One of my favourite writers about spiritual matters is Anne Lamott.  She has written several books about being Christian in our world today—practical, poetic, and deeply grounded ways to live in faith.  She has written a new book called Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers.  She says that these three simple prayers—asking for help with the things that confront us daily, expressing our gratitude for God’s love and care, and feeling a sense of awe at the wonders around us—are what will give us strength, hope and vision for our lives.

Lamott believes, and lives, the fact that we do not need to use many words when we communicate with God.  We humans are prone to believe that the more words we use, the better God will understand us—and the more likely to give us what we want to happen.  But over and over in scripture, and in life, we are reminded that God knows us better than we know ourselves.  We don’t need words.  Lamott says that prayer is really “communication from the heart to that which surpasses understanding....in some unique way, we believe we’re invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence.”  True prayer is our heart reaching to our God and words are not needed.

The prayer of “Help!” means that we know two things—that we can’t change the world, or our world, and that we are surrendering ourselves to the Great Lover, the Great Carer, the Great Compassionate One.  Often we want to tell God how to fix things, ask for “specific outcomes,” says Lamott.  But this prayer is really asking God to help us get through whatever we are facing.  “Most good, honest prayers,” says Lamott, “remind me that I am not in charge, that I cannot fix anything, and that I open myself to being helped.”  And God knows what we need, as opposed to our knowing what we want.  Often these are two different things.  Crying “Help!” from our deepest need, means that we release control and offer the future, and ourselves, to God.

But there is a practical side to all this, too.  Offering our problems to God frees us to be of service to our world.  We don’t have to spend our time and energy obsessing about how bad things are; we can move out from ourselves and help others in whatever way is available to us.  Acting will give us purpose—a central way to combat discouragement and powerlessness and lead us to the second prayer, “Thanks.”

“Thanks!” says Lamott, should become a second-nature way of responding to the good things that happen—to us, to our family and friends and neighbours, to our world.  Some days it feels like there’s nothing to give thanks for, but there always is.  “Thanks” can come from the recognition that you have been blessed.  Or it can be “the magical, mystical magnetic force of quiet and exuberant relief when you know that something has smiled on you big-time.”  Or it can be “the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina...and the strength to hang on.”

“Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behaviour.  It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides....You breathe in gratitude and you breathe it out, too....Gratitude is peace.”

The third essential prayer, “Wow!” is vitally important, too.  It is the experience of awe we feel when we see the wonder of the world around us in its countless ways of being an expression of God.  Lamott quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”  And, in awe, all we can say, the best we can say, is “Wow!”  It is often “offered with a gasp, a sharp intake of breath, when we can’t think of another way to capture the sight of shocking beauty, of a sudden unbidden insight, or an unexpected flash of grace.  It means we are not dulled to wonder....Wonder takes our breath away, and makes room for new breath.  That’s why they call it breathtaking.”

Lamott ends her book by talking a bit about why prayer is important, why it is essential to say Help! Thanks! and Wow! each day.  She quotes C.S. Lewis: “I pray because I can’t help myself....It doesn’t change God.  It changes me.”   Amen.