Prayer
Prayer means talking to God in whatever language or form one can manage (spoken words, song, writing, weeping, laughing, sighs too deep for words).
Examples from Scripture:
- Lord's Prayer
- Miriam's Song
- Jesus' prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane
- Psalms
(a formal prayer with ritual language that establishes the relationship between petitioner and God)
(an exuberant outpouring)
(a cry from the depths)
(several kinds, but all having a liturgical form)
Reading a set prayer helps to introduce the sound of prayer, but the larger goal is to pray spontaneously from the heart.
Some find that setting aside a regular time for prayer helps to underscore prayer's importance.
The point of prayer isn't to attain an orthodox understanding of God, but to stand under the umbrella of God's love. If prayer strays from doctrine or custom, so be it. The free soul will find its way to the place where God waits.
How do you teach prayer?
Life itself tends to be the first teacher. Both the joys and sorrows of life evoke in us a desire to pray. We might not call it "prayer." But listen to us when we say "Oh, God!" after a surprise, or when we look heavenward, or when we say, "Lord, help us" in a crisis.
Those are prayers, and as Paul said to the Romans, they come forth unbidden from that place in us, that "spirit of adoption," which God has planted in us.
The starting point of teaching prayer, then, is to honor the instinct for prayer that we already have within us.
The second point is to ratchet down the formalism, expectations, and performance anxiety that often are associated with prayer. An honest prayer spoken from the heart conveys more depth than an eloquent prayer read from a book. A child saying, "Thank you, God, for this food" can be a livelier mealtime prayer than a grownup's well-chosen phrases. We need to let our hearts speak, in whatever language they can.
The third is to identify God as yearning to hear true words. That is, God yearns to be in relationship with us, and God wants that relationship to be grounded in full mutual acceptance: us accepting God's truth, God accepting our truth, and ourselves living in truth. In other words, no hiding. Prayer is our way out of hiding.
The fourth is to encourage an effort to try. No matter how halting, trying to pray starts us over our hurdles of shyness, self-doubt and remorse. Praying with one other person, either a spiritual director or a trusted friend, will be a better starting point than praying in a large circle.
Finally, we need to leave room for God's many responses to prayer. Controlling nature -- reversing a disease, for example -- might or might not occur. The measure of prayer isn't that we get what we want, but that we were honest before God about what we needed and where we hurt and, in the process, heard the rhythms of our hearts. To experience God's responses to prayer, we need to get out of our own way, including our expectations and scripts.
Sharing glimpses of God's responses can be helpful, but must be handled with care. Spiritual triumphalism has been a long-standing problem in the Christian movement.
