Prayer; Just Start

27 July 2025  Luke 11:1-13

“Lord, teach us to pray….” Luke 11:1

Good praying is very much like good writing. The trick, very often, is just to get started.

In the 2000 movie Finding Forrester a reclusive novelist, William Forrester (played brilliantly by Sean Connery), befriends a struggling but brilliant teenaged writer Jamal Wallace. When Jamal can’t seem to begin, William hands him an essay that he wrote, and tells him to start typing that: “Sometimes the simple rhythm of typing gets us from page one to page two. And when you begin to feel your own words, start typing them.”

Praying is a lot like that. Very often we don’t know how to pray as we ought. So, Jesus hands us His own words and tells us to start praying them: Sometimes the simple rhythm of praying gets you from page one to page two. And when you begin to feel your own words, start praying them.

The trick, very often, is just to get started.

It has grown very common over the years and the generations to criticize the praying of “rote prayers,” prayers that someone else composed, and that we simply pray over and over again. It is a heartless criticism, for it blithely presumes that no one should ever have trouble finding the right words. And yet it is that very thing, finding the right words, that most people find hardest of all. Faced with a great love, or a deep sorrow, or a task so difficult that it makes us weep, we ache to find the right words to describe the experience, or to describe the way forward, or to offer ourselves to our beloved, or to manage pain, and ache more when we cannot find them. C.S. Lewis wrote once, “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words” (Till We Have Faces, p. 294), but those words usually have to be dug out of us, and the digging is painful and long, and for many, sadly, fruitless.

So, Jesus gets us started: “When you pray, say, ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be your name….” He goes on to commend persistence – keep on praying this way, and the time will come when you feel your own words, the words that fit with, “Our Father” and God will answer them all because they fit. The Church has taken this model seriously over the centuries and has commended to all the faithful the discipline of Lectio Divina, “Divine Reading,” in which Holy Scripture itself is the thing that gets us started. Lectio Divina has given us other prayers, like the Hail Mary, which is prayer that begins with verses from Luke 1:28 and 1:42, the whole of Psalm 23, the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-56), the Song of Zechariah (Luke 1:67-79), the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1-12), St. Paul’s Psalm of Love (I Corinthians 13), and many more.

The trick, very often, is just to get started. Jesus and Holy Scripture have provided the words, and praying them, we find our own. And finding our own, we discover, by one of the joyous paradoxes of Providence, that they were His all along, and so we are His, and our whole lives becoming prayers.