Churchy fact of the day:
A Stossgebet is an exclamatory or otherwise very short prayer, like "God help me" or "Jesus have mercy" or also the Jesus Prayer. How do you say this in English, I was asked? I didn't know. I looked it up. Apparently, Martin Luther coined the German word based on Augustine's description of the Desert Fathers, who prayed short prayers without ceasing - like arrows from a bow (quadammodo iaculatas). Not having our own Martin Luther, we in English have to settle for the unsatisfying "short prayer" or for the rather too evocative technical term taken from the Latin, ejaculation.
That is all.
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