Learning to Pray

Karl at St. Stephen’s Musings has a post quoting an Orthodox priest on the value of formal prayers in teaching us how to pray:

Those formal prayers in the prayer book are the examples of how to pray, they are the “pouring out of the heart” of people who were experienced in prayer (the saints). We begin to learn to pray by mimicking the examples.

When you learned to write in school, weren’t you give letters to trace over and over until you could do them without thinking, and then words to trace over and over and so on. Even now you use those same letters and words in your writing – the letters and words you traced have now become your own and are the means of expressing your own innermost thoughts and feelings.

We “trace over the lines” of the prayers by copying them over and over until they sink in and become “natural”, then we use those prayers as the letters and words of our own innermost spiritual expressions. That’s the “role” of the “formal” prayers in the prayerbook.

Part of the idea here is that we don’t “naturally” know how to pray as we should, but this is something we have to learn. The Holy Spirit has to teach us and teaches us through the prayers of the Saints who’ve gone before us.

For similar reasons Dietrich Bonhoeffer taught that our prayers should always have their foundation in the Bible. He says “What matters is not what we feel like praying about, but what God wants us to ask him for. Not the poverty of our own heart, but the riches of the Word of God must decide how we are to pray.”

We learn this preeminently in the Psalms, which Bonhoeffer calls the Prayer Book of the Bible. In praying the Psalms we join our prayer to the whole Church and to Christ himself whose prayers the Psalms are.

In Life Together Bonhoeffer says that meditation on a passage of Scripture should always form the basis of our personal prayers. This is because prayer, for a Christian, is always a response to God’s coming to us, not a work of our own whereby we reach God.

Of course, talking about prayer is easy. The trick, in my experience, is actually doing it.