The Words to Pray

by Dan Masterton

As long as I can remember, I’ve known and regularly recited the Hail Mary and the Our Father. I cannot remember when or how exactly I learned them. I remember saying these prayers in elementary school classrooms with my classmates. I remember joining hands during Mass as a child to say the Our Father. I remember learning the rosary and raining Hail Mary’s down over the rolling beads as we prepared for May Crowning. In a time when rote memorization is giving way to the short-term recall named Google that lives in our pockets, the ingrained words of these prayers endure deep in the unforgettable memories of my brain. As a punk teenager, I remember feeling critical toward the especially frequent use of these all too often robotic prayers. If we say them so often that we barely pay attention to their meaning, what’s the point?

At times as an adult and professional minister, I’ve seen our go-to prayers utilized with particular laziness and/or misguided intention. My all-time favorite (or least favorite) has to be a dean of students with whom I formerly worked. He possessed a particularly booming, monotone voice, which he utilized regularly to call for attention, scold kids, and in some cases, (mis)use prayer to quiet a crowd. He’d step up to a microphone at an assembly or before an all-school Mass and belt, “Quiet, please. Let’s begin with a prayer. OUR FATHER. WHO ART IN HEAVEN…” The droll, flat recitation the kids offered back was indicative of the fatigue often felt about these prayers.

Another time I see this trend rear its head is when young people are asked to pray before a group. While they possess varying degrees of comfort with speaking extemporaneously, they have no shame about leaning on their memorized prayers. In this case, it is often far from welcome piety. You’ll regularly hear something like this: “Uh, dear God, thank you for everything you’ve given us. We appreciate it. And, um, let’s just pray an Our Father…” Good hustle, kid.

This brings me to the retreats I direct. We pray frequently on retreat, from small-group blessings to before-meal grace to student-led prayer. The latter unfolds primarily as a precursor to witness talks, when the leadership team steps out of the room and offers a private blessing over the speaker with hands extended. Over the years, I have struggled to get young people to approach this as a prayer of blessing; instead, they often use it as a time to tell stories, offer the person compliments, or crack jokes to loosen the mood. These things can be helpful in relaxing the speaker, but they fall short of inviting God’s grace intentionally to the person being blessed, and often seem like a way to garner cheap laughs or even steal the spotlight from that person. As much as I try to give narrower parameters that focus our blessings toward God, grace, and the person being blessed, detours and tangents arise. So I’ve more or less resigned myself to laying out my hopes for that blessing once, loud and clear at the start, and hoping we stay on that track.

This brings me to the last retreat I directed. Initially, it followed the same trends I mentioned, but the first student who prayed kept his spontaneous reflections brief and efficiently transitioned into a request for everyone to pray the Our Father together. And we did. And I liked it. Sure enough, as teenagers are wont to do, the next person’s blessing followed the same shape – a short but sweet ramble and an invitation to that old familiar prayer. And so the next and the next until our pattern incidentally became focusing and aggregating our prayer behind the words that Jesus taught us. It was really nice and shifted the focus toward where I always hope it will be – a solemn, communal blessing for the speaker.

Back in those often doubt-filled teenage years, I remember being set straight when we learned about prayer in junior theology class. As we reviewed these rote prayers, our teacher called them “familiar prayers,” a nicer title that doesn’t connote such roboticism. By her estimation, these prayers were an essential ingredient to our prayer tradition. She explained that the familiarity of these prayers was a blessing in that they give us the words to pray when we may otherwise struggle to find them.

In the case of my young people serving as leaders, the familiar words of the Our Father were not so much an escape hatch from thoughtfulness but an inviting, warm place to go where the blessing they desired for their teammates could be conveyed with love. As they continue to grow and mature in their faith, they met God halfway, opening with some of their own words and then Christ’s words carry them the rest of the way. It’s a fine line between familiar prayer as a crutch and familiar prayer as an asset, but these kids embraced the words they knew by heart. They used familiar prayer as a way to orient their earnest desires for blessing toward the person for whom they prayed.

Five years ago, as my dad, brothers, and close family members encircled my dying mother, we were overcome with the emotions of saying goodbye to our most loved one. As she passed and we confronted the magnitude of grief in that moment, the only thing we knew for sure is that we wanted to pray. And as we babbled our way to a family blessing over our dear mother, my older brother found his way toward the Our Father and managed to get us praying together, “Our Father…”

There will always be moments when those familiar words come to mind out of convenience, lack of creativity, or even, God forbid, crowd control. But there are also times when the familiar words we know before thinking, or when we cannot even think, will draw us into prayer when we otherwise may not know how to get there. The Our Father comes to us as Jesus’ answer to his friends’ question about how we ought to pray. And this blessing from Jesus endures as a way for us to pray, especially when our own search for words may fall short and the words of Christ come when we may most need them.