Learning From the Masters

One of the best ways to learn an art form is to copy the masters. It is said that the famous painters of the Renaissance had students who simply copied what the master did until they understood what was going on and could strike off on their own. I suppose that even painting a still life is simply copying what the Master made.

I participate in many different kinds of prayer, by virtue of my work and my personal habit. When I am praying with a group, I usually prefer to let the words and experience of the group form my prayer. Some call this "extemporaneous" prayer, but often what seems to come out of thin air for the hearer has been formulated over some time by the speaker.

Praying out of my own experience, however, has its limitations. So often I will turn to words that others have composed and pray them. I do so not because God hears my words or their words any more, less, better, or worse. However, prayer is an exercise that both speaks to God and stretches the soul. I find that using someone else's words to pray stretches my soul in ways I could not anticipate but richly value.

Somewhere along the line I picked up Michel Quoist's Prayers, a thin book copyrighted in the 1960s and translated from French. Abbe Quoist was a priest and abbot in French communities both urban and rural, serving in a decade that dealt with social situations very different from my own.

But I prayed his prayers.

Prayers is a collection of almost-poetry that both speaks and listens to God. The prayers, each less than four pages long, arise from the fertile crumbling soil of human experience. Those on whose behalf the prayers rise include farmers and fascists, addicts and adolescents, the normal and the neglected. It was a joy to savor the words on my lips, but also to hear the soul-strains echoing with something divine. Praying them opened my heart more widely to the joys and sorrows of human experience, even as I lifted up people I know to be in those very joys and sorrows.

Sometimes I would pray—always out loud and standing—listening to hear myself in the prayer.

The work is thoroughly Roman Catholic, shot through with the ache of sin's guilt and culminating with a set of prayers formatted for the stations of the cross. The exclusivity of the masculine pronoun for humanity chafed against my training. Nonetheless, a full vision both of humanity's sufferings and God's love for it rises up out of the prayers.

There is no masterpiece of prayer any more than there is a perfect conversation. But like many skills, prayer withers with lack of practice and deepens with variety. To anyone seeking to learn greater vocabulary of prayer—and perhaps to hear more deeply the human heart—I recommend Michel Quoist's work.

You will have to get your own copy, however. I'm keeping mine.

~ emrys