I love to kneel in church. Often, before I get there or just after I have left I can feel a tingling in my knees. My body knows that it is approaching the Lord on bended knee.
But why should kneeling make prayer any different? Can't I communicate with my Father in any other bodily position? Surely it can't matter that much!
Well, I think that the body does matter in prayer, that kneeling communicates both humility and veneration, and that when we consciously choose one position over another, we pray better.
As Christians we know that a person is made of body and soul. We are not sacred souls trapped in defiled or evil bodies; but both body and soul intertwined are God's divine creation and therefore are called to be holy.
So God has a plan for each one of us as a complete person, body and soul. We are at our best when body and soul are of one accord and are directed towards God. God wants all of me. So that means that prayer is not just the soul addressing God, but the body too, we can understand that when we are praying out loud, or singing, we are using our lips to pour forth the intention of the soul; but we can do that in other ways too.
We see in the bible that the body is active in praise - David danced naked before the Lord (I'm not advocating that we do that - at least not in public), the Lord tells us in Isaiah that every knee shall bow to him, in a dramatic and powerful way the Virgin Mary offers her body at the call of the Lord, and Jesus himself kneels to pray.
As incarnational and sacramental people, we believe that these actions of the body are not in vain, that God can channel grace through material things and earthly actions. This is why sacrifices were ordained to take away sin, and why God redeems his people in a material sense, leading them out of Egypt. What we believe in our minds and hearts is completely woven in to the lives that we lead every day, God touches our lives, so our lives and our actions can reach out to God. We have a concept of sanctity in and through stuff.
So when my soul prays, so should my body, when my lips are uttering reverent words, so does my knee bend.
But why kneel?
When we kneel we image humility. We make ourselves smaller - think for a minute how huge God is, and yet when we come before him we still need to make ourselves smaller. It is because we need this humility. Most of the time, I'll admit, I do forget that I'm not the centre of the universe, so I need that time, to make myself present before him who is. And to kneel is to surrender, you stop moving, you prevent yourself from advancing and you focus on something external.
It is veneration too. We find from the earliest times that people knelt in order to show their loyalty to a ruler or god, and to honour that being. In fact we see in Esther that when Mordecai would not bend his knee to Haman, the king's exulted official, it was so radical that an attempted genocide ensued. Kneeling before someone is a powerful symbol. It is choosing to be subject to that power and it is a matter of veneration. You acknowledge and put your trust in that power.
And for all of this, for the humility and surrender, the veneration, the deep communication with the Lord in body and spirit, we pray better. On my knees I can focus on the Lord alone, I can see his true identity as Priest and King and I can put my trust in him as Father. This is prayer.
So when I go to a church where the kneelers are more comfortable than the pews, it says something!
