Come Learn to Pray

You don't need another theory or practice of prayer. You need someone willing to learn it with you.

Thirty years have gone by, and I can still remember how my voice caught in my throat when I asked Martin, the Dominican priest who’d become my spiritual mentor, to teach me how to pray.

I thought asking would be the hard part. It wasn’t. Martin invited me to the priory for evening prayer. He also invited me to return the next morning.

It’s been thirty years and most days I still feel like a novice. Last Tuesday proved it again. My knees found the chair by the window the way they always do. The coffee was still too hot to drink. I closed my eyes and waited for something to happen. Nothing happened. I opened one eye and looked at my watch. Four minutes. I closed it again. My mind went racing to the Teams message I needed to answer, then to the doctor’s appointment the day before, then to nothing at all, a kind of gray static where prayer was supposed to be. I have led people through the daily office since Martin. I have taught silent retreats. I have prayed in tongues in a room full of strangers. And still, some Tuesdays, I am a fidgeting man in a chair peeking at his wrist.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my younger self lately. The courage it took to ask, “Will you teach me to pray?” The long, slow apprenticeship that followed, one that has included many people since Martin. I’m not who I was thirty years ago. I haven’t stopped learning. But somewhere along the way I ended up on the receiving end of that same question. And I think it’s a good one.

Ellen, a young adult who comes to evening prayer semi-regularly, often asks a version of this question. She had a period of disengagement from Christianity, and now she’s trying to find her way back. Jim, in mid-life, asked me if I could help him build a rhythm of prayer in the middle of ever-increasing responsibilities at home and work. Stan is going through a painful separation. He’s desperate for God to do something in his life, and he doesn’t know what to do.

A few weeks ago this conviction landed on me as I walked down Dyckman Street. I think I need to teach my friends to pray. And then I spent several days wondering what this might mean.

Maybe you’ve never really prayed, not the way you keep meaning to. Maybe you grew up praying and drifted, the way people drift from anything they were handed instead of chosen. Maybe you pray every day and still feel like you’re missing something everyone else seems to have found. All three of you are welcome here. I’m not writing this for people who have it figured out. I’m writing it for people willing to admit they don’t, which turns out to include almost everyone I’ve ever prayed with, myself included.

There is no shortage of writing about prayer. Shelves of it. Some of it is theology, careful and true, written by people who have thought hard about what prayer is. There are spiritual classics that describe inner peaks and valleys I may never know. I’ve read a good number of them, and they’ve shaped how I think about God more than almost anything else on my shelf. But they didn’t teach me to pray. Nobody’s book taught me to pray. Praying with Martin, and many others since, is what taught me to pray. Both kinds of writing have their place. Neither kind is quite what my friends are asking for. They don’t want a theory of prayer. They want someone next to them while they learn to pray.

It’s one thing to read a manual about swimming. It’s something entirely different to get in the water.

That’s the gap this series is for.

The promise

It’s too easy to write on spiritual topics from a place of aspiration rather than experience. Reading about prayer, even writing about it, is a lot easier than praying in a way that will actually transform you.

For example, it’s tempting to skim a few pages of St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul and hastily apply his poetic terminology to the last time I didn’t feel like praying, or felt disoriented, or depressed. It’s even easier now than it used to be. A quote card with a saint’s name under it travels a lot faster than the years of prayer that quote actually cost him. I get the temptation. But it’s dangerous. When we write about the spiritual life, we’re playing with fire. Just because I’ve climbed a few mountains doesn’t mean I should offer advice on negotiating a cliff face. Nobody should trust my mountaineering advice if they found themselves in a life-threatening situation. I can’t give that kind of advice because, despite enjoying hiking, it’s outside of my experience. Yet pastors, preachers, writers, and even some spiritual directors do the equivalent too often in the spiritual life.

I can’t offer expertise in every form of Christian prayer that has ever existed. I won’t pretend to. What I can offer is a wider berth than you might expect.

I grew up moving between Catholic and mainline Protestant worlds before I ever chose either one for myself. Thirty years of ministry since then, most of it in interdenominational and multiethnic settings, has shaped me in ways I couldn’t have predicted as a younger man. I have knelt in charismatic prayer rooms where the noise itself felt like worship, and I have sat in silence so complete I could hear my own blood moving. I have prayed the Daily Office from a book that generations of Christians prayed before me, and I have prayed conversationally in a hospital hallway with no book at all, just words that came out however they needed to. I’ve offered prayer ministry and healing prayer, sat with people in prayer for deliverance, and prayed the promises of scripture over people who needed to hear them spoken aloud before they could believe them on their own. I’ve prayed Ignatian contemplation, imagining my way into a Gospel scene until it stopped feeling like imagination. I’ve been in prayer rooms devoted to prophetic intercession, and prayed in tongues in rooms full of strangers who somehow didn’t feel like strangers by the end.

