Learning to Pray summary

Prayer is universal – something anyone can do. But what is its purpose? In other words, why should we pray? 

Here’s one answer: because God wants to know you and have a relationship with you. Your desire to pray is proof of this. But how can you know that’s what God wants? Well, the fact that we have an urge to pray says something about how God made us. Deep within, there’s a natural desire to communicate with God, and this desire is fulfilled by prayer. 

Seventeenth-century French playwright Molière wrote many plays, but one of the best-known is a comedy called “The Middle-Class Gentleman.”

In the play, a character called Monsieur Jourdain hires a tutor to teach him the kind of things gentlemen are supposed to know. During one lesson, Jourdain’s tutor explains the difference between prose and poetry. Jourdain is amazed. For more than 40 years, he exclaims, he has been speaking prose! 

There are almost as many ways of defining deliberate or “formal” prayer as there are theologians and spiritual writers. A good place to start, however, is with one of the most influential definitions – one which goes back to St. John Damascene, a monk who lived in Syria in the eighth century. Today, it’s part of the official teachings of the Catholic Church. 

Prayer, as St. John said, is the “raising of one’s mind and heart to God or the requesting of good things from God.” When we pray, then, we are reminded of our position in the cosmic order – below God, to whom we aspire to raise ourselves up. 

While some religious thinkers, like St. John, emphasize the approach from below, others focus on a different aspect of our relationship with God: friendship. 

Take St. Teresa of Ávila, a sixteenth-century Spanish nun who believed that prayer is, as she said, “nothing else than a close sharing between friends.” 

St. Thérèse of Lisieux didn’t live long. Born in France in 1873, she died in 1897 at the age of just 24. But her brief life was unusually holy. 

As a girl, she spent a great deal of time meditating on St. Paul’s image of the church as a body with a head, limbs, and a soul. Which part was Thérèse? She decided that she was the heart – the source of love and the foundation stone of her faith. 

So far, we’ve looked at what a couple of different traditions say about prayer. 

What we haven’t discussed, however, is what many people just beginning their spiritual journey want to know most of all: What actually happens when you close your eyes and start praying?