A few weeks ago we had a great discussion about prayer. What it is, what we believe about it, what we don’t understand, what we do, how we practice it, and more. I learned a lot from it and am still mulling it over. Shortly after that, I came upon this interview with Richard Rohr. Richard is a Franciscan monk and author of numerous books, including the recent Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life and Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self. I really appreciated Richard’s view that prayer can be anything – anything done in a state of communion and connection. Communion and connection with God, with others, and...

Thank you. This is my first, last, and most essential response to the comments and conversation over the last week in response to my question and post about prayer. One reader emailed to ask who my mentors in prayer have been. I answer that it was first and foremost my parents, but as I thought about it later I also realized very recently it has also been all of you, as I have learned so much about prayer over the last week. Thank you. To honor those comments and respond out of a sense of gratitude to the conversation as it has taken shape, I thought I’d share a few of the things that I’ve learned and have been thinking about in the last...

A weekend ago I was in Colorado and during worship we prayed for the folks on the East Coast as they prepared for Hurricane Sandy. This past weekend I was at home in Minnesota and on Sunday we prayed for those same folks, now on the other side of the Hurricane, and for all those who were working to help them cope with the devastation. A little later in the prayers we also offered our hopes and concerns for those members of our congregation who had left the day before for Ethiopia where they would be partnering with local churches to build wells. Tonight and tomorrow I am in Pennsylvania with a group of pastors on retreat, and we will pray...

I think it’s easy for a lot of folks to get intimidated by prayer. We come to it thinking that there’s a certain way to pray, a right way to pray (and therefore wrong ways to pray as well). Do you know what I mean? Certain phrases and ways of speaking that make a good prayer. If you’re from a more formal religious background, that probably means a certain number of “thees” and “thous,” as in, “Oh Lord, we beseech thee that that thou wouldst grant thy servant…” and so forth. If you’re from a more informal tradition, on the other hand, then the word “just” pops up with some regularity: “We just pray to you, Lord,...

Regarding prayer, I’ve said before that while I don’t understand prayer, I still do it. And I think that’s true of various elements of the faith, full understanding isn’t a requirement for participation. Whether it’s prayer, or the Lord’s Supper, or forgiveness, we are called to participate even as we still seek to understand better. I think these two things are connected and rest near the heart of the life of faith, in fact. First, that there is an element of irreducible mystery to our faith that doesn’t require full understanding to be embraced and, second, that we are still beckoned always to understand more fully. Embracing...

On this beautiful late summer Friday (at least where I’m writing from ☺), I want to try to bring together two of my great interests: prayer, which I don’t understand but practice anyway; and video, which I think is an incredibly powerful medium for conveying the faith in an experiential, and not just cognitive, way. To do that – or at least to give a taste of doing that – I’m going to turn to a project exercised by a group of artists I greatly admire called The Work of the People. They’ve created a rather simple video based on the powerful prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi. I’ll print the words below; they also...

I’ve wanted for a while to write an occasional series of posts on prayer. Why? Because, frankly, I don’t understand prayer. I know I’m supposed to do it. And I do. But that doesn’t mean I understand it. I don’t understand, for instance, how it works. I’m not always sure what I’m supposed to do, either. And I definitely can’t quite figure out the part about “answered” prayer. Maybe you’ve felt that way, too. Maybe there’s a lot about prayer that you don’t understand, but you still do it. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe prayer is too big to simply understand, too important for us to be able to define simply or once and...