Sometimes we don’t have the words to pray. Sometimes we don’t know how to communicate with God, or begin to express the tidal wave of emotions we are feeling. Sometimes life’s struggles and traumas feel far greater than our own limited vocabulary.
At moments like those, the prayers of others can serve like a first aid kit, dressing our wounds, offering up to the listening God the fractures and faultlines of our life. Those prayers may come from trusted friends and loved ones who journey with us. However, there are times where using the prayers of others to express our own feelings back to God are required.
I grew up in churches where prayer was only ever informal, unscripted or spontaneous. Other than the Lord’s Prayer, there were no written community prayers to pray, no traditional liturgy to give voice to our worship. The nearest to written prayers were the ancient hymns we sang from slightly musty smelling books.
Those who prayed these spontaneous prayers were the experts in prayer. They appeared to know the correct, sacred words. They seemed to be able to access the throne room of heaven with words like righteousness, redemption and the blood of Christ.
I eventually learned the art of talking to God in these spontaneous ways. Often those prayers were conversations in everyday life. Sometimes they would be emergency prayers during pressure points in the day. I was able to bring my anxieties, my longings and fears to God in my ordinary, unscripted words. They didn’t require a book, they didn’t require anyone else’s words.
However, as I’ve written elsewhere, there came a time in my life when I was unable to find the words to speak to God. I was unable to express the emotions present or articulate in my own words what was occurring for me in life.
I knew others were praying for me and that was highly valued. I knew that in times when words fail us the Holy Spirit intercedes on our behalf, but I longed to reconnect with God myself, even if I had to borrow someone else's words to do it.
There were two discoveries I made during those years, two vital tools that have been used by God’s people since the earliest times. The first, which I have explored in previous books, were the Psalms. That ancient Hebrew, book of prayers and songs, offered me words to express to God the technicolour emotions I was feeling at that time. I developed a practice, that monastics and other communities – and Christ himself – would have known, of praying the Psalms, through each day. Sometimes I would paraphrase them in my own words, other times use the words of English translations as prayers. There were laments, joyful psalms of celebration, psalms that expressed anger, anxieties, and loneliness.
The other discovery was that there were some people of prayer – poets, pastors, theologians, everyday followers of Christ – who had curated prayer books. Sometimes those were formal liturgical prayer books, rooted in ancient words the church has always prayed as a gathered and scattered community. Sometimes those were more intimate fresh expressions of prayer. Others echoed the Celtic Christians, whose poetic prayers encircled their days and rooted them in nature and the simplicity of life.
Over time, as their words, and the words of the Psalms, enabled me to articulate and communicate to God once more, I began to write my own prayers and created two daily prayer books of morning, daytime and evening prayer - Pilgrim Prayers for Every Day and Ancient Words, Living Prayer. They were an attempt to offer back to others what I had learned, through years of silent suffering.
I’m conscious that daily prayer books, particularly during times of acute stress or trauma, can feel too complex, overwhelming, or time consuming to be of value in these seasons. In light of that, I pictured the idea of a First Aid Kit of Prayers – a grab bag of written prayers for those moments when your own words seem inadequate, when language fails.
I wrote many of these prayers during times of struggle, times of failure, times when I too was searching for a way to connect with the listening, compassionate heart of God.
My prayer is that these may, in emergencies, in seasons of sadness or loss, in times of struggle, offer a dressing for your wounds, until such a time as you find your own voice again.
“In my suffering I cried out to you — the One who hears my prayers.”
Paraphrase of Psalm 120