Introduction:
The Earthy Spirituality of Family Life

         Is there anything more pure, more full of wonder and hope for the future, than the prayer of a child? We find it difficult to imagine what that might be. For a child’s heart, when it forms a prayer of thanks or praise or petition, has none of the selfconsciousness and ambivalence of adulthood; it is a laser beam of light and love—focused, clear, and burning with urgency.
         Prayer is natural to human beings, whether they are children or grown-ups. It takes place all the time, and not just in churches. As Rabbi H. H. Donin has pointed out, we pray even when we don’t realize we’re praying. “Thank God!” we sigh in relief, on hearing that someone we love is recovering from a serious illness and out of danger. Some prayers don’t even invoke God’s name: a gorgeous sunset might evoke a muttered response (“How glorious!”) that is really an act of praise; a guilty conscience might bring us back to someone we’ve hurt (“Forgive me”), where our desire for reconciliation reaches upward as well as outward.
         Each of these statements ultimately implies a hearer, which is why so many thinkers have defined prayer as a form of conversation, however one-sided it might seem at first sight. And a conversation is a form of communication between persons. The Christian tradition is grounded in the belief that our God is a personal God. There is nothing odd, then, when the great Metaphysical poet John Donne calls the blessed Trinity “three-personned” God. Children take the personal dimension of prayer for granted. But prayer, like many other human capacities, will atrophy if it is not used and developed. A child possesses an innate ability to pray, just as he or she has a built-in capacity to learn language. No one would dream of being silent all the time around a child; we not only talk in the presence of our children, but we devote a great deal of time to teaching them words and their proper meanings, pronunciations, and grammatical relationships. As parents, we help our children learn to name and thus understand the world around them.
Prayer is a particular form of language (though it often aspires to go beyond words) that children can pick up with the same ease and facility that they do any kind of speech. But the tragic reality is that those of us who live in the prosperous Western nations have largely failed, in recent generations, to teach our children the language of prayer. The causes of this neglect are numerous—from a well-meaning but wrong-headed desire to allow children to shape their own young lives without parental intervention to sheer laziness. Exploring those causes is not within the scope of this book, but this much seems self-evident: to neglect children’s spiritual lives is to impoverish them in some indefinable but real way your child’s spiritual and moral development. 

Your Child’s Spiritual and Moral Development
         Christians have always known that children need to be trained in virtue. We believe that God’s infinite goodness is the basis for morality. But the danger—even for the most fervent believer— is that morality comes to mean little more than a set of rules rather than a loving response to the God who first loves us.
         In short, celebrating the virtues has rightly become an important element of character education, but too often discussion of the virtues remains abstract, as if discussions at home or Sunday school about courage will make children courageous. We do need to talk more about morality as a set of rules—children must learn the process of internalizing rules, after all—but the limitation of talk is that it remains a thing of the head and not the heart.
The secret to your child’s moral and spiritual development is this: your child should not simply admire goodness but should actually fall in love with goodness. The Greek philosopher Plato believed that in order to live a full human existence, we must develop a feeling of eros for the Good. Today we associate the word eros with “erotic,” or merely sexual, love, but for the Greeks, eros conveyed a passion that involved the whole of a person’s character. In the Bible, God is frequently described as a lover who woos us.
         Traditionally, it was in reading—and listening to—stories, including the great epic tales of heroes, that children developed eros for the good, the truth, and the beautiful. Storytelling anchors the virtues in the concrete experience of believable characters. Through the miracle of imagination, a child can enter into a sympathetic relationship with the heroes of great literature, vicariously experiencing both their mistakes and their achievements. In previous books, we have written on the relationship between storytelling and virtue, stressing the need to expose children to books and films that exemplify what we call the “moral imagination.”
         But in addition to storytelling, there is another path to a child’s moral development—prayer. Prayer is a vital means through which children make the connection between virtuous behavior and their own emotional and personal growth.
         For most of us, this is easier said than done. When approaching the question of praying with our children, the first problem we come to is often ... ourselves. Our own prayer life may not be regular or fervent or rewarding. And so we are tempted to ask, “How can I teach my kids to pray if I don’t know how to pray myself?” There’s the rub. It’s at this point where many of us hesitate, perched on the knife edge between good intentions and the challenge of putting them into practice.  We may feel we know the rudiments of prayer, but most of that knowledge relates to praying in church or in the silence of one’s own heart. Praying aloud as a family involves a steeper learning curve than we might care to admit. The notion of praying together as a family can seem at once embarrassing and intimidating, but it is just at this crossroads, this moment of hesitation, that grace lies in wait for us. When parents hesitate to teach children something they don’t know themselves, they have already stepped out onto the right path, though they don’t often recognize it. Most of us sense that prayer is something that we must practice before we can preach it. This desire to avoid hypocrisy is in itself a step in the direction of spiritual authenticity. In the life of the spirit, wanting is often the same as having. The twentieth-century French novelist Georges Bernanos once said, “The wish to pray is a prayer in itself. God can ask no more than that of us.” And fifteen hundred years ago, Saint Augustine observed, “We would not seek You if we had not already found You.”
         And that brings us to the purpose of this book. It is our hope that we can provide encouragement—and a little help with the learning curve—as you embark on the adventure of praying with your children.
         Of course, it is possible to purchase one of the dozens of collections of prayers for children on the market and give it to your children. But that would be a little like giving a two-year-old a dictionary and wishing her luck.
         The central thesis of this book is that parents need to do more than simply give their kids prayers to say. Rather, parents themselves should learn to pray by praying with and for their children. While it is crucial that parents allow children to develop their own spirituality and to pray in their own words, the parent’s participation adds a whole extra dimension.
         If we step outside the circle of prayer, we convey the message to our children that they are merely performing a duty. But when we enter that circle ourselves, we forge deep spiritual and emotional bonds with our children.
         This leads directly to the other conviction at the core of this book: that there is nothing wrong with making family prayer the springboard that helps you develop your own interior life. The first thing that attentive parents discover when they teach their children to pray is that the children quickly become the teachers, reminding us of the innocence and wonder that we have lost and restoring it to us with a grace and simplicity that can sometimes take our breath away.

