This article first appeared in the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader on July 22, 2021.

When I was a boy growing up in the denomination of my youth, I always found prayer off-putting. I found almost everything about religion off-putting, but prayer especially so.

It always seemed to me, given my 12-year-old’s nascent smugness, that the men who prayed in our church services – the supplicants always were men, women not being allowed to address God publicly – adopted these otherworldly facial expressions that registered somewhere between archangelic piety and an especially sharp gas pain.

(I knew this because I only pretended to close my eyes. The show was too good to miss.)

Then, having captured the proper face, they’d launch into a practiced stentorian baritone and, most grating of all, King James English: “O God, we thank thee today that thou hast brought thy people to this glorious house of worship. And we beseeeeeech thee, O Lord, that thou wouldst grant us thy favor as we humbly bow in adoration.”

And this would be the same guy I’d just heard the day before on the sidewalk outside the Western Auto belting out Ferlin Husky’s latest single to a scratchy transistor radio.

It all led me to decide God must be a strange cat if you had to talk to him like that. Why would you want to bother? And what if you got a thee or a thou in the wrong place and ticked him off? Not worth the risk. Prayer was not a pursuit I intended to pursue, except when my parents were about to discover I’d gotten into a fight at school.

Let me say that in the 50-plus years since, I’ve reversed my opinion. My 12-year-old self was wrong on nearly all counts.

Prayer is good. It can even be fun. It’s often helpful. God isn’t a strange cat after all. He doesn’t care a snap about the thees, thous and beseechments, although he’ll indulge your use of them if you insist.

Mainly, God likes to hear what’s on our mind. He wants to tell us what’s on his mind. He wants to have a conversation with us – and you can tell God anything. The Lord is beyond being shocked by the low-rent likes of us. What’s the worst thing you’ve done? Trust me, he has heard worse. Far worse.

Humans have been praying for as long as we’ve possessed the gift of language – and maybe before that people just grunted to their piled stones or the clouds or the majestic mountains.

There’s something about how we’re made that inclines us to reach beyond ourselves toward a world above our own. We long to transcend this life. We seek unerring guidance. We want wisdom beyond the pablum of our podcast gurus.

Prayer seems to be our instinctive means of grasping for such gifts. We pray because we need it. We need to touch the great forever from this dusty coal pile where we sit in our scuffed brogans, sporting three-days’ growth of whiskers, rum on our breath.

Soldiers pray when bullets snap around them. Teenage boys pray before they pick up the phone to call that cute girl in algebra class. Parents pray when their kids go awry. Hospital patients pray when the scan shows an ugly spot on their kidney. Old people pray as they rock all alone in dank apartments.

I’ve learned over the decades there are about as many ways to pray as there are people or problems or hopes. There are those formal prayers I often heard as a kid. There are prayers printed in prayer books.

There are the Psalms in our Bibles. There are breath prayers. Some folks pray in tongues. Some pray while giggling at God’s delicious sense of humor and others while weeping and some while half-dreaming as they fall asleep.

Tots pray for another scoop of ice cream and grandparents for another year or two of life, please Lord, just long enough to get my grandchildren raised.

I’ve prayed many ways. But as I’ve gone along, I think my favorite way of praying has become the praying that isn’t consciously prayer. It’s a communion that requires no words, no formalities, not even a spiritual intention.

The Catholic contemplative Richard Rohr recently quoted Brother Lawrence on that kind of prayer: “I have abandoned all particular forms of devotion, all prayer techniques. My only prayer practice is attention. I carry on a habitual, silent, and secret conversation with God that fills me with overwhelming joy.”

I read that and thought, “Yes. That’s what I love best, too.”

It’s prayer in which we surrender to that presence who fills us and fills everything around us at all times. We go wherever God takes us, at God’s leisure, and enjoy the journey, and experience a oneness with all that is and that will ever be. We find we’ve moved beyond language.

Paul Prather is a rural pastor in Kentucky. You can email him at

pratpd@yahoo.com