Wait for the LORD;
be strong, and let your heart take courage;
wait for the LORD!
For God alone my soul waits in silence,
for my hope is from him...

He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, 'Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.' He said to them,

'When you pray, say:
Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive
everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial.'

Whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.

He makes me lie down in green pastures;
he leads me beside still waters;
he restores my soul.
He leads me in right paths for his name's sake.

Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear.
When the righteous cry for help, the LORD hears,
and rescues them from all their troubles.

Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. Devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with thanksgiving. Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints.

Pray without ceasing.

Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.

Psalm 46:10; Psalm 27:14; Psalm 62:5; Luke 11:1-4; Matthew 6:6; Jeremiah 29:12; Jeremiah 33:3; Psalm 23:2-3; Isaiah 65:24; Psalm 34:17; Philippians 4:6; Colossians 4:2; Ephesians 6:18; 1 Thessalonians 5:17; Matthew 18-19-20.
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How we pray is who we are. Prayer is friendship with God. Our prayer is the best measure of the integrity of our Christian life. Jacques Ellul gives us the clue in a powerful chapter he calls 'The Only Reason for Praying' in his Prayer and Modern Man. According to the Bible, he says, the only reason to pray is that God commands us to pray. The biblical prayers are often very direct and frank (e.g. 2 Kings 19:15-19, 2 Samuel 7:18-29). Sometimes there is a sense of the awesome majesty and power of God (Isaiah 6:5, Job 42:1-6). Others are mystical (Ezekiel 1:4-28); many of the Psalms are lamentations - cries to God 'from the depths' to be healed, to be set free, to be saved. Some biblical prayers are very brief - even one word ('maranatha', 'our Lord, come', which is the oldest Christian prayer - 1 Corinthians 16:22, cf Revelation 22:20). The prayers of the Bible often arise out of crisis and conflict, leading us to faith, hope and confidence in God.

Prayer covers all the events of our lives, so there are many different ways to pray. Sometimes we are still, knowing within the depths of our being that he is God. At other times, we have to work hard at prayer: it 'is not a gentle pastime', as the new Dutch Roman Catholic catechism puts it. The masters of prayer teach us:

* Pray as you can, not as you can't. There is no 'instant' holiness. Prayer is hard work. It is the work of a lifetime - the longest journey is the journey inward - but we begin afresh every morning. You are unique, so your relationship with God will be unique, and therefore your prayer will be unique.

* Ask yourself: "What is my desire?" (Mark 11:24). What do you want? Do you want God to take possession of you? Prayer is, essentially, the soul's sincere desire... Prayer is an acknowledgement of our willing- ness to be changed, our readiness to be surprised.

Jesus taught two parables about prayer, about a sleepy neighbour and an unjust judge (Luke 11:5-13; 18:1-8). The main point he made was about the importance of earnest desire in prayer. We ought always to pray, and never to faint, or give up. Someone has said that when we faint we fall back on nothing, but when we pray we fall forward on God. And yet even if your desire is only tentative and flickering, our Lord never 'snuffs out the smouldering wick' (Matthew 12:20). Write down what you are really after in your life.

* Prayer is a gift. Like love, it is a gift experienced every day, fresh from one who loves us. Prayer is not a bag of spiritual techniques. Paul says God gives us the Holy Spirit to help us (Romans 8:26-27). The Spirit prays in us, for us, through us, and with us. Prayer is not just what we do, but what God wants to do through us. So prayer is not merely seeking God. Rather, it is allowing him to find us.

* The main aim of prayer: to know God, through love. Knowing God - or anyone else - is much more than knowing about him. In her beautiful book Poustinia Catherine de Hueck Doherty talks about 'folding the wings of the intellect and opening the door of the heart' in God's presence. This is 'affective knowledge', a knowing that leads to loving and responds to our being loved.

* There are three kinds of prayer: spoken (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication, intercession), contemplative ('thinking of God with love' as Charles de Foucauld expressed it), and meditative, reflecting on Scripture or life's events in God's presence. Bonhoeffer advocated half an hour's silent meditation on Scripture every morning. This was not 'Bible study' as such, but the discipline of being 'under the Word'.

As our prayer deepens, many of the saints tell us, we find ourselves needing fewer words.

* Find a quiet, regular place and time each day for prayer. If possible guarantee that you will be unhurried and uninterrupted. Your 'quiet time' may sometimes be short - but a short time with a friend is better than no time at all.

