I will never forget a conversation which I had with an elderly lady at a nursing home a few years ago. Normally, the nursing home, run by religious sisters and housing elderly people with certain terminal illnesses, kept the men and the women separate, so, though I had volunteered there quite a bit, I had only ever met the men; this day, though, everyone was outside on a beautiful day, enjoying a cookout for a special occasion. I ended up at a picnic table with a bunch of the residents, including one particular woman. She spoke happily about her love for the Lord and her confidence in his goodness and love for her.
One particular part of the conversation stuck out to me, especially because she put something into words which I had been pondering for a while at that point. She told me about her experiences with prayer and how she knew that she could ask God for anything, no matter how mundane, and she had the perfect story to illustrate her point:
One day, many of the residents of the nursing home, including this lady, were on a bus, going somewhere with the sisters who ran the home. She asked one of the sisters if they could stop at McDonald’s, especially because the residents and sisters usually never got to go out to restaurants. The sister said no, but the resident wouldn’t have no for an answer. In response she put her head down, praying, “Dear Jesus, please let us stop and get some McDonald’s.” A few minutes later, without any prompting from the elderly woman, a different sister, the one in charge of the nursing home, stood up on the bus and announced that the group was going to make a stop for lunch–at McDonald’s. The woman immediately thanked God for hearing her prayer and got to enjoy her lunch!
Sure, a double cheeseburger isn’t exactly “bread of finest wheat”, but I think that this story nailed an important and often underappreciated aspect of prayer: prayer involves a conversation between us and God, and our normal conversations deal with everyday desires and events. We think that our prayer has to sound like those which we hear at church and to deal with exactly the same topics. St. Paul tells us to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17), and we aren’t always in a liturgical setting. Have you ever seen or experienced the deer-in-headlights look when someone asks someone in a group to pray publicly and spontaneously? There are two major misconceptions about Catholics: we don’t read the Bible, and we don’t know how to pray spontaneously, instead preferring solely to use memorized prayers or to read them from books. Though these stereotypes aren’t entirely correct, they still have just enough truth to them that they stick around.
Now, don’t get me wrong here; memorized prayers and prayers from our liturgical books are great. Countless people credit the rosary or other prayers from our Catholic heritage for revitalizing their prayer life, many use prayer cards to ask for saints’ intercessions on various matters, and I’ve written previously about why I enjoy praying the Liturgy of the Hours. There’s a reason that Christians for centuries have prayed these prayers and have had significant amounts of them committed to memory, and the scriptures, especially the psalms, provide material for pretty much any sort of prayer. (That’s part of the reason that the Liturgy of the Hours and its emphasis on the psalms is so good.) And, of course, Jesus himself gave us the Our Father when his disciples asked him how to pray!
These prayers, however, are not the only way to pray. When we say grace before meals, we don’t have to use the standard “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts…” formula. We don’t have to conclude our personal prayers precisely with the language we hear at Mass: “Through Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns…” These ways of praying are good, of course, and work especially well for communal prayer; as I said, there’s a reason that they have lasted for so long and have remained in use. But we don’t have to panic and stumble through a prayer which sounds “churchy” when someone asks us to lead grace before meals or to pray in a group setting. Instead, it’s okay to speak plainly in our prayer, to have a conversational tone and to bring aspects of everyday life into our prayer, just as the elderly woman who told me her story knew well.
So, here are a few practical tips for feeling more comfortable regarding spontaneous prayer:
1. Don’t stress about making your prayer “sound good”. Some prayers are beautiful and with a rich history; they sound like–and frequently are–poetry. Others are much less glamorous but still just as heartfelt, like the blind beggar in Luke 18:38, who cries out, “Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me!” Sometimes we just need to say what’s on our hearts.
2. Don’t worry that what you’re praying about is too small. The God who created the planets also designed the smallest flowers. We should trust that he loves us beyond what we can ever imagine, and so we should bring all of our concerns, desires, and thoughts to him.
3. Pray about anything and everything. I don’t mean that we should “discern” every single tiny decision to the point of decision paralysis; instead, we should be so confident in God’s love for us that we know that we can bring every single thing in our life into prayer–even if it involves something small like a burger!
4. When praying with a group of Catholics, after praying off-the-cuff for the first part of your prayer, you can bring in a well-known prayer at the end for everyone else to join in praying. For instance, when saying grace, you can say something along the lines of this: “Thank you, Lord, for this good food; we ask you to bless it, and we pray for those who go without food tonight as we pray together, Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts…” If praying for someone, say something like this: “Lord, we ask you to heal this person and to return her to health. We ask for the intercession of the Blessed Mother as we all pray, Hail Mary…” There’s kind of an art to it, but the idea behind this tip is that, in a communal situation, after praying in an unstructured way, closing with a well-known prayer for everyone to recite together emphasizes that we’re praying together. (If in a group with a bunch of non-Catholic Christians, it’s good to launch into the Our Father, but just be aware that some denominations of Christians may use a slightly different form, in which they substitute “debts” and “debtors” for “trespasses” and “those who trespass against us”. Still, the universality of the Lord’s Prayer works well for emphasizing what we hold in common.)
Of course, these aren’t the only ways to approach prayer; you very likely have your own beloved ways of praying. How do you approach prayer? Do you prefer to use traditional, time-honored prayers, or perhaps something a bit more spontaneous and relaxed?