Prayer and worship
Prayer and worship
What prayer is, the kinds of it, and why Christian worship has a given shape rather than an invented one.
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Prayer is not primarily asking for things. It is the raising of the mind and heart to God - conversation with someone who is already present, initiated by Him before it occurs to us.
The traditional kinds, easily remembered as ACTS:
- Adoration - praising God for what He is, not for what He has done for you.
- Contrition - confessing sin.
- Thanksgiving - gratitude for what He has given.
- Supplication - petition for yourself, and intercession for others.
Most people's prayer is nine-tenths supplication. The traditions all push in the other direction, and the fixed forms - the psalms above all - exist partly to make you say things you would not have thought to say.
Worship is the Church's public prayer, and it has a given shape. Christians did not each decide how to approach God; they received a pattern - Scripture read, the word preached, prayer offered, the Eucharist celebrated. Justin Martyr describes it around 155 and it is recognisable to anyone who attends a liturgical service today.
This is the second great practical difference between the four traditions and much of modern Christianity. Where worship is understood as something the congregation designs to express its devotion, the question becomes what moves people. Where it is received, the question is what has been given. The four hold that public worship is primarily God's action towards us - He speaks, He forgives, He feeds - and only then our response.
Both personal and corporate prayer are necessary. The Christian who prays only in church has no interior life; the one who prays only alone has cut himself off from the body.
What prayer is
John of Damascus's definition is the one the tradition has kept: prayer is the raising of the mind and heart to God, or the asking of good things from God. The order matters. Raising comes first.
Three things follow.
Prayer is a response, not an initiative. We love him, because he first loved us. The impulse to pray is already grace at work. Paul goes further: we know not what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us. When you cannot pray, something is still happening.
Prayer changes the one praying. This is not a way of explaining away petition - the traditions all hold that God genuinely answers prayer and that it makes a real difference. But the primary effect of a life of prayer is on the person who prays.
Prayer is relational, not technical. There is no formula that compels God. The pagan idea that the right words in the right order produce results is exactly what Christ warns against - use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.
Pause and thinkPause: if God already knows what we need, why ask? Work out your own answer before reading.
Several answers, and they work together.
Because He told us to. Ask, and it shall be given you. Whatever the metaphysics, the command settles the practice.
Because asking is how we receive. A gift given to someone who has not asked and does not want it is not received; it is deposited. Asking is the act by which a creature acknowledges dependence, and dependence acknowledged is the difference between a recipient and a container.
Because God has chosen to work through means. He feeds the world through farmers, teaches through teachers, and heals through doctors. Prayer is another means through which He has decided to act - not a way around His providence but part of it. James says ye have not, because ye ask not, which only makes sense if the asking is part of the mechanism.
Because the relationship is the point. A father who gives his child everything unasked, in silence, has provided for him and has not known him. God wants the child, not the transaction.
Kinds of prayer
Vocal prayer - words, said aloud or in the head, whether fixed or spontaneous. This is where everyone begins, and nobody outgrows it. We are bodies, and bodies speak.
Meditation - thinking prayerfully over a text, an event in the gospels, or a truth of the faith, so that it moves from information to conviction.
Contemplation - the simplest and the hardest: attention to God without much content. Not emptying the mind, as in Eastern non-Christian practice, but resting in the presence of a Person. All four traditions have a contemplative stream.
Fixed and free. Fixed forms - the psalms, the Lord's Prayer, the collects, the Jesus Prayer - carry you when you have nothing of your own, teach you what to want, and keep you praying on the days you do not feel like it. Free prayer keeps the fixed forms from becoming recitation. Every tradition uses both, and a person who uses only one will eventually find prayer collapsing.
Why worship has a given shape
Justin Martyr, writing to a pagan emperor around 155, describes a Sunday:
The memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits. Then the president verbally instructs and exhorts. Then all stand and pray. Bread and wine and water are brought, and the president offers prayers and thanksgivings, and the people assent saying Amen. Then those called deacons give to each a portion, and carry it to the absent.
Scripture, sermon, prayers, offering, thanksgiving, communion, and provision for those who could not come. That is the shape, and it has not changed in any of the four traditions.
