The disciples asked Jesus: “Teach us to pray.” Jesus gave his disciples what we call “The Lord’s Prayer,” a prayer we now say by rote and usually think little about in terms of its content and meaning. It is a powerful prayer and a deeply meaningful one if we take time to ponder it. It addresses “Our Father”—not mine or yours, or the possession of any particular group—but the God (Father) of us all. “Give us our daily bread”—not give me…”Forgive us”—not just them. The prayer does “not heap up empty phrases” (Matthew 6:7-9) and like most of the recorded prayers of Jesus the prayer is short. (The only exception is what is called the High Priestly prayer found in the Gospel of John).
In 1937, John Baillie wrote A Diary of Private Prayer. I have found it helpful in both pondering what prayer is, and learning to pray, and doing both at the same time.
“O holy Spirit of God, visit now this soul of mine, and tarry within it until eventide. Inspire all my thoughts. Pervade all my imaginations. Suggest all my decisions. Lodge in my will’s most inward citadel and order all my doings. Be with me in my silence and in my speech, in my hast and in my leisure, in company and in solitude, in the freshness of the morning and in the weariness of the evening, and give me grace at all times to rejoice in thy mysterious companionship.”
To pray is not to use God, as Meister Eckhart suggested many of us do, as a cow whose only purpose is to give us milk, but rather to know and experience what Baillie calls that “mysterious companionship.”
“You are hidden from my sight: You are beyond the understanding of my mind: Your thoughts are not my thoughts: Your ways are past finding out. Yet You have breathed Your Spirit into my life: Yet You have formed my mind to seek You: Yet You have inclined my heart to love You: Yet You have made me restless for the rest that is in You…”
Perhaps we could say that prayer is our restless search for God’s company along our pilgrim way.
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