Since 1935, it has been a museum, where tourists are as awed as Procopius was by the immense cupola floating above the prayer hall.
In the early years of the Seamen's Church Institute, sailors arriving from the Atlantic would congregate for prayer in floating chapel barges anchored in Lower Manhattan.
In the struggle to comprehend a secular life that somehow and always includes the divine, these many commentators, like Luria and his fellow cabalists in the holy city of Safed, all seem to be "floating in their own prayer".
Maybe the question our society should ask is, "Why do we still have a world where Mother Teresa is needed?" In answer to this, an Indian prayer floats through my mind.
In the second world war Malacca was briefly overrun by the Japanese, but recently it has returned to the tranquillity of its birth.When your correspondent visited, a muezzin's call to Friday prayers floated up from a nearby mosque.
Babies screaming, children playing, cicadas, chickens, songbirds, cows, televisions and, floating above it all, the call to prayer at a distant mosque.
Putting the spotlight on Niebuhr's authorship (whether he was the sole "originator" of the prayer or the major "codifier" of fragments already floating in the homiletic air) may help redirect attention toward the social Gospel meaning the prayer conveyed to Niebuhr and his many liberal disciples — even after their radical hopes of the early 1930s had dimmed.
He finished the night of prayer feeling as if he was "floating on air".
They also joined in a prayer for Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year-old Cuban boy found floating off the Florida coast in November and whose journey home became a half-year international custody battle.
To relieve my loneliness, I prayed, asking to be allowed to sleep, without expecting the prayer to be answered, I felt so taut — a needle floating on the surface tension of a glass of still water.