Why does the shape matter?
Because worship is God's action first. In the liturgical understanding, God gathers, speaks, forgives, feeds and sends. The congregation's response is real and necessary, but it is a response. A service designed primarily to produce a feeling in the congregation has reversed the direction.
Because it protects against the tastes of the present. A congregation that designs its own worship will worship what it likes. Fixed forms include things you would not have chosen - lament when you are cheerful, praise when you are not, and texts that judge you.
Because it makes the Church one across time and place. A Christian who knows the psalms can pray with the whole Church in every century.
Because it catechises. People learn their theology from what they sing and say weekly, not from what they are taught occasionally. Get the liturgy right and the doctrine is in the bloodstream.
Where the four traditions stand
Catholic
The Catechism devotes its entire fourth part to prayer, treating it under the headings of the revelation of prayer, the tradition of prayer, and the life of prayer, before expounding the Our Father line by line. Catholic prayer is structured around the Mass as the source and summit, the Liturgy of the Hours prayed by clergy and religious and commended to all, and a rich body of devotions: the Rosary, meditating the mysteries of Christ's life through Mary's eyes; the Stations of the Cross; eucharistic adoration; the Angelus; novenas. The Church distinguishes the liturgy, which is the public prayer of the whole Church, from popular devotions, which are commended but subordinate. The Western contemplative tradition is enormous - the Rule of Benedict, the Carmelites John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, the Cloud of Unknowing, Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. Prayer is taught as itself a gift requiring perseverance, and the Catechism treats the battle of prayer, including distraction, dryness and the temptation to give up, as normal rather than as failure.
Orthodox
Orthodox prayer is dominated by two things: the Divine Liturgy and the Jesus Prayer. The Liturgy is understood as participation in the worship of heaven, which is why its ceremonial, music and iconography aim at beauty rather than instruction - the classic account is the report of Prince Vladimir's envoys, who said they did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth. The Jesus Prayer - Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner - is repeated until it becomes continuous, the practice of hesychasm, described in the Philokalia and in The Way of a Pilgrim, and defended theologically by Gregory Palamas. Orthodox prayer is markedly bodily: prostrations, the sign of the cross made frequently and with attention, a prayer rope, standing rather than sitting for long services, and fasting integrated with prayer through the seasons. Icons are not decoration but instruments: the household icon corner is the place where the family prays, and the faithful pray before rather than to the image. Orthodox spiritual writing warns constantly against prelest, spiritual delusion - the pursuit of experiences, visions and feelings - and counsels sobriety and obedience to a spiritual father.
Lutheran
Lutheran prayer is anchored in the word and in the catechism. Luther's advice to his barber, A Simple Way to Pray, is one of the best short pieces on the subject in any tradition: take the Ten Commandments, the Creed and the Lord's Prayer, and out of each petition make a garland of four strands - instruction, thanksgiving, confession and petition. He also counsels against praying at length when the heart is not in it, and warns that a prayer said inattentively is worse than none. Lutheran piety centres on the Divine Service, in which the direction is emphatically from God to the congregation - word, absolution and sacrament - with the congregation's praise as response; on the daily offices of Matins and Vespers; and on the hymn, which Lutheranism made a primary means of teaching doctrine. Ein feste Burg and Paul Gerhardt's hymns carry as much theology as many catechisms. Household prayer is specifically commended: the Small Catechism includes morning and evening prayers and table blessings for the head of the family to teach his household, which reflects Luther's conviction that the home is the primary school of faith.
Anglican
Anglican prayer is the Book of Common Prayer, and the adjective is the point: one book, common to everyone, in the language of the people. Cranmer compressed the monastic hours into Morning and Evening Prayer, designed so that an ordinary person could pray the offices daily - the psalter through every month, the Old Testament once a year, the New Testament three times. The structure is confession and absolution, psalms, two readings, canticles, creed, and prayers - a form of astonishing durability. The collects are among the finest prayers in English, and their construction is worth studying: address, relative clause naming something about God, petition, purpose, and ending through Christ. The Prayer Book's language has shaped English-speaking devotion far beyond Anglicanism. Anglican spirituality has a distinctive strand of sober, undramatic, daily faithfulness - George Herbert's poems, Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying, Lancelot Andrewes's Preces Privatae - alongside a mystical tradition including Julian of Norwich, whose Revelations is read across all four traditions.
