There is a great danger in wanting to pray well. Such a desire rouses the ego and then real pray scatters like forest critters before a clumsy teenager crashing along the path.

I’d just caution us who live in modern, Western culture that prizes a heightened individualism—or I should say, an untethered individualism—to turn more toward the tradition, that is to live more closely to it. That doesn’t mean a mere rote and empty repetition. Rather it means, as in jazz, that we learn our scales so well that we can then improvise properly and freely when given a chord chart or lead sheet.

The Jesus Prayer is that, as are the Psalms (such a wondrous collections of prayer’s that contain as John Calvin said, “the whole anatomy of the human soul.”). These words are a lead sheet, from which we playfully improvise.

Unfortunately we want to improvise like a Miles Davis (jazz musician) without the long, hard work of learning to play as he did.

And the saints and mystics (who know what it means to improvise…see Theresa of Avila, a great improviser), would also tell us that there is power in the words…the words-as-they-are. Of course, given the need for translation, etc, the words aren’t magic, hocus-pocus. Otherwise we’d have to learn Aramaic or Hebrew. But there is power in the Name of Jesus, which needs little translation.

Some would like to find words that feel good to them. I get that. I would too. But I think we also need to bend our lives toward those time-honored, proven words. “Jesus” is one of them. “Mercy” or “love” are others.

So, in continuity with the tradition, I’d say, “pray in this manner.” But learn the words. Then as they seed the heart and begin to grow there, trust the Holy Spirit to lead you into more freedom. But check the Westernized-ego within that always wants the novel, unique, and so-called “authentic”, and wearies easily of the same thing because it doesn’t want to know obedience. It doesn’t think it needs it. The ego is its own god (but doesn’t want us to know that).

The perennial wisdom tradition in all spiritual traditions knows that humble, dogged obedience in the same direction bears the fruit of a holy life.

Modernity is quite ignorant of all that, and my ego, at least, is pretty well infected with its disease.

Does this help? Come back at me, if it doesn’t.

We have a debt to those who’ve gone before. And we’re shaped by forces and ideas and images we rarely examine. Too often the god we address in our prayers is a twisted a projection of such things.

Prayer, if it’s to bring us face to face with GOD, must help us face such indebtedness, and relinquish them.