Overview:

Wednesday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time

A Reflection for Wednesday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time

Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he had finished,
one of his disciples said to him,
“Lord, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples.”
He said to them, “When you pray, say:

Father, hallowed be your name,
your Kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread
and forgive us our sins
for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us,
and do not subject us to the final test.”

Find today’s readings here.

I was deep cleaning my dorm room one winter afternoon during my senior year of college when I stumbled upon a bag of books buried deep in my closet. While attempting to make some space for this collection on my shelves, one of the books caught my eye: Flannery O’Connor’s A Prayer Journal. 

I wasn’t exactly sure how I had acquired this particular book, nor was I aware of any specific reason for bringing it with me to school. But I had been feeling distracted and uninspired in my own prayer life, so I decided to see what Flannery had to say. 

I ended up reading the whole book several times in a row. Writing as a young woman in her early twenties, Flannery discussed her struggles with faith, ambition and vocation. I kept coming back to one entry, dated November 6 of an unknown year. “But how [to] eliminate this picky fish bone kind of way I do things,” she wrote, “I want so to love God all the way.” She finished the entry with a question: “Can’t anyone teach me how to pray?” 

I knew, like Flannery probably did, that Jesus had already answered a similar question from one of his disciples by giving us the Our Father. But when it came to the “traditional prayers,” Flannery told her journal that she was “saying them but not feeling them.” I could relate. 

I returned to A Prayer Journal and Flannery’s question again and again throughout that week. But the more I read through her sprawling entries, the more absurd her inquiry started to seem. Flannery knew how to pray—she was doing it on every page of the book. And more than that, her prayers were thematically aligned with Jesus’ instructions in the Our Father.

Yes, she used different words, her sentences much more complex and conversational. But the main ideas Jesus presents in the Our Father were all there in her writing. Nearly every entry included a direct address to God. She wrote of trying to follow the “Will of the Father” and of “giving up every earthly thing” in the pursuit of Heaven. She discussed her dependence on God, especially when it came to her ability to write. And most of all, she frequently asked God both for the gifts of patience and holiness towards others, and for his mercy regarding her own shortcomings. 

The recognition of these essential themes in A Prayer Journal helped me realize I was thinking about my own prayer entirely wrong. I had been focused on saying the right words in the right order when I should have been focused on hitting the right ideas. The Lord’s Prayer has been translated time and again, leaving an abundance of slightly different versions. But across centuries and languages, the foundational themes have stayed consistent: a call to focus on God, to aspire to Heaven, to live in humble gratitude, to repent for our mistakes and to forgive those who have wronged us. 

Whether we like to recite the Lord’s Prayer or prefer to spill our hearts to God through the pages of a journal, Jesus gives us all the tools we need to speak to God properly. Let all our prayers, whatever their form, be thoughtful and rooted in his guidance.

Brigid McCabe is an O'Hare Fellow at America Media.