Note: On Tuesdays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.
A couple of years ago, I gave a two-day retreat on prayer. The retreat covered a lot of ground: the history of prayer; formed prayer vs. spontaneous prayer; prayer traditions; the origins of the rosary, the Divine Mercy chaplet and more; the lives and practices of those like Teresa of Avila and
Ignatius Loyola who in essence defined prayer styles; journaling; time for communal and individual prayer. Centering prayer, lectio divina, quotes about prayer from Catholics and other faith traditions… the retreat offered a little taste of a lot of ideas and practices.
Overall, the reviews were positive. I was most struck, however, not by the kind words people provided on the forms, but by the man about my age, late fifties, who came up to me at the very end. “I signed up for this retreat because I was really concerned about my prayer life,” he said. “And no offense, but I think the biggest thing I learned this weekend is that I actually have a pretty good prayer life. I don’t have anything to worry about, really.”
Isn’t that true for all of us, at least some of the time? We fret about whether we’re saying the right words, finding the right style, using the right venue, consulting the right guide. We babble like pagans, we flounder about thinking there’s one best way to make contact with the Lord. We think more is more when it comes to the number of words we use and the number of items we need to have on our prayer list. We forget that while exploring other prayer styles certainly has merit, we’ll never do better than the one Jesus sets forth for us in today’s Gospel in Matthew 6. It’s one of the first prayers we learn, and it’s the one we may remember long after all the others have fled our brain.
You can say it on auto pilot, you can break it into your own adoration/contrition/thanksgiving/-supplication, or you can contemplate over each word. But it doesn’t get any better than the Lord’s Prayer when you’re looking for a way to connect with the Divine.
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