Not for nothing are these five prayers considered classics. They’ve been sung, prayed, memorized, memorialized, anthologized, read, pondered over and treasured for centuries. 

There’s a long wooden table that’s been a home for my prayers for over 25 years now. It’s in our conference room at Guideposts and on Monday mornings a group of us in the New York office gather around it and read prayer requests sent  in from the web and by mail. 

Worried about what happens to your kids’ faith when away at college? My youngest is back in school and I’m not fretting about his spiritual growth even if he is on an “anything goes” sort of campus that forgot its church affiliation years ago.

First of all, there’s always exam time. Face the experience of a really grueling final in something like orgo chemistry—for me it was economics—and you’ll discover prayer. Real fast. 

Prayer is a habit. It’s a little like running, like going to bed at a reasonable hour, like eating decently, like remembering to write a thank you note, like saying something kind when that wasn’t really your first thought.

It’s funny, when we talk about habit-forming stuff, we usually mention the bad things—bad habits like cigarette-smoking, driving too fast, chewing with your mouth open, interrupting people, swearing. But the easiest way for me to get rid of one of those is to inculcate a good habit. Like prayer.

I was at a dinner sitting across from a woman whose husband had died 11 months earlier. We talked about grief and I made the comment that I thought she was doing remarkably well. Then she made this gesture with her hands, like a wave. “It’s like that. Up and down.”

Chalk this one up as a caregiver’s answered prayer.

I just spent some time with parents and it was revealing in many ways. My dad, as I’ve mentioned, suffers from a heavy burden of ailments that leave him in tremendous pain—arthritis, spinal stenosis, neuropathy and all the indignities of a body that’s giving up on him. We talk on the phone regularly but it’s hard from long distance to know how he’s doing. Mom’s the primary caregiver and I worry as much about her as I do about him.

Sometimes I need to say a prayer and I have hardly the time to say it. Here’s some inspiration for times like that. Maybe I should call these “on-the-go” prayers.

Print ‘em out. Cut ‘em out. Put ‘em in your pocket. Pray them on the fly. You don’t need to even say the exact words. Just use them to connect.

Oh Lord, never suffer us to think that we can stand by ourselves, and not need thee.
—John Donne (1572-1631)

Carol and I were back at church this Sunday after the vacation, back sitting together, back seeing friends, back singing together—I always like it when she reaches for the descant—back praying together. 

I just had this op-ed piece about recovering from open-heart surgery in the New York Times and one of the things that happened almost immediately was a flurry of emails from people who’d had the same operation or would soon have similar operations, most of them complete strangers, and they wanted some reassurance or advice.

Do you hold hands in your family during grace?

I’ve just spent a week at the beach with my extended family—nieces, nephews, siblings, sibling-in-laws, kids, amazing caregiver Mom and indomitable Dad—and every night at dinner we’ve said grace. Somebody said grace. My dad’s graces are famous for their rambling informative everything-but-the-kitchen-sink quality. Friends used to call them “the six o’clock news.” But my wonderful brothers-in-law can hold their own.