So here is my promise to you. I won’t write about what I aspire to in prayer, and I won’t write what I’ve only read about it from someone else. I will not write about a form of prayer I haven’t practiced. If I reach one I haven’t, I’ll point you to someone who has rather than fake my way through it. It will include the things I think I understand, and the things I know I don’t. You will get a friend’s account, including the parts where the account is “I don’t fully understand this either, but here is what happened when I tried.”

What this is not

This isn’t a devotional or a systematic theology of prayer, though we’ll think theologically together plenty. What I want to build with you is closer to an apprenticeship.

I still meet with my own spiritual director, thirty years into learning to pray. I tell him the same kinds of things Ellen tells me. That I don’t know what I’m doing. That the practice I tried last week didn’t work the way I’d hoped. That’s not evidence the apprenticeship failed. It’s evidence it’s still going.

Every piece in this series will end with something to try that week.

The trying is the point. You can read every word I write here and still not have learned to pray. You’ll learn to pray by praying, and I’m just going to keep handing you places to start, the way Martin kept handing them to me, and the way I hope to keep handing them to Ellen, to Jim, to Stan, and now to you.

Where we’re headed

This will run in three seasons, ending at Advent. Think of it as a school year for your prayer life, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that isn’t really an ending.

We’ll spend the first stretch on foundations. Why pray at all? What is the goal or purpose of prayer? How does what we believe about ourselves, or about God, influence how we pray? What actually happens in your mind and body when you stop and turn your attention toward God? We’ll learn why “just pray more” or “just have more discipline” is a dead end. We’ll also consider what to do when we’re disappointed by the answers, or the results, of our prayers. None of this is theory for its own sake. It’s the groundwork that keeps the practices from collapsing the first time they get hard.

After that we’ll walk through practices, one at a time. Conversational prayer, the kind that doesn’t need a book. Fixed hour prayer, and what it’s like to let a liturgy pray you instead of the other way around. Silence, and why it took me years to stop mistaking it for nothing happening. The rosary, and what repetition does to a mind that won’t stop working. Tongues, which can be unsettling to some, but has been a fascinating part of my experience. The body itself, because prayer was never meant to happen only in your head. I’ll take these one at a time, slowly enough that you can actually try each one before we move to the next. I’m not asking you to adopt all six. I’m asking you to find out which ones are actually yours, the way you’d try on several coats before buying the one that fits.

Then we’ll turn outward, toward praying with other people. What changes when someone else is in the room. What it costs to carry someone else’s need in intercession, and what it does to your own prayer life over years of doing it. What prayer ministry actually looks like from the inside, healing prayer included, with its real hopes and its real disappointments. And lament, which might be the most neglected form of prayer in the traditions we’ve inherited, the permission to bring God your rage and your grief instead of tidying them up first.

We’ll land in Advent. That’s not incidental. Advent is the season the church set aside for waiting and longing, and by then I think we’ll be ready to talk about prayer as exactly that, waiting for someone we already love but cannot yet see.

The practice

Here’s your first one, before any of the theology.

Set a timer for three minutes today. Sit down somewhere ordinary, your kitchen table, your car before you go inside, the chair by your own window if you have one. Don’t try to feel anything. Don’t try to say anything impressive. Just say to God, out loud if you can manage it, “I’m here. Will you sit with me?” Then stay for the rest of the three minutes, whatever happens, including if what happens is nothing at all.

That’s it. That’s the whole apprenticeship in miniature. You show up, you say the true thing, and you stay long enough to find out you weren’t alone in the room.

Next week we’ll start with why any of this matters in the first place, why a God who already knows everything would still want to hear from you. For now, just try the three minutes. I’ll be doing the same thing this week, chair by the window, four minutes of static and all. Let’s learn to pray together.

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If you’re new here: I’m Jason, an Anglican friar writing for people who want to learn to pray without pretending they already know how.

If this resonated, send it to someone who’s never quite been taught either.

This is a reader-supported publication. If you’d like to go deeper with the practices in this series, paid subscriptions will open a few weeks in, including a monthly live prayer gathering.