How can I pray

Whoever prays turns to God

Everyone can do this in their own way, with their own words or with the words of well-known prayers, such as Psalm 23 or the Our Father.
Many put their hands together or fold them to collect themselves – some close their eyes.
There are many occasions and reasons for personal prayer.

One can say prayers of intercession for the sick and suffering, or prayers of thanks for all that is beautiful in the world.
“Ask, and it will be given to you,” says Jesus Pray when the going gets serious – so do the authors of the Bible.

Two thirds of the Psalms are lamentations and supplications. They ask that God hear them, that he forgive them,
and that he let them see good days again. “Ask, and it will be given to you,” says Jesus in the Gospel of Luke.

Prayer is neither an art nor an obligation Prayer is not an art, an obligation or an achievement.
Nobody has to meet a condition before God hears him. Prayer is not a demonstration either.

A sentence from Jesus is handed down in Matthew 6 immediately before he recommends the Our Father to his disciples:

“When you pray, go into your little room and close the door and pray to your Father, who is in secret; and your father, who looks into the hidden, will reward you. ”
“Just be there before God” Behind the prayer is the longing to experience God.
Prayer doesn’t always have to consist of words. “It’s more about hearing,” says the theologian Jörg Zink, who died in 2016.

In 1970 he wrote the classic “How we can pray”, which is still being published today. Prayer, says Zink, “can mean simply being there before God or doing a job before God.”
That helps everyone who finds it difficult to say their own words. Or they pray the Lord’s Prayer alone or together.

The prayer that Jesus gave us encompasses everything. So why pray Because it puts us in a new context.
Because it helps us to trust. And because it changes not only us, but the world. “Folding hands in prayer”,
said the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, “is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.”