prayer cuisine

Each morning when we wake up Winnie and I say a prayer together from the family devotions in the Book of Common Prayer. We’ve done this for over a year now so it’s well-memorized. Of course, there are the occasional brain glitches that result in stumbling over a word or phrase, but generally it pretty much trips off the tongue. It’s a good way to start off the day since it’s a better prayer than I could come up with at 6:30 in the morning, especially if I’ve had to comfort a crying kid at 2 am the night before. In fact, that particular prayer has been a source of comfort and strength for me at other times of the day, and it's rich enough to be an almost inexhaustible fountain for meditation.

Prayer can be as simple as “help!” or “thanks”. If I’m asked to pray aloud without prior preparation, I usually put together a combination of riffs based on prayers I’ve heard before. This isn’t to say that a prayer composed on the spot isn’t sincere. It’s just that composing a well thought-out, meaningful prayer isn’t easy.

So I’ve come to value prayers that have had a lot of thought put into them by people who are masters of Christian spirituality and of the English language. The question is, how do I pray them? In the world of prayer cuisine, “help!” is fast food and a prayer from the Book of Common Prayer is haute cuisine (and I suppose an extemporaneous prayer is leftovers). Unfortunately, it’s easy for me to gulp down a rote prayer as if it were fast food. But if I really want to get the most out of it, a previously written prayer is meant to be savored, chewed slowly so that my soul can access its full flavor and nourishment.