I did pray, but it was primarily something I did at home. There was a simple grace before meals, an offering of thanks for food and fellowship. At night, as a small child, I'd pray with Mom before bed, after which we'd tell each other "Sillies," meaning the silliest thing we could think of. That usually got me giggling, which may or may not have been the most efficacious thing to get me to sleep.
But in church? Not that I can recall. I mean, of course there were prayers in worship, which my preteen and adolescent brain mostly tuned out. In Sunday school, we learned Bible stories, talked about helping people, and did actually service work. All of that was lovely. There was much progressive activism, and some marvelous opportunities to serve. The life of the spirit wasn't really front and center. My Presbyterian denomination being of a strongly intellectual and liberal bent, the point and the purpose of the practice of prayer wasn't really presented.
In my late teens, I can't really recall praying at all, and when my home church split in one of those tempest-in-a-teapot ego-pissing-contest fractures that so often happen in congregational life, that was that. Prayer didn't seem to change the arc of anything in the world, and church? It was just precisely the same human mess you found everywhere else. Church folks who thought otherwise were, or so my late adolescent thinking went, either earnestly naive or hypocritical. At best, church was unnecessary, so I went with the naturally solitary tendencies of my introversion, and just stopped going.
But the yearning for meaning didn't fade.
In college, I found myself praying infrequently and clumsily, usually in the form of calling out to the heavens in the wee hours of the morning when God's presence seemed close.
That deepened and became more pressing, and as I returned to church seeking meaning, I was drawn powerfully to service ministries. But I also found I hungered for prayer. Again, I didn't have deeply ingrained personal rituals of invocation and supplication. It just wasn't taught, because what mattered was justice and equity and service. The spiritual thing was your own journey, utterly idiosyncratic, do-whatever-floats-yer-ark-if-ya-feel-like-it kinda way. Or you can just not, because, again, it's all about your unique journey.
This is, I am now convinced, one of the primary reasons the progressive church has withered. A disciple of Jesus who does not pray is like a Buddhist who scoffs at meditation, a Muslim who thinks alms-giving is for suckers, or a Wiccan who turns up their noses at incantation. You've neglected the roots, and if the root dies, so goes the plant.
Prayer shapes us, both individually and collectively. It deepens our sense of God's presence, enriches our connectedness as a Christ-centered spiritual community, and refines and reinforces our integrity as persons. When we neglect it, over-intellectualize it, use critique to distance ourselves ontologically from it, or generally fail to make it a vital part of our practice of the Way, we fragment and fail.
Even just the rote practice can shift the way we conceive of the world, as described years ago by writer/journalist AJ Jacobs in his entertaining THE YEAR OF LIVING BIBLICALLY.
Jacobs noted, as urbane-liberal-he committed to adhering to biblical injunctions for twelve months, that the regular practices of the faith had an unanticipated effect. The more he prayed and kept the rules of Torah...even as a stunt intended only to provide grist for a manuscript...the more he felt that something was at work in the world. He'd notice odd resonances, and had a stronger sense of purpose He'd temporarily tuned his mind to the frequency of faith, and it changed him...temporarily.
That change is the goal of prayer.
It's not about control, or about getting what we want.
It's about opening up our perception of the world. It's about priming us to see the workings of God's grace.
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