Learning To Pray

by James Martins, SJ

Everyone can pray. Let me put that another way. If I can learn how to pray, then so can you. If you’ve never prayed before, or have had trouble praying, or think that you’re praying “wrong,” that opening statement might seem hard to believe. Or too good to be true. But it is true, even though it took me a long time to understand this simple fact: prayer is for everyone. Until my late twenties I prayed only infrequently and in the most basic way: asking God for help. “Let me get an A on my test,” “Let me get a home run in Little League,” “Let me get a raise.” There’s nothing wrong with asking God for help; it’s both human and natural. But until I joined the Jesuits, a Catholic religious order, at age twenty-seven, I didn’t realize that prayer could be anything else. When I entered the Jesuit novitiate, however, I learned to pray in new ways. And what I discovered amazed me—there are so many ways, so many practices, so much flexibility.