When You Begin to Feel Your Own Words

Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash

Jammal: A Season of Faith's Perfection." What's this?

Forrester: Start typing that. Sometimes the simple rhythm of typing gets us from page one to page two. When you begin to feel your own words, start typing them.

That is a scene from the 2000 movie, Finding Forrester. In that scene, Forrester is teaching the young Jammal how to write. He instructs Jammal to type out the notes of Forrester's own unfinished manuscript, letting the rhythm of the writing lead his young protegé into his own words.

In Luke 11:1-4, Jesus's disciples come to Him and ask Him about how to pray. In the shorter version, the one we have in Luke's Gospel, Jesus gives them the words of what we know as The Lord's Prayer. The interaction went like this:

Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” And he said to them, “When you pray, say:

“Father, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread,

and forgive us our sins,

for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us.

And lead us not into temptation.”

People have asked me pastorally, is the The Lord's Prayer a model or is it to be prayed as it is. My answer is usually, "yes". I believe that Jesus is teaching His disciples then (and us, by extension, as His disciples now) to pray in much the same way William Forrester taught the young Jammal. The Lord's Prayer gives as a "rhythm" and the rhythm of prayer moves us forward. Just as Forrester meant for Jammal to type out the manuscript word for word, Jesus gets our hearts into that rhythm by repeating His Words. But in similar fashion to William Forrester, the The Lord's Prayer is meant to "prime the pump" so that our personal prayers would overflow from our own heart. To riff off William Forrester's words (and that is the point isn't it?) "When you begin to feel your own words, start typing praying them."

This isn't exclusive to The Lord's Prayer. There are many prayers in the Bible that we can pray to find their rhythm and there are many books of written prayers out there from which we can find our own rhythm. One of the most popular is a set of Puritan prayer called The Valley of Vision. Another excellent source of prayers that help us with the rhythm of prayer is the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. While these two resources are filled with wonderful prayers, it is important that they don't become rote, but they lead to a rhythm. A rhythm that will help us feel our own words.

I publish a daily prayer from a prayer book, now in the public domain, called God's Minute: A Book of 365 Daily Prayers Sixty Seconds Long for Home Worship. I publish these under the label "Prayers of our Predecessors" This is also a great place to begin to feel our own words in prayer.