How Do I Pray?

A Little Book Of Guidance

John Pritchard

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780281073221
• eBook ISBN:
  9780281073238
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

'It happens to most of us at some time or other. A faint stirring somewhere that there may be more to this life than meets the eye? The thought just flits across our air-space – 'I wonder … is there something else?' Perhaps something really brilliant or really tragic happens, and we're not sure what to do with it. . . Maybe it even gets as far as a sense of reaching out from inside ourselves for something. But what? That elusive 'something else'.
John Pritchard explores the art and power of prayer and explains how to slow down enough to hear what God wants to say. A book for all who are curious about how to become more in tune with the Spirit.
Intended for people looking for answers to life's biggest questions, this little book of guidance will appeal to anyone, whether believer or non-believer, looking for a quick and easy way into the topic.

1

Getting started

Making space for God

So there just might be something in it – this ‘something else’. And we might have noticed some germ of an instinct, some stirring inside. A reaching out. An instinct to say thank you, a need to say sorry, or a desire to help someone. But we can all too easily lose the moment unless we make space for it to breathe.

And that’s what we’re terribly short of in our culture – space to let quiet things breathe. The pace of daily life is accelerating and the demands are unremitting. It’s as if we got on the 8.15 from Great Snoring, the slow train that stops at every little village, but instead of chugging its way gently through the countryside it gets faster and faster, accelerating steadily and inexorably, steaming through every station, until the carriage is swaying alarmingly and we’re hanging on to our seats and to our luggage – and still the speed increases! When is it going to come off the tracks?

Or here’s another image. You know when your suitcase is full, and not just full, but absolutely full to bursting? You jam another shirt in and kneel on the case to shut it. And now there’s a sweater you’d forgotten. You stand on the case to force it shut. No more, you say! And then you realize you’ve left out your sponge bag. It’s just no use. You can’t fit anything else in. You need a different strategy. You need to start again.

In a culture where speed and the ability to ‘pack more in’ is becoming self-defeating, many people are crying out for space. They long to slow down. A group of porters were once rushing through the jungle at a ridiculous pace set by the Europeans who had hired them. Eventually they got to a clearing and sat down. The Europeans tried to get them moving again but the head porter said, ‘No, we’re not moving. We’ve come so far and so fast that now we have to wait for our souls to catch up with us.’ So does our culture.

Individually, therefore, we need to build some slowing-down time into our lives. Then we can listen to the quiet whispers from another country that we’re just becoming aware of. We need to look for the moments of calm in our day and stretch them out. We need to create times for stopping, taking everything out of the case and trying a different way of packing altogether. Slowing down is a vital part of the spiritual journey. Then we can stop panicking about when we’re going to come off the rails, and start noticing the fascinating countryside we’re travelling through.

Imagine a glass of muddy water. When it’s shaken up and disturbed the water becomes murky and unpleasant. Let the glass rest, however, and you see the cloudiness in the water gradually clear as the dirt settles to the bottom. Eventually you have clear water and a dark sediment beneath. In some such way, when we slow down, the water of our inner life clears and we’re able to see and understand what’s really going on inside us. This is the next stage of our spiritual journey.

Talking to God

When we’ve noticed that there may be ‘something else’ going on in our lives, and then tried to make some space to stretch out those experiences a bit, there’ll come a time when we’ll probably want to use words in what we might begin to call ‘prayer’.

Words aren’t compulsory! It’s just that we’re speaking animals and we’ve always entrusted our thoughts and feelings to words in a desire to communicate with each other – and with God.

We live in a society that uses words in vast quantities. We send them everywhere, by letter, fax, e-mail, internet, phone, texts, tweets, blogs, junk mail, and a huge output of newspapers and magazines. We’re drowning in words, but rarely is there much judgement or discernment about our use of them. We’re simply promiscuous with them.

And yet words are the best tools we’ve got for communication, so it shouldn’t be surprising that our venture into prayer will soon take us into this dangerous arena. We’ve slowed down in order to give opportunity for those stirrings of thankfulness, wonder or need to see the light of day. We’ve made space to get in touch with what’s going on inside us. Now comes the desire to speak to the ‘something else’ that seems increasingly like a Someone Else.

But what shall we say?

Three things that don’t matter:

1. Quantity
   We don’t have to say a lot. We just have to say what we want, or what we feel strongly about. In any case, saying a lot may mean we lose the point. Woody Allen once said, ‘I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It’s about Russia.’ Prayer is about life, all of it, but we don’t need to talk about it all at once!
2. Quality
   We don’t have to speak well, in good English, with nicely rounded phrases. Authenticity is what matters. It’s a conversation, not an exam.
3. Knowledge
   We don’t need to have a theology degree to speak to God any more than we need a medical degree to speak to a doctor. Prayer is for amateurs, and we remain amateurs all our lives.

Two things that do matter:

1. Being natural
   In the Bible it’s said that Moses talked with God ‘as with a friend’ (Exodus 33.11). That’s the model. We simply talk with him about anything and everything, in the sporadic, or focused, or ‘um-er’ way we talk to anyone in the daily round of our lives. When we talk to God there’s no need to put on evening dress.
2. Being honest
   A schoolboy was very angry about his parents splitting up, and that anger spilled over on to God. He heard a sermon about Jacob arguing and fighting with God through the night, so he went back to his room and burst out, ‘God, I hate you.’ ‘Excellent,’ said his chaplain, later. Why? Because he was being honest. The psalms are full of the passionate cries of honest people venting their feelings before God. Honesty is what God deals with best.

Becoming aware of God’s presence

Prayer is sometimes spoken of as talking with God. But if that’s the case, how come we hear so little from God’s side? Perhaps we’re gaining confidence that we can say things to God, however hesitantly, but the other end of the line seems pretty quiet. And in any case, if people say they hear the voice of God, we tend automatically to wonder about their medical history. So what does ‘listening’ mean in the context of prayer? And not in a way that requires a PhD in prayer – we’re happy to be learning the alphabet here. What does listening to God mean for the beginner or the ‘beginner-again’?

Essentially it means b...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• About the author
• Series title
• Title page
• Imprint
• Table of contents
• Introduction
• 1. Getting started
• 2. Going deeper
• 3. Keeping moving
• Further reading