How I came to love embodied prayer

I suppose I learned to pray like many people in the mainline church do: I memorized prayers for mealtime and bedtime, and I listened to what felt like the excessively long prayers of the people at church. I didn’t have anything against any of these forms of prayer; perhaps God did bless the hands of those who prepared the food, keep my soul at nighttime, and intervene with world leaders and natural habitats. I just couldn’t see any results. God must not be in the business of speaking back, I concluded.

As I grew into adolescence and started hanging out with evangelicals, I learned a new way to pray: long, wordy outpourings interspersed with “just” pleas: “Lord if you would just . . .” the prayer would begin. I was expected to pray this way as often as possible, in groups and in solitude, and I filled journal after journal with outpourings to God. God was the Great Listener, the one who required total honesty. Perhaps my disproportionate speaking got in the way, but God, it seemed, was not in the business of speaking back.

In seminary, I tried centering prayer, labyrinths, meditation, and yoga, fascinated by the friends who felt a deep sense of peace in these quiet practices. But my mind chattered through them, reminding me of things still to do, working through a theological quandary, or chewing on a conversation from earlier. If I could just learn to quiet my mind, I would think. But my mind is the chattering type, and God, it seemed, was not in the business of interrupting.