The Benefits of Stammered Prayers
Growing up, my family wasn’t the type to travel widely. Mom and Dad, for one thing, were too reserved for that and too careful with their modest savings. But when I was in high school, they had in mind a once-in-a-lifetime European tour. It was a moderate-budget affair, and we breezed through several countries. I loved it. I remember an incident in France, when I had a chance to try out my rudimentary French from four semesters of classes, a university prep language requirement that I didn’t mind.
I learned enough for some basic conversation, but hardly enough to make me fluent. Still, there we were, tourists wanting to make the most of our time. So when we needed a bathroom, when we wanted to find a café, or when I lost my eyeglasses on the steps of L’Église du Sacré-Coeur and approached a police officer for help, I falteringly used my butchered French. I was trying—to the politely suppressed laughter of others—to speak the language. But I remember more than the townspeople’s bemusement. I remember how they warmly received my efforts. They strained to hear past my fractured sentences and hopeless American accent. They honored me by responding.
When it comes to our putting our words into prayers, why would God be any less generous?
According to a Jewish tradition, God hears the faintest whisper. “Before a word is on my tongue,” said the Psalmist, “you know it completely, O Lord” (139:4).
And in the long story of the church, I am startled to hear spiritual giants, who could wax eloquent in prayer if anyone could, stress the simplicity of the words we muster. The nineteenth-century saint Thérèse of Lisieux downplayed needing some “formula of words” to pray: “I just do what children have to do before they learn to read. I tell God what I want quite simply, without any splendid turns of phrase, and somehow He always manages to understand me.”
Prayer, then, may employ the most elementary speech. “Often,” said John Climacus, a sixth-century Byzantine church leader, “it is the simple, repetitious phrases of a little child that our Father in heaven finds most irresistible.”
An unforced un-self-consciousness actually helps us. The fourth-century monk Abba Macarius was asked, “How should one pray?” The elderly man said, “There is no need at all to make long discourses; it is enough to stretch out one’s hand and say, ‘Lord, as you will, and as you know, have mercy.’ And if the conflict grows fiercer, say: ‘Lord, help.’ God knows very well what we need and shows us mercy.”
What could be simpler? “Help!” is prayer in fine form, jangled exclamation and all.
Although God is awe inspiring and almighty, I try to remember that I can converse with God as with a friend, with simple naturalness. You don’t have to “fancy up” the language. What takes up room in your heart can rise up in your prayers.
Some of my best praying, I suspect, is done off the cuff and on the run, literally. (Sometimes I pray when I jog.) I also pray when I drive to work, when I wait in line somewhere, when I drift off to sleep. Prayer can pour out unrehearsed and spontaneous. We can cry out from the heart of our mundane or manic lives.
The basis for such assuredness has to do with the Person we address. God cares enough to listen with more than casual attention. He “translates” my scrubby words and hears what is truly inside. He hears my sighs and uncertain gropings as if they were fine prose. We do not like to stand speechless or stammering before God, but that does not mean God holds it against us when we do.
God hears all that arises from us. Regret, grief, thanksgiving, hope, desperation—God heeds our emotions, not just our grammar. Because of his grace, not our eloquence, we pray. Even if we stammer.