https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=__GcU02KFL4
All right, so Drew McMahon asks, does reciting the prescribed prayers over and over make them less meaningful? As a Catholic, so many of our prayers are memorized to read books or read books, et cetera. Protestants seem to pray from the heart in a way that sometimes appears more meaningful. Does making your own prayers have a benefit and make them more genuine? My prayers can feel mechanical and routine when I’m reciting the same ones over and over. And so when you pray with the prayers of the church, and what you’re doing is you’re kind of entering into the pattern of the church. You’re in some ways asking the church to guide you. You’re kind of praying the same prayers as everybody so that you’re in this unity of prayer. And so there are plenty of reasons why you would use written prayers. And there’s also in some ways a training that’s going on when you use written prayers. You’re being reminded of what prayer is, because if you just pray on your own, then sometimes it ends up being some kind of a laundry list or a complaint list or something where you’re just angry that God, I don’t know, you can become angry with God in certain weird ways or you can become sentimental and misunderstand. And so it’s like improvised prayer. I think everybody, I improvised prayers every day, and that’s totally fine. But you need to find a balance between the two. And in some ways that’s why when we pray with others, especially, we’re praying in unison with them anyways. It’s like singing where you’re not gonna each sing your own song, that’s ridiculous. You sing songs together, just like you recite prayers together. And I think for your own daily prayers and personal prayers, it also gives you a sense of what is the scope of prayer. And so a good example is, when I was younger and even sometimes still today, you think that prayer is asking for stuff, right? So it’s like you ask God to bless you, whatever you ask God to help this person, help that person, and you’re praying for things. Whereas if you look at written prayer, it’s usually a lot of praising God and then a lot of asking forgiveness for my sins. And then just a few places where you actually ask for something specific. And if you’re doing your morning prayers, for example, usually the evening prayers is where you have a little bit of intercessory prayer, where you’re basically just supposed to name the names of people. And so it shows you what is the, let’s say the proportion of what a prayer should look like. And I think that you can also be superficial when you’re improvising prayer, like the prayer from the heart. It can also be a lot of acting. And there’s a lot of things about that too, especially in public when you do these improvised prayers, there’s a lot of messaging going on in those improvised prayers, where people use the prayer to message something to the other people around, which can be annoying. So.