For many it's difficult to find silence in our noisy world, or solitude in our crowded cities. But you must keep trying. Turn a corner of your house into an 'oratory'. Pull off the road under some trees. Walk along a deserted beach. Put in a telephone answering machine. Your quest, as Carlo Carretto suggests, is to make your own desert. Remember, if you are too busy to pray, you are too busy.

* Prayer is also living and working. All of our life, our thoughts, our words, our actions, our motives, are lived in the presence of our God. Pere de Caussade talked inspiringly of 'the sacrament of the present moment'.

Sometimes, however, our work negates our prayer. Remember how Isaiah expressed the Lord's message: 'When you lift your hands in prayer, I will hide my eyes from you. Though you offer countless prayers, I will not listen... Pursue justice and champion the oppressed.' (Isaiah 1:15-17)

Prayer is not an escape from reality. In prayer we 'love the world' as God does - the world of people. He or she who is not listening to the heart-cry of another, is not listening to God either - and God is not listening to them.

So be encouraged! Prayer is hard - but so is everything else in this life that is worthwhile. There is no short cut to true spirituality.

But prayer is essentially a simple process - even a child-like one. We come empty-handed to our heavenly Father, humble, and poor. And, over time, we gradually discover that God inhabits more and more the centre of our lives, as Augustine put it, 'more intimate to us than we are to ourselves'.

* Prayer is a corporate activity. The apostolic Christians prayed together from the start. The Holy Spirit was poured out on a group at prayer (Acts 1:14). They continued to spend a lot of time in prayer together (Acts 2:42). Paul prayed constantly with his co-missioners (Colossians 1:9; 1 Thessalonians 1:2; 2 Thessalonians 1:11) and asked others to join him in disciplined prayer (Romans 15:30). James (5:16) tells us to 'confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you will be healed.'

Praying together is one of the richest experiences Christians can have with each other.

Sometimes prayer meetings are large; they are church-wide. These can be powerful occasions, but only where there is a strong sense of community. In Western nations such intimate 'belongingness' on a larger scale is quite rare, so there has been a worldwide movement towards smaller prayer-groups. This is good. Such 'growth groups', 'prayer cells' - call them what you will - should do three things: scripture reading, meditation and study; sharing of our personal concerns with one another; then prayer. That is, we listen to God, listen to each other, then speak to God the things have have arisen in the other two encounters. The 'mix' of Bible, sharing and prayer will vary from group to group, and from time to time in one group. What is important is that all three occur in all groups all the time.

Finally, a modern paraphrase of some advice from Julian of Norwich: Pray inwardly, even if you do not enjoy it. It does good even though you think you are doing nothing. For when you are dry, empty, sick, or weak, at such a time your prayer is most pleasing to God, though you find little enough to enjoy in it.
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Sometimes prayer is simple
Sometimes it seems impossible.
Sometimes the life of prayer is fulfilling and refreshing.
Other times it's dry and lifeless.

Paul Wallis, Rough Ways in Prayer, London: Triangle SPCK, 1991, p. xi.

The most important discovery of my life of prayer... Do you want to know what it is? That prayer takes place in the heart, not in the head.

Carlo Carretto, The Desert in the City, London: Fount Paperbacks, 1983, p.23.

The primary reason not to pray has to do with control. There is a strong need inside every human being to be in control. People who have an extreme desire to control their environment try to think through an adequate response to every possible contingency that might arise from any given situation. They want no surprises and are often successful in achieving their goals. People like this are not likely to entrust their well-being to another person, because that means giving up control. Consequently, these people are very unlikely to pray. Genuine prayer flows out of an acknowledgement of inability and finitude. Genuine prayer means giving up control of our destiny to God...

I need to pray, yes, and not just because I so often feel inadequate and am looking for help. I need to pray because I know the emptiness inside of me can only be filled by God. I need to pray because I know that it is only in prayer that I begin to become fully human. I need to pray because I was created to be in relationship with God. I need to pray because in prayer heaven and earth meet, and the reality of God's Kingdom, the future reality of redemption, wholeness, and joyous love, breaks into my present brokenness.

Kenneth Swanson, Uncommon Prayer p. 42, 85

The Bible pray-ers prayed as if their prayers could and would make an objective difference. The apostle Paul gladly announced that we are `colaborers with God' (1 Corinthians 3:9); that is, we are working with God to determine the outcome of events...

Moses was bold to pray because he believed he could change things, even God's mind. In fact, the Bible stresses so forcefully the openness of our universe that, in an anthropomorphism hard for modern ears, it speaks of God constantly changing his mind in accord with his unchanging love (Exodus 32:14, Jonah 3:10).

