A friend asked the question, “Why do we pray?” I’m not sure what was behind the question, but I decided to take it seriously. If I’m honest, there are times when praying feels like a chore or like talking to emptiness or just talking to myself inside my head. Besides, God knows what I’m going to say. So why say it?
I’m weak at praying. I muddle through it. I’m not particularly deep or faithful in it. This is the reason why I lean so heavily on the Psalms. I rewrote the whole book of Psalms in my own language because I needed to do it. Snippets of psalms from that book, Everyday Psalms, introduce each post on prayer over the next 60 days, but we’ll get to that in a bit. I will probably keep writing about the Psalms for the rest of my life because of how they ground me and expand my praying.
There’s something good about being bad at something. It makes me realize I need help. Hence the Psalms. But it has also made me realize that there’s far more to this praying thing than I had been told by those who taught me about it, acting as if they had this thing down cold. But when it comes to prayer, we have a crisis of imagination. Much of what we’ve picked up about it has been picked up by observation or experimentation. And far too much of what we’re taught about it reduces prayer to a few regurgitated formulas.
Easily the most repeated formula for prayer I’ve come across is referred as ACTS, an acrostic for adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. Now, all four of those approaches to prayer are good in and of themselves. I take part in them often myself. They’re trustworthy roads to travel on through the country of prayer. But for those of us who’ve been taught to stick to them, we’ve been left with the impression that these four are the only reasons to pray, the only roads to travel. That leaves us with a truncated experience. We simply leave too much of the country of prayer unexplored, unprayed. We need more than just these four highways of prayer. We need byways, not just highways. We need to wander more widely. The posts over the next two months are an attempt to sketch a map of some of the roads less traveled in prayer.
My own experience has shown that this vast country had been far too unexplored. My prayers have been like the paths through the woods near my house. I walk the same ones over and over again, making for a nicely worn path where the tree branches no longer snag my clothing. But with the aid of the Psalms as a guide, I’ve been exploring new territory and beating in new prayer paths. I’m getting to know the wilds. I still have so much more to discover. I still get snagged and trip over rocks and roots. And as I do, I keep thinking, “Who am I to write about prayer? Me of all people!” But this isn’t me being an expert. This is me charting a map of what I’m in the process of discovering myself in company with a truly great guide.
In my stumbling prayer life, I’ve discovered just how essential these poor prayers of mine are. I’m like the little old lady who put two pennies in the offering (Mark 12:41-44; Luke 21:1-4). Jesus said she gave everything. My two-cent prayers are my everything. In his poem “The Lanyard,” Billy Collins writes about all of the amazing things his mother had done for and given to him and in exchange he offered her a lanyard made at summer camp. His poem ends with these words:
And here, I wish to say to her not
is a smaller gift — not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.
So, why pray? There’s not just one reason. There are many, many reasons. And over the next two months, we’ll explore 60 of them, each of them a two-cent, two-tone lanyard. There are more reasons to pray, for sure, but I hope this is a good start. I hope you’ll continue to explore even more. But may these 60 be faithful companions to your praying as you, too, put down new paths in this far-too-unexplored country.
This country of prayer is vast. I invite you to explore it together with me.