for us.  The invocation of Saints is simply the belief that the Saints are not dead.

~ by luciasclay on December 14, 2008.