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, Sevenoaks: Hodder & Stoughton, 1980, p.32.

Whatever else it may or may not be, prayer is at least talking to yourself, and that's in itself not always a bad idea.

Talk to yourself about your life, about what you've done and what you've failed to do and about who you are and who you wish you were and who the people you love are and the people you don't love too. Talk to yourself about what matters most to you, because if you don't, you may forget what matters most to you.

Even if you don't believe anybody's listening, at least you'll be listening.

Believe Somebody is listening.

Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, London: Collins, 1973, p.71.

We want to know not how we should pray if we were perfect, but how we should pray being as we now are... It is no use to ask God with factitious earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality filled with the desire for B. We must lay before him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.

C S Lewis, 'Prayer' in John Garvey (Ed), Modern Spirituality: an Anthology, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985, p.86.

The head is not a very good place for prayer. It is not a bad place for starting your prayer. But if your prayer stays there too long and doesn't move into the heart it will gradually dry up and prove tiresome and frustrating. You must learn to move out of the area of thinking and talking and move into the area of feeling, sensing, loving, intuiting. That is the area where contemplation is born and prayer becomes a transforming power and a source of never-ending delight and peace.

Has it ever occurred to you that Jesus, that master in the art of prayer, would take the trouble to walk up a hill in order to pray? Like all great contemplatives he was aware that the place in which we pray has an influence on the quality of our prayer.

Anthony de Mello, Sadhana, pp. 13, 24 cited in Margaret Hebblethwaite, Finding God in All Things, London: Fountain Paperbacks, 1987, pp.60,223.

Sir Thomas Browne solemnly pledged himself, whenever in any quiet place, to give himself to prayer. He never passed a church of any denomination without lifting up his heart on behalf of the minister and people who worshipped there. He never left the home of a patient without a silent petition for the sufferer and for all sufferers everywhere. When he met handsome men and comely women, he prayed that their souls might be made as beautiful as their bodies. And when he met deformed or unsightly people, he prayed that their outward ugliness might be compensated by inner graces.

F W Boreham, The Tide Comes In, London: Epworth Press, 1958, p.19.

Is not listening to the pulse of wonder worth silence and abstinence from self assertion? Why do we not set apart an hour of living for devotion to God by surrendering to stillness?

About a hundred years ago, Rabbi Isaac Meir Alter of Ger pondered over the question of what a certain shoemaker of his acquaintance should do about his morning prayer. His customers were poor men who owned only one pair of shoes. The shoemaker used to pick up their shoes at a late evening hour, work on them all night and part of the morning, in order to deliver them before their owners had to go to work. When should the shoemaker say his morning prayer? Should he pray quickly the first thing in the morning, and then go back to work? Or should he let the appointed hour of prayer go by and, every once in a while, raising his hammer from the shoes, utter a sigh: `Woe unto me, I haven't prayed yet!'? Perhaps that sigh is worth more than the prayer itself.

We too, face this dilemma of wholehearted regret or perfunctory fulfilment. Many of us regretfully refrain from habitual prayer, waiting for an urge that is complete, sudden and unexampled. But the unexampled is scarce, and perpetual refraining can easily grow into a habit. We may even come to forget what to regret, what to miss...

We do not refuse to pray. We merely feel that our tongues are tied, our minds inert, our inner vision dim, when we are about to enter the door that leads to prayer. We do not refuse to pray; we abstain from it. We ring the hollow bell of selfishness rather than absorb the stillness that surrounds the world, hovering over all the restlessness and fear of life - the secret stillness that precedes our birth and succeeds our death...

We do not step out of the world when we pray; we merely see the world in a different setting...

Prayer is the way to master what is inferior in us, to discern between the signal and the trivial, between the vital and the futile, by taking counsel with what we know about the will of God, by seeing our fate in proportion to God.

Prayer is no panacea, no substitute for action. It is, rather, like a beam thrown from a flashlight before us into the darkness.

The idea of prayer is based upon the assumption of [our] ability to accost God, to lay our hopes, sorrows and wishes before him...

Prayer is not a soliloquy. But is it a dialogue with God? Do [we] address him as person to person? It is incorrect to describe prayer by analogy with human conversation; we do not communicate with God. We only make ourselves communicable to him. Prayer is an emanation of what is most precious in us toward him, the outpouring of the heart before him. It is not a relationship between person and person, between subject and subject, but an endeavour to become the object of his thought.

