‘Make Me an Instrument’ : How-to-pray books to satisfy every soul’s longing

How do you pray?

If you’ve never tried it, you might wonder about the details: What to do with your hands? Maybe you’re not sure whether to call God him or her? And what if he--or she--is more like a lover than a parent for you? Then what do you say?

It could help to find out what other people do. Maybe Billy Graham, the Baptist preacher, has some tips. Maybe Marianne Williamson, his new age counterpart, would be willing to tell what she asks for in prayer.

The answers to these and other unconventional questions are contained in an assortment of prayer books newly published this season. All of them help move the notion of prayer into the modern age.

If prayer seems like a foreign language, the place to start might be “How I Pray.” Here, people from Father Andrew Greeley, a Catholic priest and best-selling novelist, to Norman Lear, who claims no religious affiliation, write about how they pray.

Greeley doesn’t use any traditional prayers; he makes up his own and enters them in a computer journal. And he writes poetry to God as a woman. “It’s hard for a man to feel intimate with a manly God,” he finds.

Lear’s associations with prayer are equally modern. He prays as he walks the morning treadmill. Of the Prayer to St. Francis of Assisi, which begins “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,” he writes: “It isn’t asking for anything but to be a better person.”

For Graham, prayer is an impromptu conversation. “I find myself praying while I’m talking to people,” he writes. I say, “Lord, help me to say the thing that will encourage people to believe.”

Carole Mumin of Washington, D.C., a Muslim who founded People in Service to Others, knows that her prayers are authentic when she can feel an electric charge. “There’s a contact between you and your Creator,” she finds. And there is High Star, a Lakota Sioux medicine man in Taos, N.M., who writes: “To live each day is a prayer in the sense that it’s an expression of God.”

Many people, of course, need no more printed help than a dogeared copy of the Bible to open in a private moment. Editions of the Bible are myriad, and there’s a style to suit every taste.

Turner Publishing’s “The Holy Bible” is like a Las Vegas hotel. It could be Caesar’s Palace or the Luxor Sphinx, newly constructed but meant to recall the ancient and lasting. The book is built of the best classical ingredients, starting with the art, hugely reproduced in this 10-by-14-inch creation from the Vatican Library collection. The translation is the scholarly New Revised Standard Version.

Pages in the front of the book allow for a family genealogy to be penned on folio sheets that resemble Renaissance illuminated manuscripts, as if a royal family history were to be preserved. Gold leaf shimmers throughout. The archival-quality paper and specially treated gold ink ensure longevity. The unspoken hope is that the family that prays together will last as many generations.

“The Five Books of Moses” is the first of what will be a four-volume Bible translation by Everett Fox, professor of Judaica at Clark University, Worcester, Mass. Although most Bible translations are the work of a team, this is one man’s spiritual exercise, 27 years in the making. Fox starts from the position that the Bible speaks in a language quite different from ours. It was meant to be read aloud, which people tend to forget, and it is filled with ancient forms of prayer. Fox intends his translation to sound prayerful.

In his version, meant to restore the most ancient language and rhythm, even familiar personal names and places will seem foreign, unless you’re on good terms with Hebrew. There is Yhwh (the Lord), Avraham (Abraham), Moshe (Moses). And the Reed Sea, not the Red Sea, parts for the Israelites to escape Pharaoh’s army.

Many texts we recognize as prayers are passages from the Bible, lifted out and placed in Jewish and Christian liturgies. But more recent poetry can be prayer, too. Sometimes, the writer seems to be searching:

My period had come for Prayer--

No other Art--would do--

My tactics missed a rudiment--

Creator--was it you?

--Untitled, Emily Dickinson

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At other times, the writer is absolutely certain:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil . . . .

“God’s Grandeur,” Gerard Manley Hopkins

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Both forms of prayer have a place in “Burning Bright: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry.” The book glows with the good taste of Hampl, a well-known poet herself. Her global anthology collects contributors who profess themselves religious, including Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, and others who might be called pan-religious, including Allen Ginsberg. Many are established poets known for spiritual reflection: Auden, Yeats, Rilke. Some are undeclared spiritual writers, and their presence here makes us aware of this side of them for the first time, as in the case of Louise Erdrich or Louise Gluck. Certain of Hampl’s treasures are rare in Western anthologies: Marina Tsvetaeva, a Russian contemporary of Boris Pasternak, and Sanai, a Sufi from 12th-century Iran. Brief biographical sketches at the back of the book are a very helpful addition.

