Prayer: Stop and take a breath. It's that simple

"I don't know how to pray. I remember some formal prayers that I learned as a child, or that we say in Mass. But I don't know what to say otherwise."

Lent
• Lent-related articles  • 2003 Lenten Wish List (3/7 issue)  • Lenten rules (2/28 issue)

Sound familiar?

During Lent, the diocese has asked us to focus on stewardship of prayer. Prayer can take many forms -- long, short, formal, spontaneous, private and communal. But what type of prayer is best?

The diocese reminds us: "Personal prayers don't have to be structured, or take a long time. Your personal prayer is just that -- personal." What you're most comfortable with, works best because what you're doing is "building a relationship with God."

Now relationships take time, but they don't need to take a lot of time all at once. In fact, a popular catch phrase about modern family life is "quality of time, not quantity."

That's the idea behind short prayers. Commonly called ejaculatory prayer, or aspirations, short prayers are often spontaneous and extremely brief.

Pope John Paul, in addressing the psalms, has said that ancient monks used parts of the psalms as brief prayers "to release a special 'energy' of the Holy Spirit."

The pope added that this use of the psalms is "known as 'ejaculatory prayer' -- from the Latin word 'iaculum' that is 'a dart' -- to indicate concise phrases from the psalms which they could 'let fly' almost like flaming arrows."

These "flaming arrows" are also called aspirations because they are meant to be spoken in one breath, so that our very breathing might become a moment of prayer.

Ejaculatory prayer has been with the church since the beginning. As St. Paul told us, we should "pray without ceasing" (1Thess 5:17) and short prayers, which do not interrupt our regular activity, can help us do that. When you find yourself waiting at a stop light or standing in a checkout line, it's quick and simple to repeat, "Jesus is Lord" or "Thy will be done."

One of the earliest short prayers is the Maranatha Prayer found in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (16:22) and at the end of the Book of Revelation (22:20). We know this is an ancient Christian prayer, since it is in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus and his first disciples. Other Aramaic words that have come down to us in the Bible include "Abba" and "amen" -- both of which have clear prayer uses.

Maranatha comes from three words: Mar (Lord), 'ana (our) and tha (come, comes or is coming.) Depending on where the stress is placed in speaking the prayer, it can translate as "Come, Lord" or "Our Lord is coming."

Most Scripture scholars note that, since the New Testament was written in Greek, the fact that ancient Aramaic is used in these two places indicates that the Maranatha was used as a formal prayer. It appears as such in the Didache, written around the late first or early second century and titled "The Teaching of the Lord through the 12 Apostles". The Maranatha appears in the Didache in the section (10:6) that lists prayers and sacraments.

So what does this Aramaic prayer say in just four syllables?

Early Christians believed that the Second Coming of the Lord was imminent and lived in expectation of it happening at any moment. The Dictionary of the Liturgy states that the prayer was probably a liturgical refrain that was "read as a prayer for the arrival of the Second Coming of Christ ... or as an expression of hope in the proximity" of that Second Coming.

Two thousand years have passed and most of us do not live with the same sense of anticipation as those early Christians. However, we believe that the Lord will return and, in a very real sense, comes into our daily lives now. As Scripture scholar Pheme Perkins notes about the ending words of Revelation: "People must be convinced about the 'nearness of the Lord' and the certainty of the Christian vision of salvation. ... Christians live on the edge of times. They take their values from the gospel and from the way God sees things. They should always expect that 'the Lord is coming soon."

Living on that edge of time is what short prayers, prayed often, do for us. They should remind us of God's nearness and place us near to him in thought and word. The Maranatha is just one example of how to do this. St. Francis de Sales, an advocate of frequent prayer, said that ejaculatory prayer is best prayed when it speaks "with heart or mouth whatever springs forth from the love within you, which is sure to supply you with all abundance."

So, deep down, you really do know what to say in prayer.