As I mentioned in a recent post, at St. Paul's during Lent we have weekly communion services. This year we are focusing on prayer. Things aren't all planned out yet (hey, I still have 6 hours til the first session!!), but we'll be looking at prayer from different ways, exploring different prayers and types of prayer, looking at the Lord's Prayer, experimenting with Lectio Divina, etc.
My own 'prayer life' has gone through many incarnations. When I was little, and having a spiritual crisis in fourth grade (no joke), my mother asked me if I was praying everyday. "No!" So she told me to pray every night and that I should do that by telling God about my day. I took her quite literally, and being an obedient child, I did exactly what she said. I would first pray the "God bless"es, systematically going through each family member and each extended family member, including all two dozen or so cousins and occasionally even select second cousins. And then I would tell God about my day, in nauseating detail: "Dear God, today I went to school and first we studied math and then we had a spelling test and then we had lunch and then..." If I made it through all of this, I would end with the Lord's Prayer, but more often than not, I fell asleep somewhere through my recitation of events. Actually though, this, along with the daily Bible reading my mom suggested, really helped me through that time and comforted me.
As I got older, I experimented with different ways of praying, never quite returning to that childhood pattern. Now I like to think of my prayer life as more intertwined with everything I do. Isn't conversation with God supposed to be part of all we do? But, still, I have to admit that I'm more likely to do the talking and less likely to do the listening. Intertwining prayer with life only works if there is a space in there to hear as well. I'm not so good at emptying out all the bustling noises of my head to make space for anything other than myself to talk back to me. (I'm reminded of this excellent post by my brother about his meditation experiences...)
Having a disciplined, set-aside, formatted prayer time frankly seems tedious to me sometimes. But I guess that is part of the reality of discipline. If it was something we would do outside of a disciplined routine, then we wouldn't need the discipline of it. But like all disciplines, they are there to shape us even when we don't really want to be shaped.
Praying together is a different matter. I hate reading unison prayers if I feel like I (or we) don't really mean all the words we are saying. And yet, I find that praying together is important, and that we have corporate things to share with God as well as individual. I can think of some specific times when corporate prayer was very meaningful, but I find it hard to consistently avoid feeling like we're just going through the motions.
Do you have a favorite way of praying? Do you find (and how do you find) corporate prayer to be meaningful? Do you have a disciplined way to pray?
4 comments:
My daily devotions are centered around a pattern of:
1. getting my Bible and Bible dictionary and praying the Venerable Bede's prayer for insight in Biblical study.
2. Reading a chapter out of the Bible in sequential order (today: John 17) out loud.
3. Reading some relevant article in the Bible dictionary.
4. General prayer of repentance, grace, and application to that day's Biblical text.
I also pray regularly at Asbury's dandy Prayer Room. It is a lovely and holy place.
Gosh I can relate to your childhood prayer story. When I was in middle school, I kept a prayer journal that fluctuated between nauseating detail and curt basics. I had a second book where I listed (in alphabetical order, with extra pages to add more names, like an address book) people to pray for. It turned into a running list of every one I knew (or knew of), and got way, way out of hand. It's taken me over a decade to recover a sense of joy in any kind of disciplined prayer pattern. I force myself not to feel like less of a Christian than my Episcopal hubby who does the daily office.
One tool I've found really helpful in recultivating a healthy prayer life is the Ignatian concept of attentiveness--that paying attention to our lives and the lives of those around us is the first step in prayer.
When I was a freshman in college an eon or two ago I was "Super Prayer Girl" -- belonged to a couple of bible studies on campus (one of which was via e-mail which at the time was quite revolutionary), had one devotional book I did every morning and another every night. Of course, then life started getting in the way ... which, of course, is the time when a steady prayer routine would come in the handiest I suppose but wasn't thinking in those terms then. Off and on since then I've tried getting back to a routine but it wasn't really until my boy was born that anything stuck. I blame (and thank) Rodney Atkins for getting back into it because his song "Watching You" really hit home big time for me and I realized that if John doesn't see/hear either of his parents pray ever then there's a real good chance he won't have it part of his personal life in the future. And I know that there's a lot more I could probably do towards his spiritual development, but for now we're sticking with his little books of bible stories and his Veggie Tales and his momma saying a prayer with/for him every night when I put him to bed.
A couple pf helpful things:
1) Prayer is asking for things, and it's our reluctance to ask which leads us to all sorts of other nonsense to cloud the issue. Asking (James 4) is our highest possible praise of God, the one in whom we live and move and are. We've really got to get looking good to God off our agenda as we come into his presence and remember that making us look good is his job, not ours.
2) As Paul teaches in Philippians 4, our anxieties are given to direct our prayers. If we pray about whatever is making us anxious, we solve two problems: our anxieties, and our fasilure to pray.
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