Mormons don’t do rote prayers. I feel like this was a central teaching in my upbringing. We weren’t like the other Christians who foolishly just said the Lord’s Prayer or recited the 23rd Psalm over and over. We said each prayer new from the heart, at least in theory. Related to this, does anyone else recall how stressful it was to give the closing prayer after a lesson on prayer, because you had to try extra hard to make your prayer original?
The scriptural support for this position isn’t hard to find. Our go-to is of course Jesus condemning praying with vain repetitions like the heathens in Matthew 6. But we also have the bad example of the Zoramites in Alma 31, who not only dissented from the true church and gave a self-aggrandizing prayer on their Rameumptom, but all gave the same self-aggrandizing prayer. (Not surprisingly, only the Zoramite men got to do this, as the women probably weren’t chosen by God in quite the same way.)
Of course there are exceptions to the rule. We have prayers for ordinances that are required to follow a script. The sacrament, baptismal, and temple ordinances are all like this. And it could be just me, but I feel like the emphasis on this principle has declined in my lifetime. (Or it could be that the emphasis was, to begin with, particular to my ward, or even my family.) Also, perhaps coincidentally, I’m happy to see bishops in wards I’ve lived in appear to become much more forgiving when a priest stumbles over a word in a sacrament prayer. When I was a priest, decades ago, I feel like nobody got away with even the tiniest error without having to re-say the prayer.
So what’s the point of prayer to begin with? The Bible Dictionary has some commentary that I first remember reading as a teenager and I’ve always disliked:
Prayer is the act by which the will of the Father and the will of the child are brought into correspondence with each other. The object of prayer is not to change the will of God but to secure for ourselves and for others blessings that God is already willing to grant but that are made conditional on our asking for them.
The meaning of the first line seems to me to be clearly that if you pray for something, God will let you know why it was the wrong thing to pray for. What happened to “upbraideth not” in James 1:5? I don’t need a God who will force me to see the error of my ways in wanting a good thing to happen. I want a God who will listen first. I also don’t like the view in the second line of a God who’s just waiting to do a good thing for us, but wants to be sure we check the right box first. Again, I realize that my negative reaction to these lines might stem more from how I learned as a child that God was harsh, cruel, and anxious to punish, rather than anything more general from Church doctrine.
Anyway, I haven’t found much value in my life in prayer in general, of any kind. But I’ve been thinking about the possible value of a prayer that’s written out beforehand. I can see the value in the idea that when we’re sincere, we don’t repeat ourselves. But also, an aspect of prayer that I hadn’t considered until recently is the comfort in saying the language. I realize that’s kind of cutting God out of the equation, since I can appreciate saying the language whether anyone’s listening or not. But this is honestly an aspect I like, because I’m not that sure that anyone is listening. I like the idea of prayer more as a mantra or a lament that I comfort myself with.
Someone I love is right now dying of cancer. It’s an awful thing. It’s heartbreaking. I don’t even know what to say. So one thing I’ve taken to saying is a line I love from the movie Star Trek III. Spock’s father Sarek has learned that Spock had not in fact mind-melded with Kirk to transfer his katra—his soul—to him. He laments “Then, everything that he was… everything he knew… is lost.” I love his despair because it expresses well how I feel. Everything my loved one is and everything she knows will be lost. All her relationships, her connections, her unique experiences, her knowledge and expertise accumulated over decades of life will evaporate with her death, and there’s nothing I can do about it. So I pull this line out and say it to myself, not as a comfort, but as an expression of my grief.
I understand that this doesn’t look much like Mormon prayer. It’s the same words every time. There’s no expectation that God is listening or will act, although like I said, the scolding tone of bringing the child’s will into line with the father’s from the Bible Dictionary sure doesn’t sound much like God is going to act either. But I think it might be adjacent to Mormon prayer, and it might actually fit in the prayer tradition of other churches.
I’ve softened more in my thinking on written prayer too, in seeing how much joy converting to the Episcopal Church has brought to my sister Lynnette. She sometimes offers written prayers at family gatherings, and I’ve often found them lovely. They kind of strike me like poetry, which like prayer is a mode of communication I mostly don’t feel like I get. But the connection is that sometimes the language is beautiful, and it strikes exactly the note that I’m aching to hear. With a couple of my favorite poems, I pull the words out now and again just to feel their caress and how they capture just what I want to say. I can see how with written prayers, you could get the same experience with the added bit of feeling like you’re saying the beautiful thing to God. I think this also fits very closely and obviously with hymns, which of course we Mormons already use liberally.
