Until I was working full-time, I did not pray. Perhaps I should clarify this as I did go to church and sit quietly when prayers were being said. My family said a prayer before eating dinner together. If asked to say the blessing over a meal, I would recite: “God is great and God is good. And we thank Him for our food. By His hand we must be fed. Give us Lord, our daily bread. Amen.” I have no idea who created this simple children’s prayer, but I recited it from memory without any theological thoughts about the content. I recited it because I was told to say a prayer and this prayer checked the box.
I attended my church’s before-work breakfast after starting my first job in Houston. I was the youngest at a table of men. After being served breakfast, one of the men asked me to say the blessing. I froze because I did not want to recite the children’s prayer, but I could not think of an alternative. I can’t remember what I said, but it was obvious to the men sitting around the table that I did not pray regularly. Given that I had attended church for most of the previous twenty years, I believed I was a failed Christian and resolved to improve.
I first tried reading prayers that others wrote with the hope of being able to expound deep theological concepts elegantly and fluently. This did not work as it felt ingenuous and did not resonate within my heart. I read books on prayer and discovered a short outline for prayer: Adoration-Confession-Thanksgiving-Supplication (ACTS). This four-part system organized my thoughts towards praising God, confessing my sins, expounding my gratitude, and placing my petitions before God. I still use ACTS, although my prayers flow more freely now after years of practice.
After I entered seminary, people asked me to lead group prayers. I sensed that my Christian friends and family believed that I was suddenly an expert in prayer, or perhaps they felt uncomfortable praying in group settings and punted to me. When praying quietly alone, one can just babble since God knows your heart. In groups, you need to anticipate and articulate the emotions of the moment. This is not personal prayer time; it is the time to pray communally.
During October, our church pastor did a three-week sermon series on prayer using Anne Lamott’s book Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers (Riverhead Books, NY, 2012). Her writing style is ‘stream of consciousness’ which I must confess I struggle to read (I am not an English major!), but her three themes do resonate. “Praying ‘Help’ means that we ask that Something give us the courage to stop in our tracks, right where we are, and turn our fixation away from the Gordian knot of our problems. We stop the toxic peering and instead turn our eyes to something else: to our feet on the sidewalk, to the middle distance, to the hills, whence our help comes—someplace else, anything else. Maybe this is a shift of only eight degrees, but it can be a miracle.” (p. 40) Help aligns with Supplication, the act of petitioning God for help when we can’t do it alone.
Thanks aligns with Thanksgiving and is the easiest part of my prayers. “Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides. It means you are willing to stop being such a jerk. When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and in the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back.” (p. 56–57) Sociological studies have shown that one of the traits of happy people is gratitude. Knowing that you came into the world with nothing and were supported throughout your life by others and are surrounded by God’s providence, brings forth gratitude, even amidst sorrow, pain, and disappointment. Joy springs forth from gratitude.
“Wow has a reverberation—wowowowowow—and this pulse can soften us, like the electrical massage an acupuncturist directs to your spine or cramped muscle, which feels like a staple gun, but good. The movement of grace from hard to soft, distracted to awake, mean to gentle again, is mysterious but essential. As a tiny little control freak, I want to understand the power of Wow, so I can organize and control it, and up its rate and frequency. But I can’t. I can only feel it, and acknowledge that it is here once again. Wow.” (p. 83–84) Wow aligns with Adoration which is praising God who created the Wow. If we do not notice the wows of life, then we don’t witness God’s creation and mighty acts. The Apostle Paul wrote about Wow in Romans 1:20. “Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse;” (Romans 1:20)
We end our prayers with Amen which means “so be it.” We really don’t know what else to say at the end of bringing forth to God our most vulnerable thoughts. Lamott expresses this moment best: “More than anything, prayer helps me get my sense of humor back. It brings me back to my heart, from the treacherous swamp of my mind. It brings me back to the now, to the holy moment, whether that means watching candles float on the Ganges or bending down in my front yard to study a lavish dandelion, delicate as a Spirograph drawing, that looks like its very own galaxy. Amen amen amen!” (p. 100-1)
I will never be good at prayer, but prayer is good to me. I was perfectly made, but an imperfect work-in-progress until I die. Prayer works, personally and within community. I believe that God listens to my imperfect prayers and delights in the conversation. This gives me a peace beyond understanding and that is why I pray.