The work of the great Sufi mystic, Jalal al-Din Rumi, is collected in a separate book, “The Essential Rumi.” This brilliant scholar and devout Muslim reached for the divine through love poetry:

You dance inside my chest

Where no one sees you,

but sometimes I do,

and that sight becomes this art.

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Three centuries later, the Carmelite mystic John of the Cross left behind even more passionate poetry that contemplates divinity. Some has been collected in “The Poems of St. John of the Cross.” St. John was kidnapped and imprisoned by his brothers for his efforts to reform the order. In prison he composed some of his poems and committed them to memory. He wrote them down the day he escaped (by a fabric rope) and reached safety in a Reformed Carmelite convent.

His reflections on the birth of Christ begin with the period of waiting called Advent in the church year. He compares the sense of longing to that of a bride yearning for her groom:

Praying and praying again,

sighing and pale with pain,

weeping and weeping again,

night and day to exclaim

that he make up his mind and come,

join with her right away.

You could hear: O lucky love,

if I live to see the day!

--”Of Hunger for the Coming”

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This edition, in the original Spanish and English, has a lovely cover illustration, a large, elegant typeface, a brief biography and bibliographic notes for further reading, all of which elevate this paperback to the level of a fine gift.

Laurence Wieder’s sensitive editing of “The Poets’ Book of Psalms” brings together the work of familiar and obscure poets from the 16th century to the present. Like artists who copy ancient masterpieces (picture Picasso’s paintings of early Roman statues), these writers offer subjective interpretations of the Psalms. For comparative reading, the King James version of the Psalms follows the poets’ works. If you know the traditional texts, some newer interpretations may sound less than musical at first. But the poets present a challenge to be open to unfamiliar harmonies.

Less traditional prayer books are widely available. “Native Wisdom for White Minds” offers daily meditations based on the wisdom of Maori elders of New Zealand, Hawaiian prophetesses, a Uvavnuk Eskimo shaman and secular writers from Samoa, New Guinea and Peru. Schaef’s insights are not always profound, and the book’s overall effect is one of easy-listening spirituality, but there is a place for that. God meets us where we are.

Marian Wright Edelman blends gospel passages with her own personal prayers in “Guide My Feet.” The book’s subtitle, “Prayers and Meditations on Loving and Working for Children,” perfectly describes the contents. Edelman is founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, and her reverence for the young brings a depth to this book that goes well beyond the words: “God, help us to remember that there are no illegitimate children in your sight.”

In a similar way, Marianne Williamson pulls prayers out of her own agonized soul and her fertile imagination for a collection called “Illuminata: A Return to Prayer.” These are not easy, off-the-top, pseudo-meditations. The everyday language, the directness of the plea and the echoes of Williamson’s work assisting people with AIDS make her prayers vibrate with the traumas of this world, on this day, in this particular year:

Dear God,

The pain of this life is more than I can bear.

I feel as though death would be better.

My thoughts are dark, my sorrow’s huge.

I feel as though I shall not endure, and there is no one and nothing to turn to now.

My hurt is so big,

I cannot handle this.

If You can, dear God, please do.

If You can, please do.

Amen.

Her plea for a loving relationship has the same intimate urgency:

Erase my past failures.

Make me new.

I need a miracle.

Please.

Amen.

Psalms for the millennium.

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THE POEMS OF ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS. Translated from the Spanish by John Federick Nims (University of Chicago Press: $11.95, paperback; 151 pp.)

THE POETS’ BOOK OF PSALMS. Compiled, edited and introduced by Laurance Wieder (HarperSanFrancisco: $25; 311 pp).

NATIVE WISDOM FOR WHITE MINDS: Daily Reflections Inspired by the Native Peoples of the World, by Anne Wilson Schaef (One World/Ballantine: $10, paperback: 422 pp.)

ILLUMINATA: A Return to Prayer by Marianne Williamson (Riverhead Books: $12; 300 pp.)

HOW I PRAY. Edited by Jim Castelli (Ballantine Books: $9; 208 pp.)

THE HOLY BIBLE (Turner Publishing: $395; after Jan. 1, $425; 1,312 gilded pp.)

THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES: The Schocken Bible, Volume 1 (Schocken Books: $50; 1,024)

BURNING BRIGHT: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry. Edited by Patricia Hampl (Ballantine Books: $20, 178 pp.)

THE ESSENTIAL RUMI. Translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne (HarperCollins: $18; 302 pp.)

GUIDE MY FEET: by Maria Wright Edelman (Beacon Press: $17.95; 210 pp.)