How A Baptist Came to Love Liturgical Prayer

Last week, I shared the beginnings of my story with prayer – and how the world of spontaneous, prayer-louder-prayer-harder-pray-more prayers left me empty.

In the midst of my struggle to pray, I was read Lauren Winner’s memoir called Girl Meets God. In the book, Winner describes her journey from being an observant, Orthodox Jew to becoming a Christian. As I read about both her Jewish life and the nature of the Christian faith she embraced (Lauren became part of the Anglican Church) I found myself longing for something in what she was describing – Tradition.

That’s Tradition with a capital “T” – not empty traditionalism (which has been described as the dead faith of the living) but to be part of the greater Tradition of Christian history (the living faith of the dead). And as I discovered liturgical prayer, that’s exactly what I found… as I prayed these prayers (using the Book of Common Prayer) I was joining my voice with Christians all over the world who prayed these same words – morning, noon, and evening.

The words were not original to me – far from it. (In fact, most of what is said during liturgical prayer is either a direct quote or a faithful summation of Scripture). Sometimes I felt the weight of what I was saying, other times I didn’t -but I learned to pray the words anyway, knowing that they were not any more or less faithful and true when my emotions were there or when they weren’t.

Suddenly, my prayer life was a live again. As I used these great prayers of the faith my heart was comforted to know that I didn’t have to reinvent my faith anew each morning – I was part of a long tradition of God’s people who had faithfully prayed these prayers for generations before me. People who suffered more than I did, people who were stronger than I was, people with doubts greater than mine, people younger than me, people older than me – we all joined together in worship, confession, and praise. I was praying with people I would never meet. I was praying with those who had died long before I was born, and I knew that I was praying with those who will be born long after I die.

I’m not saying that this is the only way to pray – that simply isn’t true. But it is a beautiful and helpful way to pray, one that God used to renew and restore me at my darkest point.

There are pitfalls to be sure – it’s easy to simply read the words on a page and not actually pray, but that’s true of any kind of prayer isn’t it? Written or spontaneous, we have to guard ourselves to keep our hearts, minds, and prayers connected.

I don’t pray this way all the time – sometimes it’s spontaneous conversation with God throughout the day, sometimes it’s silent meditation, sometimes it’s another book of prayers like Valley of Vision… but it forms the rhythm of my prayers. It’s like the underlying beat upon which the rest of the notes of my prayer life build – a steady, ongoing pattern of morning, noon, evening. Morning, noon, evening. Morning, noon, evening.

I could write more, but I’d love to hear from you: have you ever tried this kind of prayer? What has your experience been? Any questions that would be helpful for me to answer?