Prayer as Punishment

On Monday morning this week as we discussed discipleship in our men's group we spent a few minutes on the concept of confession to each other for support and prayers as well as confession to God. I asked those in the group who had grown up in the Catholic church how they felt about the rite of confession. There were different takes on it but one of the men mentioned how the habit of the priests assigning a certain number of Our Fathers and Hail Marys to say after confession had created in him the impression that saying prayers was a form of punishment for having sinned and gone to confession. I don't know that everyone reacts that way, but I suspect a good many do. I thought it was a good insight on how we can create impressions of punishment or legalism very easily in the way we practice the faith. In a little book being passed around in our couples small group at church, A Man's Helper by Wilfred Grenfell, MD (published in 1910; he was superintendent of the Labrador Medical Mission) he has a chapter on prayer and mentions some other types of 'prayer obstacles' that includes long winded prayers, fancy words, and some others . Here are some of my personal prayer obstacles, which overlap his to some degree:

• Prayer as information to God: droning on at length to tell God what He already knows, which is generally more to tell others listening what you think they need to know. For the most part they don't need to know.
• Prayer as sermon: praying in public as a disguised form of preaching is still preaching just the same, not prayer.
• Written prayers read without feeling or fervor: written prayers may be just fine, especially when sung. That is what the Psalms are, after all, and song is a fine way to express praise, worship and thanksgiving. But a monotonous reading or mindless repetition of a written prayer is much like 'prayer as punishment'.
• Prayer as punishment: not only when assigned after confession, but what are we conveying when we 'make' kids 'say their prayers' at night? I suspect that it varies with different children, but sometimes it is punishment.
• Prayer as King James vocabulary exercise: for some this is just habit, to others it is a performance.
• Prayer as laziness: praying for what you need to get up and do. Some things can only be done by prayer, some can only be done by work. Some require both.May we have the wisdom to know the difference!

The worst prayer, of course, is no prayer at all. That is the one that is most common of all.