LITMIR.BIZ

      I might have expected that when I began this new discipline it would be like pulling teeth—that difficult and painful. But prayer is what we were made for; prayer is a spiritual connection with the Living God. It is not an ordinary experience. Once I had completed the daunting task of upending my life to take on this new challenge, I found that it was like coming home to a place I had only dreamed about. We are creatures designed by God to operate in a certain way. When we are in harmony with our design, we function well, and when we are out of harmony with our design, we don’t. A whale stranded on a beach flops about. Ah, but see him in the water and he is the magnificent creature God made him to be. And when we are in communion with our Lord in prayer, we are something to behold—something God beholds with pleasure.

      Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that the change from snatching snacks to sitting down to three meals a day was a slight thing. It was enormous. It called for a radical overhaul of my weekly schedule, an upset of priorities and commitments, a rearranging of relationships and, especially, of my mind-set. It meant revision of my goals. And the preparation took more thought and energy and planning than the prayer. Think about preparing a Thanksgiving dinner. It takes ten hours to make the meal, and one hour to eat it. Or, consider the preparation for painting a room, the taping and moving furniture and covering everything in sight, all of it requiring much more time than the actual brushstrokes.

      The first thing I had to do was take a look at how I spent my time, and then ask about every activity on the list: Is it necessary or optional? And then the next question: Can I reduce the amount of time I spend on this? Can I make do with sleeping ten fewer minutes? Can food preparation time be cut? When Martha raised that question with Jesus, he had some pretty specific thoughts on the subject (Luke 10:41). Do I need to open junk mail, answer every e-mail and every cell phone call, shop, read magazines, and watch the news?

      If you own a full apartment building and you want to move in a new tenant, you must first evict one tenant who is already living there. We don’t have blocks of time sitting vacant, waiting to be filled with prayer. They are already filled with other activities that we will no longer be able to do. To give prayer a central place in my life, I had to eliminate a number of things that felt pretty vital to me—or rather, they felt vital until I tried prayer in their place.

      Until praying became routine, I literally wrote my prayer times in my calendar. I decided for the sake of practicality that I would not stick to set times, although I do love the grounding, reverent aspect of the formal honoring of God at set times of worship through the day. Instead, I made my daily prayer times first thing in the morning, right before (or some days instead of) lunch, then at the end of the afternoon, and finally, late in the evening—but I allowed myself flexibility so that “first thing in the morning” meant 6:30 some days and 8:30 others.

      My experience of praying became enlivening and regular—that is, until it waned. I found that regular prayer is not an easy course to chart. I am very good at falling by the wayside, but just because I failed and had to begin again—and again—does not mean that I do not believe this is the way of prayer that I want in my life.

      New Times, New Prayers

      As I began my new practice, it became clear pretty quickly that not only when but how I prayed was also going to change. For too long, prayer had often been my sitting with my head bowed and my eyes closed, asking God to bless me and my dear ones, asking a quick blessing on the day, and hurrying away. So, I began to acquire several collections of prayers written by saints down through the ages—some prayers prayed a thousand years ago—prayers I prayed with concentration and intent.

      And I began praying Scripture (and not just the Psalms), reading each word very slowly, forming each phrase into a prayer. This was very different from my study of Scripture. Now the Scripture studied me.

      Prayer is being consciously in God’s presence, focusing our eyes on him, on who he is, on what he’s like. My prayer took the form of singing hymns and songs of praise, sitting, kneeling, standing, hands raised high, or falling on my face before God. We are flesh and blood. We must pray with our bodies. My prayer was also contemplation, meditation, listening to God’s voice, sometimes writing letters to God, even e-mails. Often for evening prayers I would light a candle, sometimes with Gregorian chant playing softly—the candle and the chant helping to focus my thoughts on him—standing in my often-chilly kitchen late at night, praying to the One who is the light of the world.