Sacred Time
         It’s at this point that you might be thinking, But when can a family find the time to pray together? With music lessons, soccer games, and parents rushing off to evening PTA meetings, we’re lucky if we even eat dinner together. Fair enough.
         But prayer is one of those things that we need to make time for, even if it is just before the kids get sent off to bed and we collapse into a comfortable chair. Prayer cannot stop time, but it can allow us to step into a different sort of time. When we cease our normal “worldly” activities to pray, we move from the horizontal to the vertical dimension. Instead of driving forward, we look “up.” The theologians and mystics speak of worship as “sacred time.” When prayer becomes a daily part of life, those moments of devotion seem to be linked together, almost as if prayer is a special place in our lives. That is the paradox of sacred time, that it puts us into a mode of existence that is simultaneously set apart and yet, in a mysterious way, truly our home. Another way of putting the paradox is that when we look up to heaven, we are able to delight more fully in our life on earth. Saying grace before a meal makes that meal taste better. Does that sound odd or irreverent? It shouldn’t. If we pray with real gratitude before a meal, we slow down just a bit and remind ourselves that every meal, however humble and quickly consumed, is a feast. A grace that our kids occasionally blurt out is “Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat!” The very speed of the prayer acknowledges our hunger, and yet even this jokey grace constitutes a tip of the hat to God, the giver of every good thing.
         Just as we can help create pockets of sacred time amid the hurtling pace of daily life, so we can discover the way that prayer turns ordinary things into extraordinary things.
         When thinking about spirituality, the first mistake that most people make is to assume that the sacred exists on some transcendent plane that is remote from daily life. But you don’t have to go to monasteries on mountaintops to draw close to God. In the Gospels, Jesus is always hallowing the most mundane of events, from meals to washing to visiting friends. If we are to encounter the sacred, we must find it in the mundane routines of eating and drinking, waking and sleeping, traveling and resting.
         In a similar fashion, prayer should be understood not so much as a retreat from the ordinary as it is a hallowing, or consecrating, of the ordinary. A sacred space is built out of the same materials as any other building. And the holiest rituals of the world’s faiths all center on the most mundane need of all—our need to eat. To break bread as a family is always an opportunity to consecrate the material goods we need for our bodies to a higher purpose—the love that ought to bind us closer to one another. We think it’s safe to say that if you cannot glimpse the sacred in a simple family meal, you will not be able to find it on mountaintops or in deserts.

