When We Do Not Have the Words
Posted on Apr 22, 2012 by Trevor in Religion
Something I like about being Mormon is our emphasis on praying using our own words as opposed to fixed language or psalms. While we do have set prayers in certain circumstances (like when we do rituals, e.g. baptism, sacrament, or temple endowments), individual or group prayers are generally an ad hoc, spontaneous representation of the hopes, concerns, and petitions of the person offering up the prayer.
How could people find much meaning in simply reciting the words of someone else? Especially when those words were written in a different time, under different circumstances and different emotions? In fact, the most boring Mormon prayers are typically those that are saturated with trite, pre-manufactured phrases that are so common in prayer vernacular that you could play bingo using them. Surely I’m always going to be most capable of expressing myself to God when I carefully choose my own words, right?
Well, I stand open to correction. In Jana Riess’s Flunking Sainthood, we get to read about the adventures of a Mormon who’s very well read in a variety of religious traditions as she takes up a foreign spiritual practice each month and seeks to live it out fully. One month she adopted fixed-hour prayer, which as far as I understand is a Judeo-Christian practice that involves reciting or singing psalms on a specified schedule. Riess, who is an editor by profession, obviously enjoys great comfort and familiarity with words. Yet she is sometimes frustrated by an inability to summon these words in the language of prayer. Admitting her preconceived aversion to using set language in prayer, she writes this:
…spontaneous prayers often came up empty…. They felt hollow.
What has filled the gap … is fixed-hour prayer, which is “prayer for the rest of us,” prayer for when we do not have the words. As someone heavily invested in language, I find that liberating. Six days a week, I try to come up with words: bits of sections of chapters of books, written piece by piece; new blog posts five days a week; dozens of e-mails a day. Maybe one reason I’m enjoying fixed-hour prayer so much is that it gives me a break from the me-me-me nature of my own spontaneous prayers. There is a deep rest associated with ancient prayers I didn’t contrive myself.
But it’s even deeper than that, because in fixed-hour prayer I am finding to my astonishment that I am most myself when I pray someone else’s words. Given that my faith tradition suggests that following someone else’s liturgy can be empty and confining, I’m surprised to discover that instead it is rich and freeing. I don’t have to be alone with my subjective experience, my little life. I am free to rest in the words of those who are often far wiser, and who have walked this path already.
–Flunking Sainthood, pg. 150
A common sentiment in Sunday School lessons on prayer is, “Pray even when you don’t feel like it. If you don’t feel like it, get down on your knees and stay there until you feel like it.” In practice, this never actually worked for me. I’d sooner hop into bed than wait for a desire to pray to magically enter into my tired body. Now that I’m married, my wife’s insistence on prayer has reduced the frequency of those cases. But what about those times when neither of us feels so inclined?
Enter fixed language. Maybe we can try this practice out and make it our own. I’m considering it, at least.
