Learning to Pray Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Learning to Pray

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Zusammenfassung von Learning to Pray

Name: Learning to Pray
Rating: 4.1 (161 reviews)
Author: James Martin

James Martin

A Guide for Everyone

4.1 (161 Bewertungen)

22 Min.

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Kompetenzen Erfülltes Leben Theologie Christentum Spiritualität

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Learning to Pray
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Kernaussage 1 von 7

What’s in it for me? Discover the power of prayer.

Why pray? It’s a deceptively simple question.

Virtually all Christian theologians argue that prayer brings us closer to God, but after that it’s largely a matter of interpretation. Some emphasize friendship; others focus on awe and reverence, or love and intimacy.

As we’ll soon see, this open-endedness can be liberating. It means there isn’t a “wrong” way to pray – how you pray depends on who you are and what you’re seeking.

But how should you begin to acquaint yourself with prayer and establish its place in your life? Well, a good way to start is by looking at how Christians have approached prayer throughout history, which is just what we’ll be doing in these blinks.

Along the way, you’ll learn

why prayer is for everyone;
how thinkers from St. Augustine to St. Teresa of Ávila understood prayer;
how to handle the emotions you encounter while praying.

Prayer is for everyone.

Let’s face it: prayer can be daunting. If you’ve never prayed before, you might not know where to start or what to expect. And if you have tried, you might have come up against the most common stumbling block of all – the feeling that you’re not doing it “correctly.”

But here’s the thing: like swimming or riding a bike, praying isn’t something you just do spontaneously. Whether you’re an ordinary person or a holy individual like Mother Teresa, prayer is something that has to be learned. The good news is, everyone can.

The key message in this blink is: Prayer is for everyone.

Everyone is capable of praying – the author believes that devoutly. But he also knows what it’s like to struggle with prayer.

While he grew up with religion, true spirituality played a limited role in his early life. His family went to church on Sundays and said grace before meals. The kids attended after-school religious education classes. But neither God nor their relationship with him were discussed very often. There was something missing; God was present, but he felt distant at the same time.

In short, the author didn’t feel like he had a personal connection with God. This sense shaped his understanding of prayer. Until his late twenties, he only prayed when he needed help. If he approached God, it was to ask for an “A” on a test, a home run in Little League, or a raise at work.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with asking God for help – that’s a natural and deeply human instinct. But our relationship with God can also be richer and more profound.

But how? The author discovered the answer to that question after joining the Jesuits, a Catholic religious order, when he was 27. After entering the Jesuit novitiate – the period of training novices undergo before taking their vows – he realized that there wasn’t a single “correct” way of praying. In fact, there were hundreds of different ways of praying, and just as many ways of understanding prayer.

Praying, in other words, is flexible. That’s because, above all, it’s about developing your personal relationship with God. It doesn’t have to be formulaic for the simple reason that your relationship with God isn’t formulaic. Prayer really is for everyone. To grasp this aspect of prayer is a truly life-altering experience.

Praying fulfills our deepest needs – and God’s desire to have a relationship with us.

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.

Prayer isn’t always deliberate.

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!

Prayer is an “approach from below.

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.

Prayer deepens our friendship with God.

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.”

Prayer is love and intimacy.

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.

Praying is deeply emotional.

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?

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Worum geht es in Learning to Pray?

Learning to Pray (2021) unpacks one of the most important yet misunderstood aspects of spiritual life: prayer. What’s the purpose of prayer? How do you pray “correctly?” What should you expect when you pray? These are just some of the questions that often stand between believers and this deeply rewarding practice. And there’s no better way of answering them than by looking back through the different styles and rituals of prayer found in the Christian tradition.

Bestes Zitat aus Learning to Pray

Prayer is like seeing another dimension of life.

—James Martin

Wer Learning to Pray lesen sollte

Believers struggling with prayer
Agnostics and skeptics with an open mind
History buffs

Über den Autor

Reverend James Martin is a priest, theologian, and the author of several New York Times best-selling books about religion, including Jesus: A Pilgrimage and The Jesuit Guide to (Almost ) Everything. A graduate of the Wharton School of Business, Martin joined the Jesuits at the age of 27. He is a frequent contributor to outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and The Colbert Report.

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