The Wrong Guy to Ask About Prayer
Posted on October 27, 2024 by Todd Leonard, One of Thousands of Spirituality Coaches on Noomii.
I had a patient ask me to teach her how to pray. She had no idea she had just made a huge mistake.
Part of my life is spent in a hospital serving as a chaplaiin. The other day a patient asked me, of all people, to teach her how to pray. For those of you who don’t know about this part of my life, I have been so “in my head” (as the kids say) about prayer for such a long time that I’ve pretty much given up on the practice. (I’ve actually come to a place where I’ve accepted that being in my head is, in its own way, a spiritual practice, but it’s torturous, and I don’t recommend it).
By the way, I’m a great professional pray-er and am especially proud of my worship benedictions (and I mean every word, by the way—I’m not a fraud most of the time—but the struggle is real).
So anyway, of course it makes perfect sense for this patient to ask a member of the clergy to teach her to pray. She just has no idea that she has happened to ask the absolute worst clergy person in the world for that favor. Her need stems from the fact that she got just a little bit of prayer teaching from the Catholics—basically the Our Father and the Rosary—without being brought along towards a full and robust understanding of the spiritual disciplines and the accompanying prayer practices that make Catholic spirituality so rich and deep. So she’s been repeating those two prayers for everything in her life regardless of what’s been going on, not understanding how they work, what they mean, and most importantly, not having any comprehension of how to connect to the heart of God.
So I tried my best to teach and show her how to pray. I talked about asking wisdom to know when to say yes or no to things; asking for help from God when she felt helpless; asking for peace to replace fear and anxiety; asking for more love for self and more love for others and what that looks like in the current situation she’s facing; saying “thanks” when she’s experienced something good; and cussing God out when she’s angry (she laughed at that one—she was pretty comfortable cussing in front of me).
Then I prayed with her, trying to do what I had talked about. When I finished, she said, “That was a great prayer! I can do that!” Which I took to mean, “That’s it? Seriously? Any idiot can do that! Geez, I was making too big a deal out of it.”
God is merciful. I’m all in my head about it now.
