The Limitations of Learning to Pray from Books

I spent much of the month of May and the first half of June working on a manuscript about prayer. This was the first time I tried to actually synthesize what I consider the vital basics to be able to pray in health for many years. What are the best and basic prayer practices that keep delighting and sustaining me?

That book isn’t quite ready for release, but simultaneously, I also did about a dozen interviews with different friends around their experience of prayer: what resources they had found to help them grow? What trainings or teachings? What chronology?

What came up again and again was that they didn’t learn prayer primarily through books. They learned through demonstration, through practice, through trying something and then talking it out.

That makes sense to me, too, because I had read probably several dozen books on prayer before I met Bob, but I had scores of specific questions about my own experience that I couldn’t figure out. (I didn’t realize that his library of books on prayer extended to 1200 volumes, not counting his wife’s collection of hundreds of books about meditation and lectio divina and such.)

Maybe with the AI tools today I could have asked some of my questions and gotten an answer—but I also think AI tools can be confidently wrong. Some help is better than no help, but human help, in the realm of prayer, is better than computer help. Body, soul, and spirit makes a difference.

I had been thinking of running down a book path—and I’m not opposed to that—but for the moment, I want to try something I’ve been dreaming about for a few years.

Two years ago I met the woman who runs the Decluttering Club. What a fun name! I loved AWANA as a child, and sometimes created clubs with my friends.

Ever since then, I have been mulling over the idea of a prayer club. Do It With Me Prayer Club? Eh—it lacks a certain ring.

I’m not really a joiner, but I do like to belong.

So … coming this month: Growing Prayer: A Club for the Curious and Hungry.

I envision this as the first Tuesday of the month a Zoom call teaching. I love it when people are live, but I’m also content to simply record and let people watch after the fact. (That’s my preferred way of consuming most trainings. My friend Andrew calls that “asynchronous learning.”) I can pull the transcripts, too, for those who would prefer to read.

And then we’ll reconvene the third week of the month to talk through: what did we do personally? How did it go?

More to come….

So excited for this happy dream to finally be coming to pass!

Lord Jesus, thank you that you call us from glory to glory. We want to be ever more glorious.

We love you, Lord! You are good! Amen!

May we live for the praise of his glory,

Amy Joy

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