From the book ‘The Power of Stillness’:
Let’s be honest: Latter-day Saints (and many others) pray a lot!
We have personal prayers morning and night, we pray over every meal, we have couple and family prayers, we pray at the start of a two-hour church block, at the start of every single administrative meeting at church and at the end of all of those meetings . . . and even within the meeting that opened and closed with prayer, we have more (sacrament) prayers. On a typical Sunday we could have easily engaged in a dozen prayers or more!
As much as we value prayer, the frequency and commonality of our prayer habits can sometimes undermine the sanctity of this humble encounter with the divine. But does it have to?
On a recent trip to Jerusalem, Carrie had lunch on a sailboat on the Sea of Galilee. She recounts: “I sat with my girl friends under the bright blue sky, dangling my feet into the Sea, while one of Israel’s top chefs brought course after course of absolutely amazing local dishes prepared right on the shore: fresh-caught fish, organic vegetables grilled on the open fire, beautiful salads, and rich dark chocolates. At the height of the deliciousness, some smiling, scraggly fisherman rowed by, saw our feast and joyfully shouted a toast, “L’Chaim!” To Life! . . . . Now that, my friends, was a meal blockbuster. On another day soon after, for lunch I had canned tuna at my desk, Meh. That was a meal rerun.
Our bodies need the nourishment of lunch, even if most of those meals are simple reruns. In some ways, the ordinary presents a neutral canvas so those extraordinary meals can really shine.
This is similarly true with prayer. Many of our prayers may feel more like canned tuna than sailboat dining, but our souls need the nourishment of those simple, everyday, and in some ways their ordinariness creates a baseline, allowing the more noteworthy prayers to stand out.
Christian author Tish Warren elaborates: “There are moments of spiritual ecstasy in Christian life and in gathered worship. Powerful spiritual experiences, when they come, are a gift. But that cannot be the point of Christian spirituality, any more than the unforgettable [meal] I ate years ago is the point of eating. . . .Thousands of forgotten meals have brought me to today. They’ve sustained my life. They were my daily bread.”16
Despite all the ways religious practices aren’t now disparaged in modern society, there’s power in regular, even ritualistic observance-yielding to set a way for going through something that creates a rhythm and muscle memory. As Elder Jeffrey R. Holland has pointed out, the word religion comes from the Latin word religare, meaning “to tie” or, more literally, “to re-tie.”17 We might then think of each prayer offered potentially tying and binding us closer to God.
Even “daily bread” prayers can have small moments of stillness. One family takes three breaths to help wiggly kids calm their bodies before family prayer. In a Primary calling, another has children practice “the skill of still,” focusing on calming the body and listening to a moment of quiet before beginning a prayer in class. Rather than launch immediately into an opening prayer, we’ve also begun classes having people briefly check in with one another so that the person offering the invocation can include personal details about class members in the prayer.
President Spencer W. Kimball wisely taught that prayers should be “appropriate to the need. Certainly, it should not be long when little children are involved, or they may lose interest and tire of prayer and come to dislike it. ~ Jacob Z.Hess, The Power of Stillness, Carrie L.Skarda, Kyle D. Anderson,Ty R. Mansfield (Salt Lake City, Deseret Book, 2019), p. 49-51
