Do You Bow Your Head?

As we bow our heads to pray, how often do we find ourselves questioning, Why are we bowing our heads? Many of us are used to this practice, but few really know the reasoning behind it. I am going to reveal some of the reasons to you in this article. 

You see, for years the only place that was acceptable to pray was in a holy prayer room at the Church in the area. If we had requests for God to hear, they must be brought to our Priest and he was alone allowed to present them to God. Supposedly this was loosly based on Matthew 6:6 saying that when we pray we are to enter into our prayer closet and pray alone and in secret to others.  

The idea behind Martin Luther and other reformists in the early Roman Catholic church was to open up both the scriptures and the other things that only the priests did to the general partitioners bring before God instead of only the priest. It cut down drastically on the workload of the priest, while at the same time giving much more responsibility to the individual. 

The idea of bowing your heads came later though as each individual was urged by his church leader to devote a room in their home or somewhere to the practice of prayer and reading of the scriptures. This practice became harder and harder as the people got closer and closer to each other and the population increased.  Soon it became very hard to give up the room for God’s use and for His purposes alone. Soon afterward people were finding themselves in smaller and smaller spaces attempting to continue their practices of praying and studying God’s Word. Soon afterward, it became expedient to men to no longer leave prayer and the study of the scriptures to a special room or place and make a more open way to continue it. 

This is when the bowing part comes into play. Men began to, even though the bible says for them not to do it, pray in public places. This was a compromise made by men to save themselves the time and effort of devoting a room and place of their own to prayer and study of the scriptures. Men, and women, would bow their heads and close their eyes, to simulate to themselves being in a closet where they could be alone with their prayers to God. The Israelites do the same thing to this day by bowing their heads and pulling their prayer shawls over their heads as they pray. This is where the verse, written by Paul, that has received so much controversy about women keeping their heads covered and men not, comes from. 

This is also the reason Paul is referred to as a tent maker in the New Testament. Pulling a prayer shawl over your head to pray is making a personal prayer tent for yourself and so the making of big burly tents made of goats hair and cloth and being very cumbersome to transport, was most likely not Paul’s trade, however the making of prayer shawls out of cloth found almost everywhere he went. And containing the corners with the blue threads interwoven in them as prescribed in Exodus by Moses, was very possible. 

Let me get back to my topic as I seem to be digressing. When we bow our heads and close our eyes we have less distractions to keep us from focusing on the prayer at hand. It is done now because it has become more of a learned behavior and to show reverence to God than for any other good reason. Personally I think that if we should find ourselves not being able to focus on the prayer, perhaps some personal alone time with God is needed by us to ask God to reveal to us the real reason why we cannot stop and pray.