Every morning I make myself a cup of coffee, go into my tiny home office and shut the door, and have my morning quiet time of Bible reading and prayer. Later, I use the same space to lead live streamed Morning Prayer and Night Prayer on Facebook.
Some days, as an alternative, I like to go for an early morning prayer walk. I find I quite enjoy praying out of doors. I didn’t always connect well with God in nature, but I do now.
Back in 1990 I made a mission trip to the isolated Inuit community of Umingmaktok, where I stayed for a week in a one room house shared with five other people. Very little space for privacy. Funnily enough, though, I found the people instinctively understood the need for private space. If I sat down in the corner to read my Bible and pray silently, people respected that and left me alone til I was done.
C.S. Lewis once remarked that he enjoyed saying his prayers in railway carriages (in those days British railway carriages were divided into small compartments with seating for perhaps six to eight people). He said they provided exactly the right balance of privacy and distraction. He also talked about kneeling down beside his bed to pray (which was a common practice in years gone by, morning and/or evening—the Queen is even seen doing it in the TV series ‘The Crown’). I used to do this when I was a student.
I know people who write their prayers as letters to God, using a journal. I’ve done this myself from time to time. One advantage I find is that it’s an easily transportable form of prayer; for instance, it’s quite enjoyable to do it in a coffee shop, which again provides Lewis’ ‘right balance of privacy and distraction’.
I know people who work in offices who purposely go to work a little early so they can spend the first few minutes of the day at their desk in prayer.
My wife and I frequently pray together while we sit up in bed. We usually have cups of tea at hand; we read a passage of scripture and a devotional commentary, then we each pray extemporaneously, closing our prayer time with the Lord’s Prayer.
There’s a venerable Christian tradition of family prayer around the meal table. The 1959 Canadian Book of Common Prayer actually provides two short forms of prayer for use in families, one in the morning and one in the evening. They are designed to follow the reading of a passage of scripture, and to be led (somewhat quaintly) by ‘the head of the house’.
What do all these ways of praying have in common? Answer: they don’t require the use of a church building.
Currently, some Anglicans in various parts of the world seem to be be putting a lot of emphasis on the importance of having church buildings open in a time of continuing coronavirus pandemic, so that people can go into them during the day for private prayer.
I would like to submit that if we have schooled our people to see access to church buildings as essential to private prayer, we should be sued for spiritual malpractice. Most New Testament Christians had no such access, and their prayer lives appear to have been very healthy.
Rather, we should see it as of first importance to teach people to take prayer into the normal locations of their daily lives. That is where God is to be found. Time will hallow those locations just as it has hallowed stone sanctuaries. This is entirely a function of the way habits wear themselves into our brains. And once formed, those habits will serve us well in the cultivation of a sense of the presence of God in the midst of ordinary life.
One final thought. What did Jesus teach his disciples about avoiding ostentation in prayer? “But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” (Matthew 6.6 NRSV).
‘Into your room.’ Of course, Jesus was well aware that many poor people in Galilee didn’t have their own ‘rooms’; his point was not about location but about attitude—praying out of love for God, not out of a desire to be admired for one’s spirituality. Nevertheless, I find it interesting that he assumed that the natural and common location of private prayer would be the home.
May it be so for us too.