Work with it
Check yourself
What does Christ condemn in Matthew 6:7, and how do we know it is not set prayers?
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Correct. "After this manner therefore pray ye" is followed by the Lord's Prayer, and Luke's version says "when ye pray, say". The objection would also rule out Psalm 136 and the holy, holy, holy of Revelation 4.
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He assumes public prayer throughout, and criticises only prayer performed to be seen.
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The parable of the persistent widow commends exactly that.
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Christ prayed the psalms, including from the cross.
Check yourself
What does ACTS stand for as a pattern of prayer?
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Yes, and the order is instructive. Most people's prayer is nine-tenths supplication; the traditions push towards the first three.
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Not a traditional formula.
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Not the classical kinds of prayer.
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Mixes prayer with other parts of church life.
Check yourself
According to the liturgical traditions, what is the primary direction of public worship?
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Right. A service designed primarily to produce a feeling in the congregation has reversed the direction, which is the core of the liturgical critique.
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The response is real and necessary, but the traditions hold it is second, not first.
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Preaching is central but is one element within a larger action.
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The four traditions treat worship as an encounter, not primarily a gathering.
Objection drill
Written prayers are dead ritual. Jesus said not to use vain repetitions. Real prayer comes from the heart, in your own words, led by the Spirit in the moment - not read off a page that someone wrote four hundred years ago.
A model answer
Begin with the text being cited, because it says nearly the opposite of what it is being used for.
Matthew 6:7 warns against battalogeo - babbling, piling up words on the assumption that God is worn down by volume, as the pagans did. Then look at what happens four verses later. After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father, which art in heaven... Luke's version is even more direct: when ye pray, say. Christ's response to bad praying was to hand His disciples a fixed form of words and tell them to use it. Whatever He was condemning, He cannot have been condemning that.
And notice where the objection leads if pressed. Psalm 136 repeats for his mercy endureth for ever twenty-six times in a row. In Revelation 4 the living creatures rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy. If repetition is the problem, heaven is in serious difficulty.
On praying someone else's words. The psalms are the Church's prayer book, written by other people, given by God, and prayed by Christ Himself. He dies quoting Psalm 22
- my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me - which means that in the most
desperate moment in the history of the world, the Lord reached for a written prayer that was already a thousand years old. If that is second-rate praying, the category needs rethinking.
On sincerity. Grant the danger at once: a written prayer can be recited without attention, and liturgical churches sometimes are as lifeless as the objection supposes. But extemporaneous prayer is not immune, and in practice it is less immune than people think. Anyone who has spent time in non-liturgical churches knows the stock phrases - we just really want to, Father God, we just - which arrive in a predictable order and are as fixed as any collect, with the disadvantage of being worse written and of nobody having examined them for content.
On the Spirit leading in the moment. He does, and the four traditions all make room for free prayer alongside the forms. But the same Spirit inspired the psalter, and a Spirit who gave the Church a hymn book is not obviously opposed to the Church using it.
Here is the argument that usually lands. Ask what happens on the bad day. The day your marriage is failing, or a child is ill, or you have done something you cannot say out loud, or you simply feel nothing at all. Free prayer depends on having something to bring. On that day you have nothing, and a prayer life built entirely on spontaneity has just stopped.
Fixed forms carry you. The man who can generate no words of his own can still say out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord, and the words will be truer than his mood. He can still say the Lord's Prayer, which contains forgiveness he does not feel and submission he cannot manage, and saying it will pull him towards what he cannot reach.
And there is a second thing the forms do. They make you say what you would not have chosen. Praying the psalter through every month means praying lament when you are content, praise when you are bitter, and imprecation you would rather skip. Left to ourselves we pray about what is on our minds, which means our prayer life comes to have the same shape as our anxieties. The Church's forms enlarge it beyond the present self - which is precisely the reason they feel like an imposition, and precisely why they are worth keeping.
Memory work
Turn each card over, then say honestly whether you knew it. Cards you miss come back sooner.