Abraham Heschel, in John Garvey (Ed), Modern Spirituality: an Anthology, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985, pp.viii, 8,9,11,13.

Meditation is an activity of thought, while prayer is the rejection of every thought. According to the teaching of the eastern Fathers, even pious thoughts and deepest and loftiest theological considerations, if they occur during prayer, must be considered as temptation and suppressed; because, as the Fathers say, it is foolish to think about God and forget that you are in his presence. All the spiritual guides of Orthodoxy warn us against replacing this meeting with God by thinking about him. Prayer is essentially standing face to face with God, consciously striving to remain collected and absolutely still and attentive in his presence, which means standing with an undivided mind, an undivided heart and an undivided will in the presence of the Lord; and that is not easy...

In The Way of a Pilgrim a village priest gives some very authoritative advice on prayer: `If you want it to be pure, right and enjoyable, you must choose some short prayer, consisting of few but forcible words, and repeat it frequently, over a long period. Then you find delight in prayer.' The same idea is to be found in the Letters of Brother Lawrence: `I do not advise you to use multiplicity of words in prayer; many words and long discourses being often the occasions of wandering.'

Theophane the Recluse says: `You ask yourself, "Have I prayed well today?" Do not try to find out how deep your emotions were, or how much deeper you understand things divine; ask yourself: "Am I doing God's will better than I did before?" If you are, prayer has brought its fruit, if you are not, it has not, whatever amount of understanding or feeling you may have derived from the time spent in the presence of God.'

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, 'Meditation and Worship', in John Garvey (Ed), Modern Spirituality: an Anthology, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985, pp.30, 32, 33.

Archbishop John (Maximovich), Russian bishop in Shanghai, in Western Europe, and finally in San Francisco (d. 1966)... It was his custom each year to visit Holy Trinity Monastery at Jordanville, N.Y. As he left, after one such visit, a monk gave him a slip of paper with four names of those who were gravely ill. Archbishop John received thousands upon thousands of such requests for prayer in the course of each year. On his return to the monastery some twelve months later, at once he beckoned to the monk, and much to the latter's surprise, from the depths of his cassock Archbishop John produced the identical slip of paper, now crumpled and tattered. `I have been praying for your friends', he said, `but two of them' - he pointed to their names - `are now dead and the other two have recovered.' And so indeed it was.

Kallistos Ware, 'The Spiritual Father in Orthodox Christianity' in John Garvey (Ed), Modern Spirituality: an Anthology, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985, p.55-56.

Every bearer of the word of God was a [person] of prayer: Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon. Each one has bequeathed us both a style of prayer, prayers which can turn directly to our own use, and also a model of the relationship with God, which is unique and yet available to each person. To read the Bible is to read prayers...

Jacques Ellul, Prayer and Modern Man Seabury, 1979, 108-109.

Here are some guidelines [in praying for others]: 1. Set aside a specific time... each day. 2. One specific place for prayer is the ideal... 3. Prepare by quieting your heart and mind. It helps to reread some of the great Scripture passages on intercession (eg. Isaiah 59:16; Romans 8:26-39; Ephesians 1:17-23; Hebrews 7:14-28). 4. See the person for whom you are praying as being in the presence of Jesus with his light shining around and through that person... See the person as Jesus does. If emotions need healing, see them as becoming stable; if there are body ailments, see them as becoming whole... 5. Be objective about the person and the problem... God's power is what matters, not our feelings. Our sense of weakness can be his strength. 6. Listen. God speaks to us most often by planting a thought in our minds. Do not be discouraged if nothing comes through right away. Keep listening. Keep asking for his ideas, his help, his guidance. 7. Write down what you hear... 8. Peace and joy in your spirit are often given you as the sign that the prayer is being answered.

Leonard LeSourd, 'Praying with Power for Others' Leonard E. LeSourd (Ed.), Intercessory Prayer, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990, pp. 24, 25

Contemplative prayer is the prayer of the heart, imagination and will, where the lips and mind are both at rest. It is a simple gazing, looking at the Lord in wordless prayer, seeking to be one with him. It is 'communing with your own heart ... and being still' (Psalm 4:4b).

When Jean Vianney asked a peasant what he did as he sat alone in church he replied, 'I just look at him, and he looks at me'.

