Words of the Mouth and Meditations of the Heart

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, Oh Lord my strength and my redeemer. Prayer is one of those funny things that we talk about doing all of the time, but I suspect that in reality, we don’t have a clear idea of what prayer actually is. Or, perhaps, we know how we pray, but we don’t really know how others pray. There are popular images of children, in their innocence, kneeling with their head down, hands together below their chin in an iconic posture of prayer. Or, there is the image of weathered hands in a praying position, drawn by Albrecht Duerer, accompanied by the apocryphal, emotion-laden legend that the hands were of his brother, who worked in the mines to finance Albrecht’s art training. Or, there is the woman I once encountered at a hospital chapel, who was kneeling on the floor with her arms propped up on the seat of a chair, praying out loud for the medical staff who were taking care of a relative. Her tone of voice was one