Real Families, Real Prayer
         In writing Bless This House, we have tried to produce something that is more than just a manual of prayer. We’ve taken a few tentative steps in the direction of what we can only call the spirituality of family life. In the course of assembling this book, we found—to our amazement—that very little has been written about the relationship between the ordinary, everyday experiences of living together as a family and the inner world of the spirit. Our emphasis, then, is not simply on the “how-to” of prayer but also on the moral and emotional context in which family prayer can take place.
         Prayer is not a subject on which we consider ourselves authorities. Neither of us is ordained, nor do we have degrees in theology. In fact, we joked at one point about whether to title this book (with an eye to our own situation) Prayer for
Dummies or The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Prayer. Our credentials for writing on this subject are simply that we are the parents of four children ranging in age from eight to nineteen and that we have been praying as a family for nearly two decades. In putting this volume together, we’ve relied on our own experiences, a few good books, and a series of conversations with spiritual writers who have plumbed the
depths of prayer.
         In short, we’re not going to pretend that we’re a Superfamily—clean-cut, well-adjusted, full of greeting-card sentiments. Not at all. We snap at each other when we’re tired; we try—and fail—to balance work and family time; we struggle on a daily basis with selfishness, resentment, and anxiety. To put it delicately: we are an expressive family, which sometimes means that all six of us are expressing ourselves in very loud voices. On the other hand, we are also a physically demonstrative bunch—hugging, kissing, biting, wrestling, and so on. For better or worse, no emotion is repressed in the Wolfe household. And yet somehow we manage to hang in there, find the time to calm down, and even to lift our voices in prayer. Slowly but surely, prayer has become an essential part of our cohesiveness as a family. It is all too easy, when addressing the subject of children and prayer, to slip into sentimentality and a pious, otherworldly tone—what the writer Patricia Hampl calls the “eau de cologne language of spirituality.” We’ve tried to avoid that mind-set like the plague it is. On the contrary, we’d like to think of ourselves as “spiritual realists.” As every parent knows quite well, family life is an exercise in barely contained chaos: babies crying, older kids rampaging, parents struggling with exhaustion and a day that is never long enough.
         Family prayer times are commonly beset by fidgeting, bickering kids, ringing phones, and distractions galore. In these circumstances, it doesn’t seem likely that we will find mystical illumination or even emotional uplift. That’s why it is so important to remember that prayer is an art. Like any art form, prayer requires us to overcome the powerful forces of inertia. The life of the spirit requires time and discipline to grow; you can’t just take a few prayers, add water, and expect instant holiness. The self-help industry has generated a lot of revenue by promising some quasi-sacred number of “easy steps” to healing, wisdom, and prosperity. To be honest, we feel that too many Christians have bought into the pop psychology of the self-help movement. The great spiritual masters know that the only effective steps are the small ones that we take every day of our lives—just like a one-year-old learning to walk.
         The good news is that with discipline comes liberation. The obvious analogy here is with the musician who practices. After practicing innumerable scales and arpeggios, musicians can play with such freedom that they seem to be making up the music as they go along. So it is with prayer. Somehow, by placing ourselves on a daily basis in the precincts of grace, the joy of heaven can suddenly irrupt into our lives. In our household, there are times when family prayers take place in the midst of giggles, good-natured wrestling matches, and the occasional naughty joke. Our family would certainly scandalize those who think that piety requires a long face and rigid posture. But there’s no reason why prayer has to turn anyone into a prig. Many of the great saints and holy ones have possessed a mischievous sense of humor. In this regard, Saint Francis springs to mind; he often indulged in playful irony. To take just one example, he loved to call his body, with all its embarrassments and complaints, “Brother Ass.”
         We’ve tried to write about prayer in the same vein of earthy humor and realism that characterized Saint Francis’s approach to life. If prayer means anything at all, it is about the way the divine penetrates the earthly, making ordinary things radiant and turning the chaos of our days into a joyful dance. As G. K. Chesterton once said, “Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.”

The Breadth of Christian Tradition
         There are other challenges that face those who attempt to write about prayer. For example, this book is addressed to a large and diverse Christian readership, and yet prayer is a practice that often takes place within specific denominations and traditions. What makes this even more difficult for us is that we have great respect for the differences and specific habits and rituals of the different sectors of the Christian communion. In compiling this book, we were faced with the question of how to show respect for specific traditions while also striving for breadth and variety in approaches.
         In struggling to find the proper balance, we have followed two basic principles. First, both the selections of prayers and our commentaries on them keep to the middle of the stream rather than paddling up the individual tributaries. In other words, we include many prayers from the Roman Catholic tradition, but not the rosary or other prayers that involve a theology that is obviously controversial for non-Catholics.
         And so on.
       Second, we’ve borrowed an idea from C. S. Lewis’s popular book Mere Christianity. In his preface to that book, Lewis says that his exposition of Christian doctrine is intended to serve as a hallway—a meeting place where many different believers find common ground. But Lewis goes on to say that a hallway is not a dwelling place. Most of us need to find the door of the particular tradition that seems most welcoming to our spirits and then to enter into that room to eat our meals and get warm by the fire. Our hope is that this book will also serve as a hallway and that you will move on into the rooms where you can find nourishment and comfort.

