Reflections on Prayer
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How to Pray
Traditional prayers are often based on words from scripture or from church-based prayers like the rosary and those from the Book of Common Prayer. But prayer does not happen only with beautifully crafted words. Anything spoken from the heart to God or simply attentive silence is prayer. Prayer is helped if you can:
- find or create some sacred space
- still yourself, breathe gently and quietly
- read and reflect on a passage of scripture like a Bible story or a verse from a psalm
- establish a routine to help get prayer going
- use visual images like icons or candles
A simple way of meditating is to stay with a word or passage of scripture as if slowly sucking a boiled sweet until, like the sweet, it breaks up and is absorbed.
If prayer seems too difficult it may help simply to set aside a few minutes of time (with a timer to avoid clock watching), begin with the Lord’s Prayer (Our Father….) and end with asking God to bless you – then leave it up to God to look after the time in between.
Everyone, however experienced at prayer, goes through dry times full of self-doubt making it all too easy to become disillusioned. The answer is not to give up but to persist – simply being with God is restorative. When you do get an answer you want to prayer you may wonder whether it is the prayer that has worked or whether it is just coincidence. Well, as more than one wise spiritual guide has said, with prayer the coincidences increase.
What does prayer do?
An important thing to remember is that prayer is not about changing God but about changing ourselves, learning to be attentive, not only to the mystery of God, but to the mystery of our humanity. Prayer helps us develop our creativity and become more attuned to and responsive to suffering.
