The disciples watched Jesus pray for a long time before one of them finally asked: Lord, teach us to pray. They had seen him go off alone. They had seen what he was like when he came back. Whatever he was doing out there, they wanted it.
What he gave them was short. A prayer of about sixty words, and a handful of instructions: go into your room, shut the door, do not use many words, do not perform. The Father already knows. Everything in this chapter is an unfolding of that.
What prayer is for
If the Father knows before you ask, prayer is not information. You are not briefing God. And with the instruction against many words, it cannot be persuasion either; no quota of eloquence earns a hearing.
The contemplative tradition’s answer is alignment: the turning of the whole self toward the one who already knows, until gradually you begin to want what is wanted for you. It changes you, not God. The fewer the words, the less there is to hide behind, and the ancient practices below move steadily from many words to few to none.
The Lord’s Prayer as a structure
Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy. May your Kingdom come. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors. Bring us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.
Most people say it at speed, as a single unit. Try it another way: as seven movements, each a room you stay in for a while.
- Our Father. Not my. Not the. You are praying as part of everyone, to one who is near. Stay here until you feel it.
- Hallowed be your name. Reverence before requests. Something is holy and it is not you. Stay here.
- Your kingdom come, your will be done. The great surrender, placed before any petition. Not my will but yours. This is the hinge of the whole prayer.
- Our daily bread. Ask for today’s need, and only today’s. Jesus is precise about this, and it is the antidote to anxiety.
- Forgive us as we forgive. The only clause with a condition. You cannot receive with a closed fist. Open it here: name the person, let it go.
- Lead us not into temptation. Honesty about weakness. Ask for the path around the thing you know you cannot resist.
- Deliver us. Trust. You are not on your own.
Prayed this way, the Lord’s Prayer takes ten minutes and covers everything. Many people use it as the whole of their morning prayer for years.
The Jesus Prayer
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
Seven words, and the oldest continuous contemplative practice in Christianity. The desert monks of Egypt prayed it in the fourth century; the hesychasts of Mount Athos built a whole theology of silence around it; a nineteenth-century Russian pilgrim wandered the country praying it thousands of times a day and wrote The Way of a Pilgrim about what happened.
The instruction is simple. Say the prayer slowly, on the breath: Lord Jesus Christ on the in-breath, have mercy on me on the out-breath. Do it for ten minutes. Do it while walking. Do it in the queue, in the car, in the moments between things. The aim, over years, is that it begins to say itself: that it sinks from the lips to the mind to the heart, and becomes the background sound of your attention.
It is also the answer to the question what do I do with my thoughts when I try to be still? You return to the Name, gently, every time. That is the method.
Lectio divina: reading slowly
The sixth-century Rule of St. Benedict prescribed hours of lectio divina a day. Divine reading sits somewhere between study and devotion: you read so slowly that the text begins to read you.
Take a short passage, a single paragraph of the gospels or one of the sayings in the Teachings, and move through four steps:
- Read (lectio). Read it aloud, slowly, twice. Let a word or phrase catch you. Do not analyze why.
- Reflect (meditatio). Turn the phrase over. What is it saying to you, today, in your actual life? Stay with it as long as it keeps giving.
- Respond (oratio). Speak back. A sentence, a question, a complaint, a thank-you. This is the conversation.
- Rest (contemplatio). Stop. Put the words down and simply stay in the presence you have been speaking to. This is where lectio hands you over to stillness.
Twenty minutes, one paragraph. Done daily for the forty days, you will know a handful of sayings the way you know your own hands.
The examen, the prayer at night
Ignatius of Loyola gave his followers one prayer that they were never to skip, however busy: a nightly review of the day, ten minutes, in five steps. It is the best tool there is for noticing where God was when you were not paying attention.
- Become quiet. Sit. A few breaths. You are in the presence of one who was with you all day.
- Give thanks. Two or three specific things. The bread. The person who was kind. The light at a certain hour.
- Walk back through the day. Morning to now. Where did you feel alive, open, at peace? Where did you close, grasp, fear? Do not judge; just look.
- Face one thing. Choose the one moment you are least at peace with. Sit with it honestly. Ask forgiveness if it needs asking; forgive if that is what is needed.
- Look toward tomorrow. Ask for what you will need. Then sleep.
Praying for enemies
He said to do it, and it is the practice that most directly changes the mind. Once a day, name the person you resent, actually name them, and ask that good come to them. Do not try to feel anything. Just make the request. Over a week or two, something shifts, and the shift is in you. You are stepping out of the small mind that sorts the world into deserving and undeserving and into the large one that sends rain on the just and the unjust.
When it is dry
It will be. Every person who has ever prayed seriously reports long stretches of nothing: no feeling, no sense of presence, words going into a void. The tradition has names for this: the dark night, the desert. It is usually a sign that the prayer is going deeper than feeling can follow, not a sign of failure. Keep the hour. Say the words. Sit in the silence. The desert is where he went, and it is where the forty days happen.