Prayer and Praying

'Hands together! Eyes closed!' Most of us above a certain age probably met that sort of prayer at school.

We've all seen the pictures of good little children kneeling by their beds saying, ‘God bless Mummy, God bless Daddy ...'  We might have been to church and heard God presented with a list of suffering people or troubled places in the news, interspersed with the words, ‘Lord in your mercy, Hear our prayer'.  And there will not be many of us who have not at one time or another simply cried out in despair to a God who doesn't seem to hear or to care.  But what is it all about?   

There are two different ways of praying.  There is public prayer and there is private prayer.  Public prayer is what happens in a traditional church service: one person leads and the congregation chips in with formal responses now and again, or everyone says the same prayer at the same time.  Private prayer is what you do alone.  We'll look briefly at each in turn.