Lord, teach me. . . .

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,  for you are with me." --Psalm 23:4a Sometimes, prayer just feels-- goofy. We spend the time talking, trying to listen, and we just feel so darned clueless. Thomas Merton would say that is just fine with God. Here is Fr. Merton's best-known prayer: "My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. AndI hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.  I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fe...

"Give me . . . . Forgive me . . . . Lead me . . . ." -- The Lord's Prayer One of the hardest things to do, for so many people (including me), is to ask for prayer. Our hearts are aching, we are filled with sorrow or burdened beyond what we can bear-- but still we feel uncomfortable asking someone to pray for us. (Seriously-- have you ever consciously prayed the Lord's Prayer in first person? Try it.) After all, in the scheme of starving children and nations torn by wars, our pain cannot possibly be that bad-- by comparison. But here's the deal: Life is not a comparison or a contest. Your pain, your sorrows are legitimately yours. And you are as entitled to prayer as the next person. In fact-- Jesus, when he prayed, prayed first for himself , then for his closest friends, then for the priesthood of all believers.  It's true-- check it out. In John 17, Jesus first prays for himself, then for those closest to him, and then the next "circ...

"Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy Name." --Matthew 6:9 (This may be just the silliness you need today.)  Prayer is serious business. After all, it is frequently through prayer that the Almighty seeks to reach his children-- and they reach back. Having said that, that prayer is serious business, we really need to lighten up and not take ourselves  so darned seriously, even where prayer is concerned. I was thinking about how we pray, and to whom we pray. Paul wrote to the church at Rome that, " You did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, ' Abba , Father.'" When Jesus prayed in the Garden, he prayed to Abba , an Aramaic word most often translated as "Daddy." Jesus had a special name for God. I wonder if you do, as well. There was an old sitcom in the 1980s called Night Court , starring Harry Anderson, John Larroquette and many other...

Give us today our daily bread. --Matthew 6:11 [One of my favorite contemporary prayer gurus is Richard Foster. His book, Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home  (San Francisco: HarperCollins 1992), will be a frequent reference for me.] It can be so easy to get caught up in how  to pray that we find all sorts of reasons not to get around to praying. We think there must be a right way and a wrong way, and since, after all, prayer is about God, we certainly do not want to get it wrong !  But the fact is, there is no wrong way to pray. Richard Foster describes a number of different types of prayer, the first and most elemental being Simple Prayer. Simple Prayer amounts to coming before the Almighty as a child comes to a parent, crawling up into the warm comfort of his presence and speaking simply, honestly, even angrily-- and sometimes, with seemingly ridiculous requests. Things that anyone other than a loving parent might think were just-- silly. ...

“This, then, is how you should pray:" --Matthew 6:9a I have been really sensing lately that there is another blog inside me, one focused on prayer.  Oh, I know-- those elephants are all about prayer. Heck, they  are  prayer. And I will continue there, as well. But what I've been feeling is that people-- maybe you--  have always been told, "You should pray," or "Pray about that." But maybe you feel your prayers aren't "good enough," or that it's just too hard, too embarrassing, too [fill in the blank] to pray. Maybe it feels like no one really talks about how  to pray-- except, of course, for Jesus, in Matthew 6 and a couple parallel passages where we are given what's come to be known as The Lord's Prayer. And it is a great prayer. And there are other great prayers, and other ways to pray that do not involve rote. So "my plan" here is to share, hopefully on a weekly or semi-regular basis, a lot of ...