The Protestant Reformer Martin Luther (1483-1546) was sitting in a barber’s chair in Wittenberg, Germany, one day in spring 1535 when his barber, Peter Baskendorf, asked, “Dr. Luther, how do you pray?” Martin took his question seriously. He went home and composed a thirty-four-page response, later published as A Simple Way to Pray. Martin cautioned his friend to guard against thinking, “Wait a little. I will pray in an hour. I must attend to this or that.” Martin advocated setting aside regular times for prayer, making it “the first business of the day and the last at night.” He urged Peter to devote to prayer the same focus given to a man receiving a shave or a haircut. If a barber allowed his eyes and mind to wander, he could cut a customer’s nose or even his throat.
Martin began his time of prayer with Scripture meditation, to “warm his heart to the things of God.” He often prayed the Psalms which John Calvin, his Reformed colleague called, “an anatomy of all parts of the soul.” He also commended music as an aid to prayer and once arranged for a music composer to set his favorite Psalms to music. Martin incorporated the Lord’s Prayer into his daily routine, praying it “once and more slowly a second time,” pausing at each petition to add his own reflections in prayer.
Concerned that his friend Philip Melanchthon was ascribing too much piety to him, in 1521 Martin confessed to Philip in a letter that “I sit here like a fool and hardened in leisure, pray little, do not sigh for the church of God, yet burn in a big fire of my untamed body. In short, I should be ardent in spirit, but I am ardent in the flesh, in lust, in laziness, leisure, and sleepiness…. Already eight days have passed in which I have written nothing, in which I have not prayed or studied.” Take heart, my friend. If this great Reformer struggled with prayer, there’s hope for folks like us who chastise ourselves for being intermittent and inconsistent about prayer.
A morning prayer by Martin Luther follows here: