In July of 1944, our Sister Elizabeth (then Lieutenant Elizabeth Hillmann) was on a ship crossing the English Channel. She was headed for Normandy, where in June, the Allied Forces had begun the liberation of France. Although hammocks had been provided below, these were full of bedbugs, with the result that many of the soldiers were sleeping — or trying to sleep — on the deck.
Out of the dark came the sound of airplanes. As they approached, they flew so low and so close that the soldiers on the deck could see the swastikas on the rudder. The ship was being strafed.
Sister Elizabeth remembers the experience as one of stark terror. Other than that, she is not clear on the details. After the planes had flown off into the night and calm was restored, her friend Clare turned to her and asked, “What was that you praying?”
“I don’t know,” Sister Elizabeth replied. “What was I praying?”
“You were praying grace before meals,” came the answer.
While the words, “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts which we are about to receive…” may not seem quite fitted to the situation of being shot at, still Sister Elizabeth’s story illustrates two points related to prayer:
1. The benefit of memorized prayers
2. The relative unimportance of the words
The benefit of memorized prayers
A better term, perhaps, is learning “by heart,” so that the prayers are not just rote, but are continually present to us whether or not we are consciously aware of them, and available when we need to pray and may not have words of our own. Jesus learned prayers by heart. On the cross he called upon two of them: psalms he had memorized, probably at his mother’s knee:
Psalm 22, which begins, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Psalm 31:5, “Into your hand I commit my spirit.”
The relative unimportance of the words themselves
I have spent a good part of my life studying and working with language, so I am not one to denigrate the value of beautifully crafted words. After all, in prayer as in the rest of life, we want to give God our best.
Nevertheless, I can’t imagine that God was displeased with Sister Elizabeth’s prayer simply because the words were unsuited to the circumstances. I believe that the simple act of crying out to God was far more important than the words used.
So we must pray, with words or without words, in season and out of season, in crisis or in times of tranquility. And we learn prayers by heart, so that prayer may be always with us and may break through our fear or seep through our sadness, emerging into God’s blessed light.
Rejoice in your hope,
be patient in tribulation,
be constant in prayer.
(Romans 12:12 RSV)