Babbling Prayers like the Pagans

Mat 6:7 But when you pray, do not repeat babble like the heathens [do]: for they think that they shall be heard for the volume of their words.

There is a wealth of ideas here that gets over looked, both in the ancient Greek and in translation.

Starting with the Greek, I love the word battologeo that gets translated as "repeat babble" and comes from the word battos, which describes a stammer, meaning literally the word of a stammer. I also love the word polulogia, translated as "volume of words" but which sounds like a polution of words. (Similar to logodiarroia which means a flux of words but makes me think of word diarrhea.) These are great words!

Conceptually, however, what Christ is saying about prayer is that prayer isn't the repeating of some verbal formula. This statement is interesting because the Lord's Prayer soon follows, perhaps the most repeated prayed in history. As an adult, as I began to pray again, I started by repeating the Lord's prayer in the way that Christ advises against: the simple repeating of words.

As we master prayer, we discover that every real prayer is unique. There are millions of ways to say the Lord's Prayer when you are thinking about the meaning of the prayer and what you are trying to communicate to God at a specific moment in time. The meaning of the prayer changes from year to year, especially as you study Christ's words. For example, if you know that Christ also describes the Father as "in hiding" as well as "in heaven," you naturally think about the hidden nature of heaven as you pray the word. This leads to thoughts about the difference between heaven and earth and the nature of freedom.

However, avoiding simply repeating the words gets harder the longer the prayer formula. For example, I sometimes want to pray for an hour or so and use the rosary to try and keep me focused. The challenge of such forms is to move forward with each prayer repetition and very few prayers have the complexity of the Lord's Prayer to sustain progress over a period of time.

In my heart, I know that true prayer uses none of these formula's. It is simply talking to God in our hearts. We carry on a constant dialogue in our thoughts. Our goal should be simply to dedicated as much of that to God as possible. In other words, our thoughts should be a constant prayer. If we are thinking about it, we should be praying about it and the two are not mutually exclusinve.