In our modern preoccupation with achieving 'results', working hard, late and long, we have lost the one thing necessary: to sit at Jesus' feet looking at him and listening to him. In the Carmelite tradition such prayer has been given various names: the prayer of recollection (Teresa of Avila), prayer of simplicity (Bossuet), prayer of silence, prayer of loving attention, and prayer of the heart.

Rowland Croucher, Recent Trends Among Evangelicals, Melbourne: John Mark Ministries, 1991, p.75

The well-known Australian Baptist theologian, Principal G.H.Morling used to have a sermon he called 'A Robe of Healing'. His text was Mark 5:31 - 'Who touched Me?' - and he made the point that 'the woman touched his robe, his vesture... Nature may be thought of as his vesture. The world of nature is a cloak of God. William Carey prayed in the open air. Nature is a garment of the Most High. And we can touch God if we're sensitive.'

However, nature mysticism is a means, not an end. It is meant to draw us beyond nature into a relationship with a loving Creator, Provider and Redeemer ('panentheism' as Baron von Huegal called it - seeing in all created things God's energies - not 'pantheism' which identifies creation with God). There is also the danger of nature mysticism being escapist; so rather than 'loving' nature, we should do as Jesus instructed and consider it. We might not be poetic, like Keats or Wordsworth, or praise God as St. Francis did (with birds in his hair) for sun and moon, fire and water, wind and weather, flowers and grass. However we can all learn to see more, with newly-opened eyes, in the magnificent world God has given to us.

Rowland Croucher, Recent Trends Among Evangelicals, Melbourne: John Mark Ministries, 1991, pp. 71-73.

There is a deep joy in praying together, an added vitality, a plus difficult to define. It is rather like the difference between eating your meal alone and sharing in a party feast. Eating together is not the same as eating in solitude; the something more is the company, the fellowship. So it is with prayer.

Stephen Winward, Teach Yourself to Pray, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1976, p.86

Thomas Merton said, 'If you want a life of prayer, the way to get it is by praying.' So how does one begin a life of prayer? Dom Chapman said it is best to pray as you can, not as you can't. Begin with what you know about prayer and use that as the basis for beginning a relationship with God...

For Evagrius, the first of the Desert Fathers to reflect systematically about prayer, the life of prayer had three stages, which he called 'prayer of the lips, the mind, and the heart.' This discipline led first to apatheia (it), the freedom from passions, before moving on to knowledge of divine reason, and finally, entree into the life of the Trinity.

Kenneth Swanson, Uncommon Prayer, pp. 157, 198.
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'We praise you Father, for the sea, the sky and the stars. We praise you for the power of the atom.... We praise you for your Son, through him all things came to be, and not one thing has its being but through him. Through him, you continue to create all things, to make them holy, to give them life, to bless them, and to give them to us. Amen.'

Michel Quoist 'Hymn of Creation'

But now, Lord, all these things lie in the past, and time has healed my wound. Let me listen to you who are the Truth. Let the ears of my heart move closer to your mouth, so you can tell me why tears are so sweet to those in misery. Have you, who are present everywhere, placed our troubles out of your reach? You reside within yourself, but we ricochet from one rugged experience to another; and if we weren't able to pour our troubles into your ears, what hope would be left us? How can there be such a sweet flavour in the bitter fruit we pluck from life - with all its groans, tears, sighs and wailings? Does the sweetness come from the hope that you will hear us? In the case of payer I would say Yes, for prayer is built on a longing to get through to you... Or is it that weeping is a bitter thing that gives us pleasure only because it relieves the tension created by sorrow?

Sherwood E Wirt, The Confessions of Augustine in Modern English, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1977, p.55-56.

Lord, bless your people who hope for your mercy
Grant that they may receive
the things they ask for at your prompting.
Grant this through Christ our Lord.

Lord, come, live in your people and strengthen them by your grace.
Help them to remain close to you in prayer and give them a true love for one another.
Grant this through Christ our Lord.

Daily Mass Book, Brisbane, The Liturgical Commission, 1990, pp.37, 38.
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A Benediction: May God the Father give you a special gift of healing prayer. May Jesus, the Son of God, teach you how to pray. May the Holy Spirit who has been given to you to guide you in prayer, help you to pray better. May your prayer be to you as breath is to life. May your worship be in spirit and in truth. May your confessions be sincere, and you know your sins are forgiven. May your intercessions be answered according according to his will. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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To do: How we pray depends on who we think God is. Why not spend a few moments writing down the kind of God you generally pray to? What is he like? What do you expect to happen when you pray? How did you come to get this/these ideas about God? Is your God, to whom you pray, the same God Jesus told us about?