A Simple Way to Pray

A Simple Way to Pray is a short pamphlet Martin Luther wrote in 1535 for his barber, Peter Beskendorf, who had asked him how an ordinary layman should go about praying. Luther was fifty-one, long past the dramatic years of Worms and Wartburg, and now spending much of his energy on the practical formation of the evangelical churches in Saxony. The piece carried the subtitle "for a good friend," and it reads that way: not a treatise but a letter of counsel in which the reformer simply tells the barber what he himself does. Printed almost immediately, it circulated widely, and its publication was shadowed a few months later when Beskendorf killed his son-in-law during a drunken quarrel; Luther's intervention helped secure banishment rather than execution.

Luther begins with candor about his own dryness. When he feels cold and disinclined to pray, which he admits is often, he takes his psalter, retreats to his room or to the church, and recites the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and a few sayings of Christ or Paul quietly to himself, letting the words warm his heart before he attempts anything of his own. He warns against the deceit of postponing prayer until other business is finished, since the flesh will always find one more task. Prayer, he says, should come first in the morning and last at night. The famous barber's analogy makes the point about attention: a barber who lets his mind wander while holding a razor will cut a customer's nose or throat, and the one who prays must likewise keep his whole mind on the matter at hand. From there Luther walks through the Lord's Prayer petition by petition, showing how each line can be expanded into free prayer in one's own words, and then does the same with the Ten Commandments, weaving each one into what he calls a garland of four strands: instruction, thanksgiving, confession, and petition. He adds a briefer treatment of the three articles of the Creed. Throughout he insists the method is a scaffold and not a law. If the Holy Spirit begins to preach in the heart during one petition, the rest should be abandoned and the sermon heard in silence. A good prayer, he says, need not be long, but it must be fervent.

The pamphlet has endured because it solves a problem that catechisms create. Luther had already taught the faithful what to believe; here he shows how the same memorized texts become living speech to God, so that doctrine and devotion run on one track. It is also one of the few places where a major theologian describes his own prayer life without idealizing it, including the boredom and the wandering mind. Later Lutheran piety, and much Protestant teaching on prayer, descends from these few pages.

Who should read this: anyone who finds extemporaneous prayer intimidating or formulaic prayer deadening and wants a bridge between the two, and anyone who has memorized the Lord's Prayer or the commandments and never known what to do with them. It is not for readers seeking contemplative method in the monastic or mystical sense; Luther's way is verbal, catechetical, and brisk, and he has no patience with technique for its own sake.