My wife and I saw my daughter take her doll “Ella” and put her into the crib adding a blanket, her little blanky named “Ollie”, and a stuffed animal. Then we heard a little mumbling and then a loud and clear “Amen” coming from her room.
She was putting them into bed and having a little prayer with them.
Of course she’s only a little older than two, so I have no idea what she was saying or what she was thinking about when she was praying, but it was one of the most adorable things she’s done in a long line of adorableness. We pray with her every night right before we put her to bed, and now she’s “playing” prayer.
We know what we hope will happen, we hope that she will be formed in prayer by our practices and actions.
You practice or play until you get the hang of it, and even adults learn by watching and imitating what they cannot figure out how to do on their own. Even sorting things out on our own is tricky because we probably watched someone doing the same thing. Innovation is the ability to bring together diverse items or concepts into a cohesive whole which is novel. The most innovative prayers come from people exposed to the eloquent prayers of the past and finding themselves in regular practices of prayer couple with situations or lifestyles that develop the prayer.
Perhaps this will be a rich cultivating ground for prayer, I hope we offer enough variety that she can begin praying in all sorts of voices from the spontaneous to the great prayers of St. Thomas, St. Francis, John Wesley, St. Patrick, and all the other terrific prayers our tradition has had. I hope the psalms and the proverbs and the prophets get mingled up with the law and the letters for truly God centered and connected prayer in her life.
But of course it doesn’t start there. It starts with mumbling and saying amen with your little girl as she puts her baby doll to bed.
It starts at meal time singing the Wesley Table Grace or some Johnny Apple Seed prayer or reading a psalm together.
It starts one “Child-Like” step at a time.
Pilgrim Out of Water 