Prayer

Prayer

Prayer is a very complicated subject, because it is so subjective. It means very different things to each of us and is performed in so many different ways, depending on who we are. As humans, though, we seem to need to connect in some way with the Universal, with that beyond us, but the form of that connection is as varied as we are as humans. There is a very old hymn by James Montgomery, “Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire, unuttered or expressed, the motion of a hidden fire that trembles in the breast.” Our thoughts and desires to know God do not have to be beautifully articulated or crafted into eloquent verses to be valid. Once we turn our minds to God and quiet ourselves, God often takes it from there. Some of us, though, need to form our thoughts into words and sentences so that our minds stay focused and do not wander.

Some of us feel most comfortable with standard, memorized prayers, as are Muslims, who recite their prayers learned in their earliest years, five times a day. This discipline forces their minds to turn to God with a devoted regularity. I think of these prayers and the chants sung by medieval monks as similar to  the mantras we devise in meditation to empty and focus our minds in order to allow the Divine to enter. Eastern meditation is rooted in a desire to connect with the Universal Mind, to lose one’s individuality in a wholeness beyond ourselves. Meditation requires time, a regimen of practice and a certain spiritual inclination, a talent to go inward, in order to accomplish the sought after unity. However, there are more and more very accessible online and even community group courses to help all of us begin to at least enter into the first phases of meditation. 

Many of us, though, still rely on our childhood prayers, like the pretty, musical table grace, “Thanks for the food we eat and for the friends we meet; for each new day we greet, we give you thanks.” Lent is certainly a good time to teach children The Lord’s Prayer by rote, but you certainly do not have to limit your teaching of The Lord’s Prayer (The Our Father) to the season of Lent. The value of teaching especially this prayer is that all Christians know it and most in mainline churches, at least, use it when they worship together, so it unites us as Christians. Imagine being a preschooler attending a cousin’s church service. You have been admonished and possibly incentivized to remain still and quiet during the service.  You can’t see much, and you can’t read any of the responses or words to hymns, but your mom continues to point to the place you are in the service in the order of worship, so you will know how much longer you need to sit. Suddenly, everyone stands and you hear, “Our Father, who art in Heaven,” and you realize, “I know this! I can say this prayer too!” Not only do you feel more grown up, you feel like part of the Christian family gathered there by being able to say The Lord’s Prayer with everyone else.

The value of praying alone with children, though, is that they need to hear about God and address God themselves for God to be present in their thinking. As humans, we cannot perceive reality without the prior language given to us to do so. In my family when I was growing up, my parents called on my brother and me to deliver a spontaneous table grace each day.  We took turns. My parents never took a turn. They never criticized what we offered in prayer or omitted, but one year, my brother went on a rampage, complaining to my parents that I said the same thing each evening . Fortunately, my mother vigorously defended me saying that whatever I offered in my prayers was fine. Eventually, I got through that pray-er’s block phase, probably when my brother left home for college.

Even though children should be able to keep their own prayers private, if they wish, we can help children have a better understanding of God and prayer if we have an open, nonjudgemental relationship with them that allows communication with them about their prayers. 

My mother was a first grade teacher in a small town with one elementary school. There were five first grade teachers who gathered before the beginning of each school year to determine their class rosters by drawing names from the pile of first grade students in the town named on little slips of paper. Each teacher drew a certain number of boys and a certain number of girls. In this particular year and drawing, as the drawing ended, and there were no more names in the pile, my mother, Mrs. White, discovered that she was one student, a girl, short of the total she should have had. In a quick search, they discovered that one slip had fallen on the floor beneath the table. The teacher who picked it up said, “Well, here’s the missing student, but it’s a boy, Jesse Lee Crandall, and you’re missing a girl, Mrs. White.” My mother said, “No, Jesse Lee is a girl. I know the family, because I had her older sister, Anne, in my class three years ago.” So Jesse Lee Crandall was added to my mother’s class roster.

Two weeks before the drawing, Mrs. Crandall had taken Anne and Jesse Lee to buy their school supplies. Jesse Lee was very excited to be buying her supplies for first grade. One evening Mrs. Crandall peeked into Jesse Lee’s room and saw that she had all of her supplies spread out on her bed. Because Anne had already attended school, Jesse Lee knew the procedure to label her supplies with the name of her teacher and room number. Mrs. Crandall was alarmed to see that Jesse Lee had labeled all of her supplies with permanent marker, “Mrs. White  1-C”. “Oh, Jesse Lee!”, exclaimed Mrs. Crandall, “Why did you already label all of your school supplies? We don’t know whose class you’ll be in yet!”  Jesse Lee said, “I know I’ll be in Mrs. White’s class.” “How do you know that?”, Mrs. Crandall asked. “Because in my prayers, I asked God to be in Mrs. White’s class ,” replied Jesse Lee, matter of factly. (Names changed.)

A relieved Mrs. Crandall shared this wonderful story of her child’s faith with my mother on the first day of school. I love the story, and when I need courage to step out in faith, I remember Jesse Lee Crandall.  I also wonder, though,  if Mrs. Crandall was able to explain in her kind way that God does not grant wishes, just because we ask. A child who asks God for something and doesn’t get it, doesn’t wonder what’s wrong with God; she wonders what’s wrong with herself. Did she pray wrong in some way? Was her faith not strong and worthy of receiving her request from God? When a young child is forming her self-image and her faith in relationship to God, it would be unfortunate for her to think that God did not act, because she had erred in some way.  I hope that each child, as she matures, will have the opportunity to read and study about faith and the nature of God more fully to understand these issues, but until she has such maturity, we can nurture little buds of faith by praying with her and talking with her about our prayers.

A correction to this problem is to teach children to give thanks to God in prayer. It is natural, as humans, to cry out to God for help at times, but we do that, realizing that prayer changes us, not God. God stays by us, sustaining us constantly, comforting us in our anguish and pain and strengthening us when we feel unable to go on alone. In prayer, we can acknowledge God’s daily grace in our lives with our gratitude, and we can teach our children to do the same.

For children who are raised with a sense of God’s presence in their lives, prayers of thanks come easily and readily; they are natural, but demanding or forcing children to pray or worse, yet, punishing them with prayer can greatly harm that natural gratitude they feel and express.  I can imagine a tired, frustrated parent sending a child to her room to pray about her bad behavior. It’s the same if you are trying to raise a musician and you use practicing his instrument as punishment. Obviously, he’ll never want to practice. Practice, or better yet getting to play the instrument,  should be a reward, and soon, playing will be a reward in itself.  The same is true of prayer. Prayer at bedtime is a special time with you, a happy time to share God’s blessings in your lives.