Prayers for Life: A Book in Progress

"There is no such thing as writing—only rewriting." 

That's what my professor in graduate school, Gordon Fee, used to tell us repeatedly.

(He likewise told us that he’d always read out loud the penultimate drafts of his book in order to make sure that the words sounded right and said what needed saying.)

It's another way of saying, of course, that editing is everything.

And that's precisely what I have been over the past six months: editing my book of prayers which I finally turned into the publisher yesterday. 385 Collect prayers. What a haul.

I resisted throughout these months the temptation to write new prayers because I knew that I needed to spend every cent of gray matter on editing the prayers that I already had. 

I made the exception in five cases only: in a prayer that I wrote for those who struggle with mental health, a prayer for those who have suffered a traumatic experience, a prayer for skeptics and cynics, a prayer for earthquakes, and a prayer for pets. The book, I felt, wouldn't be complete without them.

Those prayers aside, I ruthlessly carved and whittled away at the prayers that I had already decided to include.

I asked myself if each word needed to be there. I asked if the single idea of each prayer was clear and concrete. I asked if the language "sung" rather than only plodded along. 

I asked, finally, if I had given credit to whom credit was due, because I knew that very little of what I did here was truly original. For those with ears to hear, one would hear echoes of the prayers of the psalmists and Saint Paul, of Saint Basil and Saint Augustine, of Thomas Cranmer and Evelyn Underhill, of William Barclay and Flannery O'Connor.

“We stand in the presence of the craftsmen and women of the Spirit of God,” writes John A. McGuckin, a priest in the Romanian Orthodox Church, “who have gone before us” in the craft of written prayer and to whom we apprentice ourselves in the habit of prayer. 

We stand, in short, in a tradition which has been "handed down" to us by God's grace and to which I am wholly indebted with this book of prayers.

I'm very excited to be done with this part of the process and to watch Phaedra create the paintings that will accompany each section of prayers. And I am grateful in advance to all the editors at IVP who will make this better than either of us could have imagined.

Phaedra Taylor, watercolor, work in progress for book project