I wonder if the Church would ever soften its stance on written prayers. Other than the temple, we seem more low church, with little ceremony and next-to-no liturgical calendar, so it might be a reach. An example that intrigues me, though, that we could draw from if we did is temple dedicatory prayers. They’re written out beforehand. They aren’t the same every time like ordinance prayers. It seems like whatever rationale the Church has for having them written out beforehand could be applied, at least theoretically, to any prayer.
I’d love to hear what you think of pre-written versus composed-on-the-fly prayers, or whether you think my mantra-like pseudo-prayer approach is too heretical.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with written prayers. Hymns are an ancient form of praying in Christianity (Ephesians 5:19, Colossians 3:16 ), the Psalms were sung by early Christians and the practice has been praised by thinkers from St. Augustine onward. Emma Smith was commanded to collect hymns with this noteworthy revelation: “For my soul delighteth in the song of the heart; yea, the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me, and it shall be answered with a blessing upon their heads.” (D&C 25:12) I think that pretty much throws the door open for poems, written prayers, etc. for those of us who can’t develop our musical talents past toe-tapping. Joseph Smith wrote a heartfelt pleading prayer in D&C 121.
We should acknowledge there are many different flavors of prayers (as implied by Old Man above)–personal prayers, meeting invocations, ordinance prayers, and hymns being just a few. The admonition against vain repetitions can be appropriately applied to many of them. But not necessarily all of them, potentially making room for written prayers. But to be clear, I think that the purpose and effect of reciting written prayers is fundamentally different than those for personal prayers.
I recently wrote a 600-word piece that is relevant to the subject (in a document called “Talks I’ll Probably Never Give”) that I could post as a comment or submit as a guest post if 600 words is too long. To summarize the conclusions, I think that reciting written prayers, chanting mantras, and speaking in tongues (the Pentacostal version) are all manifestations of an attempt to achieve the same alternative state of consciousness. I have no idea if any of them are successful, but it is something that Mormonism ignores entirely, which may (or may not) be a mistake.
I am a person who cannot think well on the fly and this anxiety becomes even worse when I am in front of an audience. When asked to pray at various family funerals, emotions make composing an unrehearsed prayer impossible. I write down the prayer I want to give so that I can find the perfect words to describe my love and to plead for comfort and peace. Composing these prayers is very much a spiritual experience for me and is clearly a more spiritually active experience for the congregation than if I just stood up and asked for safety on the drive home.
I don’t have much to say about written prayers (if someone finds something that is helpful to them and not harmful to others, they should go for it!), but I think I can see where the Bible Dictionary definition is coming from. If prayer can actually inform or persuade God to help us, then that means that God is either not omniscient (because he should already know our needs) or not omnibenevolent (because he’s not willing to help unless we bother him). But the definition’s second sentence allows God to maintain those properties and still incentivize us to pray.
I prefer to think of prayer as a way to develop a relationship with God/the universe/ourselves. The first sentence kind of alludes to this, but “correspondence” sounds a bit formal. Can it produce any supernatural effect? That’d be pretty hard to prove or disprove. But it can allow us, or God, to shape our minds. And, as Steven Peck said, maybe that’s the only way God can interact with the universe.
When asked to perform the dedicatory prayer at my sister’s funeral, I had no hesitancy in writing out a short prayer, and reading it over the open grave. I also wish our culture allowed us to use a set prayer for blessing a meal at mealtime; that seems more fitting than continually asking God to bless the mashed potatoes to make us healthy.
Nothing wrong at all, in my view. There’s no reason why a person cannot be inspired in writing before the event they’re preparing for, than unscripted at the time. Same for prayers as for talks. Different strokes for different folks, as they say. My kids attended a CofE school, and one of the things they did was to write prayers when it was the turn of their class to prepare a school assembly. In some ways it can be much more thoughtful. We had a new member give the closing prayer in sacrament meeting today. He had it written down on his phone. It was extremely thoughtful, articulate and very much one of the better closing prayers I have heard for some time.
On the topic of vain repetition. I don’t believe it is the repetition that is the problem. I recall a conversation with my mother in which we agreed we pretty much pray for much the same things every day in our personal prayers. But actually those are the things we want to say. The things we want to ask. To deliberately seek to rephrase them so as not to be repetitious just seems clunky. I think vain is the operative word. Do we actually mean what we are saying? That’s the important thing.