Prayer for beginners

Has my time of prayer been a success? How would you answer that? I remember times of sweet consolation, I remember striking out across my grandparents back yard in the dew of the evening, making my way out into the fields: a stop at the creek, a hike by the pasture and a soak in God’s presence in breeze blowing through a stand of elms. I remember finding God in the sunset, and being knocked on my back by the Spirit’s breath. Fathers Barry and Connolly suggest that such touchstone experiences with God, where God is more real to us than the dew soaking our shoes, provide us a standard to recognize authentic spiritual experiences when they come along (The Practice of Spiritual Direction 104).

It is important for us, as we begin our journey into prayer, to recognize that those times don’t always come. They are gracious gifts, and prayer need not be accompanied by them to be authentic or successful. Still it is tempting for us to seek or even manufacture such experiences to feel we are succeeding at prayer.

When I wasn’t on the farm, I didn’t have the same kind of experience with prayer. When I would go to the prayer room on my dorm floor, I could spend some time in prayer, but I couldn’t work myself into a frenzy of powerful prayer the way some others could. I felt my prayer life was weak, and wanted more. I have found my personal times of prayer hit and miss, and when it is more miss than hit, it is easy to fall out of practice.

So what kind of prayer do we recommend to other beginners? Perhaps the “just do it” isn’t the best advice for prayer. The trainer is at the prayer closet door giving the person a pep talk and opening the door and sends them into battle. The door closes and the darkness and solitude envelops and the pray-er goes says everything he wants and all the nice things she can think to say and in three minutes the time in prayer has become a chore.

Paradoxically a form of prayer can help us pray more effectively from the heart. We Pentecostals tend to believe that if our prayers aren’t spontaneous, they are “vain repetition.” But when the beginners, the disciples, asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he gave them a form. The Lord’s prayer is a great place to start, as beginners we can look to each line and find wealth of meaning. Praying the psalms has been a great experience for me these last few years. That is another form called “The Divine Liturgy.”

Thomas Merton has said,

If we compare the sobriety of the liturgy with the rather effusive emotionalism of books of piety which are supposed to help Christians to ‘meditate,’ we can see at once that the liturgical prayer makes sincerity much easier. The liturgy takes man as he is: a sinner who seeks the mercy of God. The book of piety sometimes takes him as he is only on very rare occasions: on fire with exalted and heroic love, ready to lay down his life in martyrdom, or on the point of feeling his heart pierced by the javelin of mystical love. Most of us, unfortunately, are not ready to lay down our lives in martyrdom most days at six o’clock in the morning or whenever our mental prayer may occur, and most of us have little or nothing to do with javelins of mystical love.

I have found that praying the liturgy of the divine office has given me freedom - freedom to invest meaning into the psalm-prayers rather than working myself into an insincere good feeling. To be sure there is a danger for the novice to make this into law. “I must pray all seven hours every day or I fail” (it is strange that doing anything in this spirit is called by our culture doing it ‘religiously’). I have come to appreciate the benefits of catching a single hour in a day, and have learned not to berate myself for missing out.

Other forms of prayer are also good for the beginner to learn, such as centering prayer or the prayer of examen. Tom Trask, at our ordination service, rightly noted that there is a world of difference between saying prayers and praying. Forms of prayer that help us to listen and get us beyond saying our peace to God help to bring real praying to our prayers and to our work.