The question came up this week: Mary, how do you practice prayer? It’s a great question, because prayer is a practice and it takes practice. But “it”—the precise form of prayer—varies greatly from day to day, from person to person, from tradition to tradition. There are so many ways to pray!
What’s very important, though, is to confirm that I am referring to a conversation with God—the One who created everything and is sovereign over the universe, our world, and our souls. God has no true rivals, though we try occasionally to erect our own golden calves. The God I speak to daily is the God above all gods who has revealed himself to us through his Word, the Bible, and incarnationally in his Son, Jesus Christ. When we pray, Jesus is our go-between. We pray in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, because it is through him that we gain a hearing with the Father. The conversation that ensues is a precious gift.
The good news is that the practice of prayer is not a legalism, a set of rules, or a magic formula. It’s a conversation facilitated by the Holy Spirit who dwells in our hearts by faith in Jesus. The Spirit is at work in many ways, including interceding for us especially when there are no words. So even if our attempts at prayer are thin, inarticulate, or flummoxed, we can rest in the assurance that the Spirit is translating our longings into petitions to God.
Since prayer is a conversation with God, communication is two-way. God speaks to me through his Word, inner promptings, and rarely (maybe five times in my whole life) by a definite word that intrudes upon my thoughts, clearly not from me. The fact that God is an active conversation partner suggests that it is important to listen as well as to speak. But my end of the dialogue can be silent, spoken aloud, or sung, in free-form or guided by Scripture or read from a prayer book.
Some people I know pray while they walk the neighborhood; others have a special quiet place in which to sit and contemplate the goodness of God. I even know folks who pray through their reading of the newspaper. Anything can serve as a prompt or place for prayer. My next post will describe one such prompt and its meaning to me.