Praying to a Personal God
         Then there is the vital question of who it is that we are praying to. Some people would say that it doesn’t matter to whom prayers are addressed because they have a therapeutic value in and of themselves. Prayer, to this way of thinking, has a calming effect and is simply a form of “personal expression.” There’s an element of truth to that. Prayer can bring deep inner peace, and it is always colored by our unique personalities. But we think that it is both ill-advised and self-defeating to think of prayer as merely a therapeutic device. If you approach prayer from a purely pragmatic point of view, as a kind of stress-relieving technique, you’re bound to be disappointed.
         There are many practices, ancient and modern, that are geared to calming body and soul, including meditation, deep breathing, and guided visualization. Prayer, however,  requires us to speak, and even if we never hear an audible answer to our prayers, the whole process makes sense only if we are entering into a conversation with someone.
         Here the witness of our children can infuse a healthy dose of common sense into the discussion. A child addresses his prayers to a person and seeks attention—and answers—from that transcendent figure. Children have a startling capacity for praying in a naturally conversational tone, as if they were talking to a beloved aunt or uncle. Modern psychology has brought much good to our world, but some of its more ideological strains have tended to caricature faith and spirituality as the result of “childish delusion.” We prefer to side with the Pulitzer Prize–winning child psychiatrist Robert Coles, who refuses to reduce faith to wish fulfillment. After a lifetime of work with children all over the world, Coles wrote The Spiritual Life of Children, in which he concluded that he sees children “as seekers, as young pilgrims well aware that life is a finite journey and as anxious to make sense of it as those of us who are farther along in the time allotted us.”
         We don’t want to imply that prayer is incompatible with doubt or uncertainty about the existence and character of God. As most of the great spiritual writers attest, doubt is a close cousin to faith; healthy doubt, allied to an open mind and a curious heart, provides fertile ground for the inner life. Perhaps Coles’s analogy of the pilgrim is apt here. A pilgrim is not a mere wanderer; he has a goal, whether that be God or some form of enlightenment. But even the most ardent pilgrim knows that he is still on the road, that the journey itself is marked by moments where the path is sometimes clear and sometimes hard to discern. Just be careful that you don’t let your adult uncertainties become a burden to your child. And by the same token, don’t assume that your child’s faith is merely naïve, that it cannot help you recapture an intuitive knowledge that you’ve found it difficult to hold on to. Jesus rebuked his disciples for keeping children away from him. They had fallen into a trap not unlike that of some psychologists: they looked on spirituality as the serious business of grown-ups. But Jesus said, “Let the children come unto me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:14).
         So with children as our guides and teachers, we write from the perspective that prayer is addressed to a personal God who created the world and who knows and loves each and every one of us in that world and who answers our prayers in real, if mysterious, ways.

How to Use This Book
         We have tried to design this book to make it as useful as possible. If you can, read it straight through to discover the entire gamut of prayers that we have included, as well as our thoughts and experiences with them. Then you can return to the book for daily or occasional prayers as best suits your family’s habits.
         The two initial chapters of Bless This House address the central features of prayer in the context of family life. The first focuses on the role that prayer can play in your child’s moral, cognitive, and spiritual development. The second responds to the many practical questions that occur to parents when seeking to introduce their children to prayer. When do I begin praying with my children? What if parents are of mixed faiths? Are there particular places or postures that are conducive to prayer?
         The remainder of the book is devoted to a collection of classic and contemporary prayers. Each section of prayers is introduced with anecdotes from our own family or others and contains practical suggestions for how to integrate the many different types of prayer into your family devotions. The prayers in each section always begin with selections that are geared to younger children and become progressively more mature. Many of the prayers may strike you as being too demanding for a young child. Some of them undoubtedly are. But we happen to believe that the greater danger is of condescending to our children. Prayers that are overly cute, sentimental, or simplistic don’t have the resonance and mystery to draw a child deeper into the life of the spirit.
         How did we go about selecting the prayers? Our criteria were straightforward. We looked for prayers from every corner of the globe and a range of Christian traditions. We also wanted examples of as many different types and occasions of prayer as possible. Finally, we wanted prayers that were substantial enough to be said again and again without becoming thin or trite. Since many hymn lyrics and poems have a powerful devotional dimension, we have not hesitated to treat these as prayers. Our quotations from the Bible come from two classic translations—the King James Bible and the recent and widely acclaimed New Revised Standard Version. The poetry of the King James Bible has never been matched and is something that every child should hear, even if it isn’t the translation that satisfies you for everyday use.
         With the beauty and wisdom of these prayers to inspire you, perhaps you will be motivated to try writing some of your own. It is our earnest hope that you will unlock your child’s—and your own—potential for the divine conversation that is prayer. It is a well-known paradox of the spiritual life that when we gather together and focus our love and attention outward—on God’s goodness and grace—we actually grow closer to one another. That is the secret of praying together as a family.
         And now, instead of wishing you luck, we’ll send you off into the adventure of prayer with a somewhat more spiritual and decidedly old-fashioned word:

         Godspeed.