Pray This Way To Connect With God, Hal Green. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2023.

Summary: A book on learning to pray, focusing on God’s initiative toward us to teach us to pray and prayer as focused on deepening our relationship with God.

“Lord, teach us to pray.” That was the longing expressed by the disciples of Jesus. Hal Green encourages us that the “good news is that God will teach you how to pray” and that the journey begins with “speaking whatever is in your heart,” that we learn to pray by praying, and that we pray as we can and not as we can’t. In a collection of readings, generally a page and a paragraph long. Green leads us into praying.

The readings are divided into eight sections

1. About Prayer: a number of reflections on the nature of prayer: why, what to pray, how to tell if a word is from God, on distractions, and more.
2. Breath Prayers: Explained and examples around peace, love, faith, hope, joy, gratitude, forgiveness, etc.
3. Praying the Scriptures: A single chapter on how to pray scripture.
4. Hebrew Scriptures: focusing on the Psalms and Prophets.
5. The New Testament: Numerous passages from Matthew through Revelation
6. Praying With the Saints. Prayers of the saints from Augustine to Henri Nouwen.
7. Meditative Prayer: Resting and knowing God’s touch, breath, and gaze.
8. Contemplative Prayer: The God Hug, Abiding Prayer, The Romance of God and more.

Green advises beginning with the prayers themselves and then going back and reading the “About Prayer.” While each reading is short, to pray the prayer meditatively may take anywhere from five to twenty minutes. This is a book to be taken slowly, taking a day or several days on the prayer in a reading.

Green leads us into prayer that isn’t about getting things from God but about communion with the Triune God of love. He speaks of desire that becomes romance, the love and being loved of lovers, of oneness with God. One senses that for those who experience this, human sexuality is a good but pale shadow of this love. This may be the journey of years. But along the way we learn to pray with scripture, to breathe in God and breathe out what is in our hearts, and to rest contemplatively with God.

There is so much wisdom here, whether it is dealing with the distraction that plagues all our prayers (that’s one of the reasons he encourages praying for five or ten minutes and not fighting oneself) or discerning if we have really heard God’s words (they are generally brief, understated, and concise, yet penetrate to the heart).

I’ve learned the most in prayer by praying along with someone further on the prayer journey, yet such people are rare. Hal Green’s book, the culmination of a fifty year journey and the leading of many prayer retreats offers us a companion who says “pray this way” and helps us to understand as best we humans can, the ways God teaches us and meets us as the lover of our souls.

____________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher through Speakeasy for review.