Unlearning how to pray
A spiritual retreat, the Beginner's Prayer, and stepping into the unknown
As I write this essay, I am looking out over lush green farmlands from my window at Mt. Angel Abbey’s Guesthouse. I am here for the weekend. A spiritual retreat of sorts that includes long bouts of writing and walking down to the monk’s brewery for a beer (or two). It has become a favorite place to visit a few times a year for silent prayer and writing. I particularly enjoy the Liturgy of Hours throughout the day. Each hour is so different. It starts early beginning at 5:20 AM for Vigils. You stand the entire time for Lauds. Noon Prayer is maybe 10 minutes. And Compline closes the day with the sprinkling of holy water on willing participants.
I met a lovely woman named Elizabeth who guided me through the Lauds hour and afterward invited me to pray the Holy Rosary with her and a priest. She led me to a corner of the church where I met a gentle, grey-haired man dressed in his long black robes. He held our hands as we prayed:
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
I stumbled through the prayer. It was obvious I didn’t know the words but I didn’t hide my ignorance. You don’t know what you don’t know. Either way, they prayed well enough for the three of us. Elizabeth led me out, stopping by the shrine of St. Catherine of Sienna, and told me to come back for mass. I said I’d try but I didn’t really know when mass was, it all felt like “mass” to a Protestant. Which one? I wanted to ask but I didn’t. I did, however, come back for Noon Prayer.
For most of my spiritual life, I’ve had a pretty neutral relationship with prayer. I wasn’t particularly drawn to nor resistant to prayer. Except for the times of “popcorn”1 prayer that offered some the opportunity to wax on eloquently while the rest of us sat in anxious silence waiting for it to end. I also dreaded when it came time to take “prayer requests”. I’d rather sit silently for ten minutes than feel the guilty burden of trying to remember everyone’s request. Even more so, pray in detail to prove I was actually listening.
Because of my lack of desire to engage in prayer, I’ve struggled to feel like a “spiritual” person. I often envied those who prayed with such poetic fervor. They seemed to have a closer connection to the Divine than I did and were always the ones people would go to for guidance. Yet, I have come to understand, that prayer is like many things: it can be a skill you learn or a gift that comes naturally, giving the opportunity for some to become proficient at it, while the rest of us get a passing grade. But if we are being honest, most of us are just guessing when it comes to prayer. Some are just better at knowing the right words than others.
Will you teach us how to pray? The disciples asked Jesus.
I love this question. It’s a question born out of curiosity. Jesus did teach them and we have what is known as The Lord’s Prayer. It is a beautiful, sacred, and simple prayer. Perhaps, a bit too simple. Easy enough to memorize and recite on the regular. Well structured, covering all the major areas of prayer from confession to intercession. It is so broad sweeping, it makes me wonder why.
Jesus is a good teacher. We know this. And a good teacher won’t do the assignment for you, right? Right. Instead, they teach you how to do it, and show you where to start. When it comes to The Lord’s Prayer, I think I’d like to rename it, The Beginner’s Prayer. Making it to be a starting point for those just learning, the first step, a doorway. Yet, this is what I believe has been the root of my struggle with prayer: we get stuck in the doorway. Then we start to believe the doorway is prayer, so we start changing out the fixtures, slapping on a new coat of paint, and busy ourselves maintaining and polishing the doorway.
If The Beginner’s Prayer is more of a starting point, then prayer feels more like a path I walk on, than a spiritual ritual I perform. It becomes journeyable, containing all the necessary steps that enable me to walk over the threshold. But into what? Who knows! That’s the spiritual mystery of prayer, it’s a doorway that leads to nowhere and everywhere at the same time. But that’s hard to teach in a Sunday School class!
In Richard Rohr’s book “Just This” he writes this about prayer:
The way to any universal idea is to proceed through a concrete encounter. There are a number of ways to say the same thing: The one is the way to the many, the specific is the way to the spacious, the now is the way to the always, the here is the way to the everywhere. . . when we see contemplatively we know that we live in a fully sacramental universe, where everything is a pointer and an epiphany.
It has taken me years to believe there was anything past the doorway and it only took letting go of all I thought I knew to be true. Prayer is to me now an act of continual learning and unlearning. It is taking the first known steps to experience the unknown. Prayer is walking the well-worn paths only to wander through untrodden wilderness. Seeing words and liturgies, popcorn prayers and requests as merely the beginning. It is when we get stuck on the words, that prayer can become a cold ritual we either do well or suffer through it. Prayer can’t really go much further if our fragile egos are in charge of the agenda. We’ll get stuck painting the doorways of our spiritual lives, focusing solely on the substance and missing the “nothingness” of prayer which is pure being: The soul being in God and God in the soul. This is what I believe Paul is referring to when he talks about “pray without ceasing”. Yet it is only possible when we have experienced what is beyond the doorway!
Here’s the excruciating part of this whole thing. Many of us don’t actually want to walk into mystery. We want answers, we want control, and we want to know we’re doing it right and using the right words. Richard Rohr writes that “our egos resist the awe and our wills resist the surrender” when it comes to encountering the Divine. We resist mystery and the “nothingness” of prayer because there is nothing to accomplish! Our ego’s very survival is based on our ability to succeed. But in order for prayer to actually accomplish what it needs to in us, our role must become passive - a dying to ourselves, a letting go, unlearning all that we think we know to embrace the Mystery of the Divine that longs to be ceaseless within us. It feels like dying, be sure of that, but it is only death to our egos. It is however, life to our souls.
We are finite creatures who need the specific to reach the spacious. Jesus knew that. We need words. They are our conduits. Just as art and music, liturgies and tall trees serve as thresholds to Christ. Yet, let us not mistake the conduits for the Divine. That’s why prayer, in its purest form, must be a continual process of learning and unlearning, of knowing and unknowing. In one sense, we are always beginners asking Jesus to teach us how to pray. What a blow to the ego!
And yet, the best place to start.
A form of open prayer where anyone is able to pray. Usually, the leader chooses someone to “open” prayer and someone to “close” in prayer. It can be short and simple, or depending on who is participating, it can feel like an eternity.
"In one sense, we are always beginners asking the Lord how to pray." Yes! Here's something I've been learning about Jesus' doorway prayer: https://open.substack.com/pub/janell/p/sitting-still-among-the-rocks-march?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android
I start writing about it half way down. It's surprising but also yes of course! Of course Jesus knew exactly what we needed when he said, pray this.