On Prayer
2026
On Prayer
Whenever I start to think or write about a spiritual issue, I turn first to the gospels to see what Jesus of Nazareth had to say on the subject. His comments are always insightful and invariably lead me to see connections with what other spiritual traditions or writers have to say on the same subject. This is what happened when I turned to the gospels for guidance on how to pray.
When I went to the gospels to see what I could learn about praying, I wasn’t looking for a new prayer to memorize; I was looking for examples of how Jesus prayed on the many times when the gospels say he went off to a “deserted place” by himself to pray. But as frequently as the gospels mention him doing that, they never describe what he did—how he prayed—when he got there. The only example of what he said during a time he went off by himself was the prayer he said in the garden of Gethsemane on the night he was arrested, the prayer in which he says, “remove this cup from me, nevertheless not my will but thine be done.”