Prayer forms are a good thing to cultivate in the spiritual life.  They give structure to our prayer life.  A prayer form tells us how to sit when we pray.  It tells us what to say and how to say it—or better yet, perhaps, what not to say and how not to sit.

Prayer forms are designed to calm us down when we’re too agitated to concentrate.  They center us in the midst of the natural distractions and noise of life.  In many cases, they even provide the content that a soul that is dry or weary or perturbed simply cannot always provide for itself.  They fill the emptiness that sets in when prayer becomes just one more effort I have too little energy to make.

No doubt about it:  prayer forms are part of the superstructure of a serious prayer life.  But they are not everything. Prayer is a great deal more than simply the way we pray or even the prayers we pray.

The everything of a deep and demanding prayer life is awareness and acceptance of the self.  No rosary, no icon, no prayer corner can supply for the raw material of prayer, which is the self-knowledge that cements the relationship between the self and God.

To grow spiritually I cannot hide—even from myself.  I must pray for self-knowledge, for the searing honesty that, with the grace of God, can bring me to the heart of God.

Self-knowledge saves us from ourselves.

   --Breath of the Soul by Joan Chittister