A word of prayer

Posted by ESC on October 28, 2008 at 20:23

In Reply to: A word of prayer posted by Marshal MacDougal on October 28, 2008 at 16:05:

: "A word of prayer".
: When a religious gathering is opened or closed, it is often said to do so with not simply a prayer, but "a word of prayer" as in "Let us begin with a word of prayer". I am interested in the origin of this construction, since it makes no grammatical sense. My guess is that it began as a half apologetic assurance that there would not be too many words, i.e. as saying "a brief prayer", but I wonder if there is an origin that can be traced beyond that. I have searched this site for any previous discussion of this, and found none, also nothing elsewhere on the web, although the phrase itself appears frequently.

My references have a lot of information about prayer customs. But I haven't found anything, so far, about the above phrase. Maybe this has some bearing: in Biblical terms, a word isn't just a single word. From Merriam-Webster, the Word is "the expressed or manifested mind and will of God."

• A word of prayer Smokey Stover 29/October/08