How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

by Pete Greig

Every pilgrim gets a stone in their shoe eventually.

To move forward we must pause. This is the first step in a deeper prayer life: Put down your wish list and wait. Sit quietly. “Be still, and know that I am God.”[1]

In a way, he was right. Sometimes we make prayer way more complicated than it needs to be. How to Pray has been written as a simple guide for normal people.

But there’s more to prayer than asking, and God is not in a hurry.

There are ways of praying that are more like exploring than imploring:

There’s no one superior way to pray. If you’re searching for the Holy Grail, go back to where you began. But as you set out on the many paths of prayer, the Lord is going to join you on the journey.

Our journey is going to be paced around an easy, four-step rhythm: P.R.A.Y.—Pause, Rejoice, Ask, Yield.

The first was that prayer is actually, surprisingly, pretty much the most important thing in life. The second was that my friends and I were horribly bad at it.

links to additional online resources available at www.prayercourse.org: Toolshed: Index of Thirty Prayer Tools—to help you practice this kind of prayer; and The Prayer Course Video—relating to each chapter, including a guide for group discussion.

More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice Rise like a fountain for me night and day. ALFRED LORD TENNYSON, IDYLLS OF THE KING

It’s worth pausing at the start of a book like this to acknowledge the unending chorus of human longing: a canticle of sighs and cries and chiming bells, mutterings in maternity wards, celestial oratorios, and scribbled graffiti. In the words of Abraham Heschel, “Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.”

Our English word prayer derives from the Latin precarius. We pray because life is precarious.

The greatest person who ever lived was preeminently a man of prayer. Before launching out in public ministry, he fasted for more than a month in the wilderness. Before choosing his twelve disciples, he prayed all night.

Jesus prayed and he prayed and he prayed. But it didn’t stop there. After his resurrection, Jesus commanded his disciples to follow his example so that the church was eventually born as “they all joined together constantly in prayer.”

Paul’s epistles bubble and fizz with petition, with spontaneous doxologies and passionate exhortations to pray.

“Prayer is more than a lighted candle,” insists the theologian George A. Buttrick. “It is the contagion of health. It is the pulse of Life.”

Spiritual teacher Richard Foster urges us “to find a place of focus—a loft, a garden, a spare room, an attic, even a designated chair—somewhere away from the routine of life, out of the path of distractions. Allow this spot to become a sacred ‘tent of meeting.’”

Prayer had to be learned the hard way, and their schooling was to begin on a particular day with this simple, touchingly vulnerable request: “Lord, teach us to pray.” And so, of course, he did.

THE BEST BIT of advice I ever received about how to pray was this: keep it simple, keep it real, keep it up.

God knows that we don’t always find it easy to string a sentence together in his presence.

God wants to spend time with us even more than we want to spend time with him.

As Archbishop Justin Welby says, the Lord’s Prayer is “simple enough to be memorised by small children and yet profound enough to sustain a whole lifetime of prayer.”

As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton says: God is far too real to be met anywhere other than in reality.

What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. . . . These, perhaps . . . come from a deeper level than feeling. . . . God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard. C. S. LEWIS, LETTERS TO MALCOLM

A Christian who prays only when they feel like it may survive but will never thrive. Their vast, innate potential will be stunted because grace needs a little space to take root between the cracks of a person’s life.

This discovery, that the Lord’s Prayer originally rhymed, was made by a friend of mine, Bishop Graham Tomlin, as he listened to a Syrian Orthodox priest in Israel reciting the prayer one day in its original ancient Aramaic form.

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. BLAISE PASCAL

The best way to start praying, therefore, is actually to stop praying. To pause. To be still. To put down your prayer list and surrender your own personal agenda.

“Be still, and know that I am God.”[8] The Latin for being still here is vacate—the very word we use to describe vacating a place or taking a vacation.

Moments of stillness at the start of a prayer time are moments of surrender in which we stop competing with God, relinquish our messiah complexes, and resign from trying to save the planet.

Sometimes, having stilled my house, I spend my entire prayer time in silence, simply enjoying God’s presence without saying or doing anything. I used to worry that this wasn’t real prayer—that I had somehow wasted my time—but I have come to understand that these can be some of the most beautiful times of communion.

Relax. Start off by sitting comfortably without doing anything for a few moments, perhaps with your palms open in your lap.

Breathe. As you relax, take deep, slow breaths, inhaling the life breath of the Holy Spirit and exhaling your concerns with leisurely sighs.

Speak. As you sit quietly and breathe slowly, you may also find it helpful to repeat a prayer word or phrase in time with your breathing. You could say “Father in heaven” while breathing in and “hallowed be your Name” while breathing out.

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Repeat. When distractions come, as they inevitably will, don’t worry. Simply return to the process of relaxing, breathing, and repeating your prayer phrase until stillness resumes.

All who adore Him must adore Him in the Spirit of truth. And day and night let us direct praises and prayers to Him, saying, “Our Father, Who art in heaven.” FRANCIS OF ASSISI

“God’s ear hears the heart’s voice,” said Augustine in his commentary on Psalm 148.[6] “It is the heart that prays,” said Father Jean-Nicolas Grou. “It is to the voice of the heart that God listens, and it is the heart that he answers.”[7] “We do not know what we ought to pray for,” admits the apostle Paul, “but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit.”[8]

Lord, help me not to worry about the words, but address you with the language of the heart. . . . I simply present myself to you; I open my heart to you. . . . Teach me to pray. Amen. FRANÇOIS FÉNELON

I definitely don’t understand why he does some miracles and not others—it often seems so arbitrary. But I am learning to understand that I may never fully understand. I am learning to be a bit more okay with not being okay. Life sometimes hurts, but I’ve discovered that deleting God from the equation doesn’t actually help.

find it helpful to read psalms aloud whenever possible, because this is how they would first have been used and it helps to stir my soul. As I do so, I look for a particular phrase or line that resonates with my heart, and once I find one, I try to memorize it and revisit it in idle moments during the day.

We all need the encouragement, the challenge, and the discomfort of active participation in a local worshiping community.

His own book of fixed worship—the Psalms—was so deeply ingrained in his psyche that he even quoted it from the cross.[19]

When we repeat fixed prayers, several thousand years of faith begin to shape us and pray through us, providing solidarity (in every sense of that word) amid the subjectivity of our fragmenting culture, with all God’s people.

When you pray about the small things in life, you get to live with greater gratitude.

As Archbishop William Temple famously said, “When I pray, coincidences happen; when I stop praying, the coincidences stop happening.”[1]

The notion of “daily bread” harks back to the Old Testament when God fed his people in the wilderness with manna that only remained fresh for a day. There is a strong sense in this phrase, therefore, of asking for today’s needs rather than tomorrow’s wants.

Daily bread means daily bread; Nutella is not guaranteed.

First, because the act of asking is relational in a way that mere wishing is not.

The second reason that asking is necessary is that it is vulnerable.