Fri, förvirrad eller övergiven? En kvalitativ studie av prästers personliga böneliv

Sammanfattning: In the Church of Sweden, priests do not have a specific vow concerning their personal prayer life, which some other church traditions in the world do have. Concerning this, the purpose of this paper is to give a picture of how newly ordained priests in the Church of Sweden, more specifically the diocese of Lund, describes their personal prayer and whether the priests feel that they have received the support and tools from their education they wished for. This has been done using a qualitative method where 10 interviews were conducted with 10 different priests. These interviews have been the primary material for this paper. To discuss the result from the interviews, theologian Tone Stangeland Kaufman’s book A new old spirituality – a qualitative study of clergy spirituality in the nordic context and theologian Gordon W Lathrop’s book The Pastor: A Spirituality constituted the theoretical framework. The result of this study shows that there is great diversity between the priests’ descriptions of their own personal prayer life. This goes for the frequency, the format, the room where their prayer takes place and concerning the body’s role during prayer. Furthermore, the results show that some priests do feel content with their personal prayer life while some feel as if they are lacking something and are longing for more. The results also show that some priests are satisfied with the support they have received during their education while some describe a lack of support. Based on the results my hope is that this topic will be addressed both by the academy but also within the church and especially the Church of Sweden. I also argue that with the lack of existing literature, the results and the discussion in the last chapter shows that this topic is very much up to date and of utmost importance. Therefore, this paper is a start to filling the existing lacuna concerning this topic.