I’ll be honest–for three years I’ve struggled with prayer more than at any other time in my life. During that span, three pathogens of deep-seated personal battles, unexpected professional challenges, and COVID-related social and cultural upheaval bred a toxin infecting my prayer life, leaving it feeble and anemic. There have been days when the best I could do is utter a few sentences to the sky as I walked our dog Dasher through the neighborhood or scrawl a few lines in a journal whose empty pages left me wondering where the rest of prayer had gone.
I hope you can’t empathize. I hope prayer flows as easily for you as breathing. I hope you’re flourishing when it comes to prayer.
But, I suspect many of you can empathize. If you can, don’t worry. You’re in good company. St. Benedict, the sixth century father of western monasticism, once wrote, “Even when we fail, always we begin again.” This line, “always we begin again,” became for Benedict a kind of mantra, summarizing a common need in the spiritual life. For one reason or another, in one season or another, we’re always beginning again. As I continue to begin, again, in prayer, I’m stepping back into what I know. And here are four things I know:
1.Prayer can be me borrowing someone else’s words, letting the fullness of their words fill the emptiness left by the absence of my own words. Like a respirator breathing for me until my lungs heal and strengthen enough to breathe alone, someone else’s words can pray for me until my soul and spirit heal and strengthen enough to pray with words of my own.
2. Prayer can also be me speaking my own words, no matter how few, feeble or
unformed they feel. My free-flowing conversation with God can be as raw, honest, short, long, casual or formal as it needs to be.
3. Prayer can be me listening for God’s words, giving God space to speak when I can’t find the energy to speak or make the effort to speak. God doesn’t always need me to speak. If prayer truly is dialogue, God longs for my silence so he can speak.
4. Prayer can be simply savoring God without any words at all. Silence can be a form of prayer when done intentionally, a way of saying, “I’d like to just be with you for a bit.”
In this blog series, I’ll explore all four ways to pray.
