Relearning Prayer

I am not proud to admit it, but prayer is a part of my spiritual life in which I pretty much feel like a failure.

I’ve attended conferences on prayer, read books on prayer and experimented with various styles of prayer: conversational prayer, silent prayer, listening prayer, journaling prayer, fixed-hour prayer, group prayer, and contemplative prayer – just to name a few. While in high school, I even tried unsuccessfully to learn how to pray in tongues. I figured that, maybe if the Spirit were to take control, I wouldn’t struggle so much with prayer. But no matter what I’ve tried, I have never been particularly good at prayer.

Some friends spend an evening, a day, or even weekend in prayer. I struggle to spend an hour. Some rhapsodize concerning the beauty, wonder and divine intimacy of the time which they spend in prayer and I feel like I am missing something. I pray and my mind wanders, my leg jiggles impatiently, and my heart, as often as not, remains untouched.

About the only thing I can state on my own behalf is that, despite my frequently disappointing experiences with prayer, I keep on pursuing a better prayer life.

I grew up in a Bible-believing, evangelical church during a rather transitional period of the late twentieth century. There was still the occasional formal prayer full of thee’s and thou’s, usually practiced by geriatric elders presiding at the Communion table. But, increasingly, these prayers were looked upon as a form of pious pretentiousness and an indication of spiritual artificiality.

To my generation, real prayers were expressed in words that were simple, commonplace and informal. My generation took to this ‘natural prayer’ wholeheartedly and treated our casualness in prayer as proof that our relationship with God was personal and intimate; just like we were stopping in for a chat with a friend over a cup of coffee.

Obviously, authenticity and simplicity are good things, and conversational prayer is still the ‘meat and potatoes’ of my prayer life. But my search for a deeper prayer life has led me in some unexpected directions. Imagine my surprise in experiencing winds of spiritual freshness and glimpses of divine majesty revealed in classic, old-school prayers which have been passed on, written down and, in many cases, repeated by hundreds of thousands of believers over millennia.

I was surprised to not only find these prayers meaningful, but also formative and corrective. Some of these prayers teach me lessons about the nature of God. Some teach me about the essence of surrender and trust. Some teach me about the holiness and the worthiness of God to be reverenced, even feared. Some remind me that God’s pure love and offered intimacy, if not contrasted against the backdrop of the justice and warranted distance of a holy God, cannot fully be appreciated.

And so, I have become something of a prayer scavenger. I look for prayers which teach me something, mold my heart in a certain way, often to address a spiritual deficiency in my prayer life. It’s an adventure that has already rewarded me and which, I trust, will continue to do so.

This pursuit may not make any sense to you, and that’s OK. I get it. For example, my wife grew up in a more traditional, liturgical church and, based upon that experience, she tends to find anything which is scripted and repeated to generally be pretty lifeless. I have, on the other hand, over the last couple of decades overdosed on the ‘church of the present moment’ that sways with every breeze of popular culture. Consequently, I find these inherited prayers and worship traditions to be grounding and reassuring in their changelessness.

Over the next little period of time, I propose to share some of my prayer discoveries with anyone who is interested to read about them and, in the process, I will do my best to explain why they speak to me. Perhaps they will impact you, as well. If so, you are welcome to borrow and use any that fit you. I am a borrower, too, so I am glad to share.

Some of these prayers are going to be really old. Some will go back to Israel’s King David and the Psalms. Some will date from the early centuries of the church. Some will come out of the ‘high church’ traditions of the Catholic, Orthodox or Anglican churches. Others will come from the Reformation period or later – right up to our generation. I hope that you will appreciate, as I have come to, how God spoke into the lives of people of all these times, places and situations in ways which were meaningful then and which can be meaningful still.

I also hope that you will share with me if there are prayers which have touched and taught your spirit, regardless of when they were recorded. Perhaps they are written in the back of your Bible or in some journal you pull out from time to time. If so, I would love you to send them to me and, perhaps, we’ll let others borrow those prayers as well.

To get us started, I want to share a few personal reflections on a written prayer which you almost certainly already know. It is the recorded prayer, the gold standard of prayers to be memorized, repeated and passed on. It is the model prayer which Jesus taught his disciples.

In my current prayer discipline, most days I repeat this prayer a couple of times a day. And, like anything you do with that kind of frequency, familiarity can become the enemy of meaning and sincerity. Words trip glibly off the tongue until they become that empty babbling of prayer against which Jesus forewarned us. My antidote to this has been to retain the meaning by refreshing the words.

So, even though I pray written, scripted prayers, I do everything within my power to translate them into terms which are personal and meaningful. Why then, perhaps you wonder, use these historic prayers, if you’re just going to update and contextualize them?

For me the answer is to be found in the depth of spiritual wisdom and surrender which many of these prayers reflect. They are a healthy counter-balance to the ‘me-centeredness’ which so much of my casual, informal prayer gravitates toward, if I am left to my own devices. In short, instead of allowing my heart to focus on the natural object of my preoccupation – me, these prayers assist me in focusing my heart on the One who deserves to be my focus.

So, in wrapping up this first reflection on prayer, let me do something very briefly. First, I will present you with the familiar words of the model prayer. And then I will share one of the ways I have adapted the words of this prayer when I have prayed it.

I warn you in advance, this is not a translation – it is a personal application of the prayer. Therefore, you may think it does not perfectly capture the original meaning of the prayer, or it may not resonate with you. If it does not seem to adequately convey the essence of the prayer for you, then I urge you to find the words that do. Shalom.

“This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’” (Matthew 6:9-13)

 “Father, you are above everything you have created, and you are worthy to be shown the honor and to receive the worship which you deserve.
May your Kingdom come into this world, and may I bring it with me into my world. May your will be done in this world – and through my life today – with the same obedience shown you by your angels.
Everything I have has come from your hand. I don’t deserve what I have, let alone any more. But I humbly ask that you bless me with your continuing faithfulness and provision.
Forgive me of my sins, in the same way as I also forgive others of the offenses which they have committed at my expense.
Guide me away from paths which lead to temptation and sin, and protect me from the adversary who desires to bring about my spiritual destruction.”

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