The only people I heard pray in my growing up years were pastors. They used formal, religious-sounding words that I never heard outside of church. Everyone in the sanctuary became very still, folding their hands and closing their eyes. The whole exercise eluded me. I tried praying this way, but I didn’t get very far. No doubt praying for things that didn’t happen in the manner I prayed had a lot to do with it.
So, here I am years later writing about prayer. My life has been enriched by our “great cloud of witnesses” who have gone before to teach us how to pray. I often cite prayers from ancient sources because our early Christian forebears knew how to pray. Prayer was the heartbeat of the early church. Prayer was regarded as more foundational to early church community worship than the sermon.
The customary posture for prayer in the early church was head raised, eyes open and arms raised. Heads raised and eyes open to God and outstretched arms to symbolize the cross express receptivity to God. While rote prayers were sometimes utilized, more often in public worship, prayer was improvisational.
Verbal precision was critically important in pagan temple prayer ritual. One had to use the exact words in precise order with proper inflection to gain a hearing with the gods. “We pray from the heart,” the early church leader Tertullian wrote. We bring our whole selves to God in prayer. Today’s prayer originates from a fourth century worship liturgy called the Old Gallican Sacramentary: