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To start we must stop. 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.
Stillness and silence prepare your mind and prime your heart to pray from a place of greater peace, faith, and adoration.
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
In the words of Abraham Heschel, “Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.”[2]
inchoate
his example so that the church was eventually born as “they all joined together constantly in prayer.”[18] And then, as it began to grow exponentially, the apostles continued to follow their Lord’s example, resolutely prioritizing prayer above the clamor of pressing leadership responsibilities.[19]
Prayer is nothing at all unless it is a matter of vast and all-consuming importance for each one of us.
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.’”[32]
Wherever you find your chair, try to visit it daily. Let it become your thin place, a sacred space that helps you walk and talk with God through the many twists and turns of life.
Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home by Richard Foster
Abraham Joshua Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (London: Macmillan, 1997), 341.
He’s not frowning. He’s not looking bored. He’s probably pleased that you’ve picked up this book!
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.”[6]
pray all the time,” said Native American pastor Richard Twiss:
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
(For prayer and Bible reading see the Toolshed: How to Have a Quiet Time at www.prayercourse.org.)
You cannot grow in prayer without some measure of effort and discomfort, self-discipline and self-denial.
I alternate seasonally between various trusted devotional frameworks including Nicky Gumbel’s The Bible in One Year, the Northumbria Community’s Celtic Daily Prayer, and Phyllis Tickle’s The Divine Hours.
(See Toolshed: How to Pray the Lord’s Prayer.)
using my own version of an old Ignatian prayer tool called the Examen (see chapter 10). In these moments, I do not rant or rave. I don’t make big requests. I hush my soul, remembering the day with gratitude and preparing my soul to sleep.
Why do we binge mindlessly on Netflix at night and gaze like monks before icons at our smartphones on our morning commutes? We seem to be increasingly attracted to activities that put the world’s relentless demands on hold, forcing us to focus for a few eternal moments on a single, simple thing. Hot yoga? Tetris? A lakeside in the pouring rain? Anything to assuage those
“Why don’t you take a vacation from being god and let me be God instead for a change?”
have calmed and quieted myself, I am like a weaned child with its mother,” as the psalmist says. “Like a weaned child I am content.”
Anthony of the Desert
Living with a Wild God is a good book,
Diary of an Old Soul,
I’m partial to either techno (great for intercession) or the harmonies of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, whose music may well have been inspired by the polyphonic sounds of monks singing in tongues. When I’m hillwalking, I find myself turning to the grandeur
One of the finest jazz records of all time—A Love Supreme by John Coltrane—is a journey into the mystery of God.
through the day with the Ignatian prayer of Examen
For Olympic athlete Eric Liddell, it
The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence
Karl Barth,
Hudson Taylor: A Man in Christ by Roger Steer
of the words I began claiming for our sons came from Luke 2:52, where a beautiful thing is said of Jesus as a boy: he “grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.” I took this verse and began to pray that our boys would grow in wisdom—academically “with man” but also spiritually “with God.” That
The Soul of Prayer by P. T. Forsyth
We began studying the lives of mystics and monastics like Anthony of the Desert in fourth-century Egypt, Teresa of Ávila in sixteenth-century Spain, Amy Carmichael in nineteenth-century India, and Henri Nouwen in twentieth-century Canada.
The Sacred Year by Michael Yankoski
Hearing God by Dallas Willard
The Lost Art of Forgiving by Johann Christoph Arnold
The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil.
Dirty Glory by Pete Greig
