This cycle of prayer is designed to be used with the Prayers of the People each Sunday and to fit into whichever form your church chooses from The Book of Common Prayer (BCP). It is also designed to complement the Anglican Cycle of Prayer. By using this cycle of prayer, congregations and individuals will remember, in a systematic fashion, all the ministries and churches in the diocese.
Since we're making a concentrated effort in the diocese to encourage and strengthen the ministry of all God's people, added emphasis on the prayers of the people is especially appropriate. You are encouraged to include the petitions in your Sunday leaflet or other material so that they are available for each person to use in daily prayers. As a member of the congregation stands each week and reads the petitions, she or he helps make the liturgy truly the "work of the people."
We hope that this cycle will help strengthen the relationship of each person with God and the connection among all in the diocese.
There is no way from one person to another. However loving and sympathetic we try to be, however sound our psychology, however frank and open our behaviour, we cannot penetrate the incognito of the other man, for there are no direct relationships, not even between soul and soul. Christ stands between us, and we can only get into touch with our neighbours through him. That is why intercession is the most promising way to reach our neighbours, and corporate prayer, offered in the name of Christ, the purest form of fellowship.
— Dietrich Bonhoffer,
The Cost of Discipleship
The Rev. Martin Smith, Superior of The Society of St. John The Evangelist in Cambridge, MA, writes in the February, 1999 issue of Episcopal Life:
We can understand intercession better as a form of contemplative prayer. In intercession we are holding in our hearts the awareness of God, God in relationship with those whom we care about. God cannot but be already in intimate connection with them, present and active in the situation about which we are concerned.
We are not calling God's attention to people's needs; the Holy Spirit is calling ours to a place where God already is. Our response in intercession is to unite our love for those persons with God's, to offer our concern to be taken up into God's, for God to use in bringing about the good in them which we both desire.
