My Grandmother's Prayers

You say them at night and you say them properly.

The same ones, in the same order, in the order she said them, and you have not missed many nights in forty years. You know which ones she said quickly and which one she slowed down for, and you do the same, without deciding to.

It is not empty. That is the thing you would want understood. These are real prayers, said by a real woman for sixty years, and when you say them you are aware of her and of everybody who said them before her, and there is something in that which is not nothing.

And you have never said one of your own.

Not once. Not a sentence in your own words, made up on the spot, about a thing that is happening to you now.

You noticed it in the spring, standing at a graveside, when somebody prayed out loud in ordinary language about the actual man in the actual ground, and you found that you could not have done it.

You could have said the ones she gave you. They would have fitted. They fit everything, which is why they have lasted six hundred years.

But nothing about him. Nothing about the fact that you had not seen him since March and about what you had said on the phone.

That is what has been sitting with you since April.

What this page will not do

I am not going to tell you to stop saying them. That would be taking a woman's sixty years away from you on the say-so of an article, and I would not do it and you should not let anybody.

I am not going to tell you that written prayers are second best. That is a very modern opinion held mostly by people whose own spontaneous prayers are considerably more formulaic than they realize.

And I am not going to tell you that forty years of them was going through the motions. You know it was not, and you know it because of what happens in you when you get to the one she slowed down for.

What I am going to do is add something, and adding is the whole of this page.

You are not further from Him for having prayed in her words. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and nearness is not withheld from somebody praying in a form, and the Holy Spirit is in that courtyard beside a chair nobody sits in.

The verse is about what you are allowed to call Him

There is a line in Romans 8 that is about exactly this, and the word at the end of it is the whole argument.

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.Romans 8:15

Look at the word cry. It is not a word for reciting. It is a word for the sound a person makes when something is urgent and unrehearsed.

And then the two names. Abba, Father. One of them is not Greek; it is the word a child in that house used for his own father, kept untranslated in the letter because there is no way of saying it that carries what it carries.

Paul is describing something specific. Not permission to pray, which you have and have exercised for forty years. Permission to speak to God in the register a child uses in his own house.

That is what the spirit of adoption is for, and it is stated as something already received rather than something to be earned.

You are not on the wrong terms with Him. Scripture says ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father, Romans 8:15, and the crying is unrehearsed by definition and the receiving is already done, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts a person's own voice into their own mouth.

What the inherited words do and do not do

Here is the distinction, and it takes nothing away from her.

The prayers she gave you are true, they are shaped by centuries of people who knew what they were doing, and they will hold you on the nights when you have nothing. That is exactly what they were built for and it is why they exist. Scripture stands under that in Romans 8:15, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

They also cannot be about your Tuesday.

They are general because they have to be. A prayer said by millions of people over six hundred years cannot mention a man you had not seen since March, or the phone call, or the particular thing you said that you have thought about ever since. It is written, in Romans 8:15, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

So they are doing their job perfectly. It is simply that the job has an edge, and everything past the edge is yours to say, and nobody ever told you that you were allowed to.

You are not required to keep every sentence general. Scripture says in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God, Philippians 4:6, and every thing has particulars in it by definition, and the Holy Spirit carries an unpolished specific sentence exactly as far as a beautiful general one.

Why nobody ever told you

There is a reason for this and it is worth knowing, because it will remove some of the shame.

In the house you learned this in, the prayers were what devotion looked like. Devotion was faithfulness: saying them, not missing, doing it properly, at the same hour. That is a real and good form of piety and it produced a woman who prayed for sixty years and a grandson who has done forty.

Nobody in that house improvised. Not because it was forbidden, but because it was not the shape of the thing, and a child copies the shape.

So the missing half is not a failure on your part. It is a thing you were never handed, and you cannot miss what was never in the house. Scripture settles that in Romans 8:15, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

And she would not mind. That is worth saying, because part of what has kept you from it is a sense that adding your own words would be a criticism of hers. It would not be. A woman who prayed for sixty years wanted her grandson to talk to God, and she gave you every tool she had.

You are not being disloyal by speaking. Scripture says a good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things, Matthew 12:35, and bringing forth is a first-person act rather than a repetition, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to leave behind anything she gave you.