How does one pray?

You can bend on your knees, close your eyes, put your palms together, point them up, and say, “Our Father.”

Or you can pound your fists against the wall and scream. It happens.

I got the feeling that I was supposed to know how to pray, after being Catholic all my life and going to Catholic schools, but when I decided to really look into it, on my own, for my own use, I didn’t know how to pray.

Jesus’ Apostles asked Him to teach them to pray as John The Baptist had taught his disciples. “When you pray,” Jesus answered, “pray like this.” He wasn’t telling them everything about how He prayed, nor was he conducting the entire class on prayer. I think rather He spontaneously suggested an approach and some topics that were useful examples, even indulging their foibles so far as to give them permission to ask God to please not lead them into temptation. (As if in the Garden of Eden God had said to Adam and Eve, “This is my friend, the Serpent. He’ll give you good advice!” and then stepped away to watch that fateful encounter.) The Lord’s Prayer is one of the great comfort prayers, but a slavish devotion to that is akin to the person who goes into a forest and copies the drawing of someone else in the forest who just drew a tree.

An authentic prayer arising from an inspired individual is more in the spirit of the Lord’s Prayer than a rote recitation of that prayer itself.

A more comprehensive discussion of prayer was planned for this article, but one should only say so much at a time. Maybe next time I’ll write about what I thought I was going to write about this time!