Light Lenten Reflections

Week 1

Talking to God

My earliest memories of praying take place at the foot of my mother's bed. It is here my brother and I would kneel at bedtime along with my mother and grandmother and say our prayers. It was at the foot of that bed I learned the Lord's prayer, the Hail Mary and an informal personalized family prayer that included asking God for specific things for individual family members. When Mom and Grandma would go out for the evening, it was left to Grandpa to supervise our nightly prayer time. Grandpa, who learned his formal prayers as a child in German, would let my brother and I lead the prayer time, asking us to pray the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary so he could learn it in English. We took this task very seriously, though, looking back, I think Grandpa did know his prayers in English and just didn't want to say them aloud, being a somewhat private pray-er.

We'd also said grace before meals, and sometimes grace after meals. When I started Sunday school as a first grader, I was viewed as a superstar because I came to class already knowing the trifecta of prayers that we would be learning that year – the Our Father, the Hail Mary and Grace before Meals. What more to praying was there? Already I knew prayer could be memorized words written by other people, prayers we made up ourselves to fit our family needs, prayer to bless our food before we ate it and thanks for food after we ate it. And thanks to Grandpa's reluctance to pray out loud, I knew prayer could be silent and private as well.

In second grade, as my class prepared to receive first communion, we were required to memorize 25 catechism questions, which we practiced reciting everyday in class. Sometimes the memorized questions opened up second-grade-level theological discussions that Sister Joan Bernadette did her best to moderate with a straight face. The subject of prayer must have come up for I remember her response to it being simple and firm and, for me, life-changing. “Prayer,” she said, “is just talking to God.”

Just talking to God...

I've experienced a lot of spiritual growth and adventures in various spiritual disciplines over the years, but I've never been able to get beyond the truth and simplicity of a second-grade teacher's explanation of what prayer is. After her pronouncement, I added talking to God to my growing list of what types of prayer I practiced. I still acquired “prayers” as was wont in the Catholic Church in the 1960s, laying in bed at night and saying the Act of Faith, Hope and Charity, the Act of Contrition and random other memorized prayers that parochial school had required me to learn. But I also talked to God. The “prayers” became rote, though I occasionally made myself concentrate on the words and appreciated what they were saying. Talking to God, though, never became rote, but was always fresh and real and often desperate. When I was a senior in high school I had my significant moment of knowing God differently. I already “knew” about Jesus's death on the cross and that it meant I got to go to heaven when I died. It was, after all, the answer to one of those long-ago-memorized catechism questions. But as an eighteen-year-old, I suddenly found myself taking God seriously, was saved, born-again, redeemed, or whatever theological label might be put on my renewed experience with the God I talked to. Now my conversations with the living God began in a new way.

I thought I'd focus this year's Light Lenten Reflections on talking to God, a.k.a. prayer. I won't attempt to write a definitive work on the subject here. (Light Lenten Reflections, remember?) It's not my style, and there are centuries of writers who have covered the topic in far more detail than I ever could. There are a lot of great books out there for those who want to delve deeper into prayer this Lent.* What I want to encourage us to do this Lent is to look at and practice how we talk to God. We all have some some concept of what prayer is or what we think it's supposed to be. We may feel we are good at it, or not so good at it at all. But if we believe that we were created to walk with God in a garden,** then we were also created to interact with Him on that walk. Let's put on our spiritual Nikes and just...do...it....

Something to think about: What are your earliest memories and understanding of prayer? How has your concept of prayer changed since childhood? Do you feel you can talk to God or are there any barriers to easy conversational prayer?

Something to talk (to God) about: Most of us feel we don't pray enough or pray “good” enough. Spend some time talking to God about your prayer life or lack there of. Be honest about how you feel about growing in your prayer life and tell God of your fears, hopes and expectations of what you'd like your time of talking to Him to look like this Lent.

*My favorite is Richard J. Foster's Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home. Timothy Keller's Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God is good, too. The Foster book is more practical, the Keller book more theological, but both are encouraging.

**We were! I wrote about our garden relationship with God in The Angle for Light Lenten Reflections 2020.