I don’t know how to pray
My God, I don’t know how to pray. Yet I so deeply feel in myself the need for prayer. I want to pray.
Hour by hour the intense longing to talk with You altogether comes over me. The longing to come into contact with You, the Ineffable and Unfathomable. But I lose the words. I cannot piece together what I mean. My thoughts become confused. So often I don’t know what to say, while I understand that I have so much to say. Something indefinite, confused, something without shape or form, is in movement within me. A whole world of ideas, feelings, thoughts, and experiences is in a constant tidal wave within me.
I do not want to hide from You, God. In the past years I have prayed but little. From the time I was a child, in my last few years of elementary school, until today, prayer seemed to be almost absent from my life.
Therefore even now that the thirst for contact with You burns me up like fire, I cannot—I do not know how to talk to You. I try to pray, and the same words I used to use when I was a child come to my mouth. But in the condition that I am in today, they seem so strange and foreign that I am embarrassed to use them in prayer.
I beg You, Almighty God: Teach me how to pray. Speak to me. Show me by what divine art I can commune with You. I am sitting at Your feet ready to listen to You. Right now my eyes are fixed only upon You.
The same old question burns my lips as that which Your Apostles asked, Lord, teach us to pray (Luke 11:1).
Be the conversant I am looking for
My God, conversation with You is something simple. But at the same time it is also difficult.
A dialogue with You, I feel, constitutes the highest art, the most profound science, and the most authentic life.
Oh, how I feel the pressure of being without any training, education, or effort in this direction!
God, I feel like an invalid, because up to now no one has taught me the art and method of conversing with You.
I spent many years for my education. I can make myself understood just fine to people who were born in many other places, from places where snow doesn’t melt to places where the sun scorches the ground.
I speak freely and comfortably with them. You gave me the ability to have long and interesting conversations with them and with others.
But when it comes time to talk to You, who are my Father who made me, then a terrible weakness comes over me. An odd difficulty engulfs my words. Dialogue with You stops and dies before it begins.
You know, All Wise God, my desire to have a dialogue with You. The wish to converse with You is torturing me. I long to be able to talk to You and for You to answer me. For You to whisper inside me and for me to listen happily and ecstatically.
Lord, I feel a deep pain when I think about how I can go on for hours with my friends and even strangers on serious or empty, meaningless topics while with You I cannot accomplish talking to You even a few minutes, or so often for a second.
I start my day or end it without this supernatural dialogue with You.
Don’t leave me, my Savior, in this state any more. Make me a participant in Your living Word. Build up in my contrite spirit and in Your pure and infinite Spirit a bridge of dialogue which my very existence demands.
Become the other Conversant whom I have looked for all these years.
~Taken from Speaking to God, by His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios of America, Primate of the Greek Orthodox Church in America. Speaking to God was originally published in Greek in 1960 by the Christian Student Union, Athens, Greece, and is now available in English.
