This is a tough subject and not the kind of thing I normally discuss in my writing. But it’s my blog, or column, or article and I can pretty much do with it as I please. Today it pleases me to talk about prayer.

Why the sudden interest in things that are from on high and obviously above my paygrade? Because there’s a little boy in a hospital near Columbus, Georgia that needs all the prayer he can get. More on that later.

I am convinced that prayer is a universal practice in this world in one form or another. I’m not saying we humans are very good at it but, hey, it’s not a competition. Besides, if the One listening can build a universe based on some pretty complicated mathematical equations that nobody would even begin to understand for millions of years, then I bet he can figure out what our prayers mean no matter how badly we blow it.

Like most of you, my very first introduction to the business of praying was as a small child at bedtime. Mama sitting on the bed beside me. Me lying back with my hands folded above my chest. You know the prayer.

“Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”

I learned a lesson on those nights that took me years to unlearn. I thought that prayer was about saying the right words. A good prayer had to sound like a prayer, and it had to have a rhythm to it that was worthy of prose. Like something that came from the pen of Robert Frost.

I was no poet. The only prayers I knew were the ones I learned from listening to others. Like my dad’s favorite.

Good bread, good meat
Good Lord, let’s eat.

My dad was always the one who said the blessing at our supper table. I must have heard him pray in church hundreds of times when called upon to close a service or to remember the sick. He gave communion meditations and led the congregation in prayer before the bread and cup were passed.

What I learned is that his prayers were a lot like everyone else’s prayers. They sounded alike. They included some of the same phrases that I heard over a lifetime of being present in church when everyone’s head was bowed.

Praying in church meant that a person was a lot more likely to use a few words straight from the KJV Bible than if a prayer was being spoken at home.

“Lord, we thank Thee that we shouldst all gather together in Thy house this day.”

I never heard anyone speak with Thee’s and Thou’s any other place than in church. For sure, anytime that anyone prayed for a table full of fried chicken at church, the prayer included these words.

“Lord, we thank Thee for this food and the hands that have prepared it. Bless this meal to the nourishment of our bodies and our bodies to Thy service. Amen.”

I carried these lessons with me for a long time. I don’t mean to speak irreverently of the men and women who taught me to pray by example, but I never really got it. Close your eyes and say the same words you said last week and last month and last year.

For what? I assumed that it was to offer a proper and acceptable prayer.

I remember very distinctly the first time I ever heard a public prayer that was different. I was in my late twenties. I lived in Cartersville, Georgia. We went to a little church on the edge of town. Most of the praying there was just like the praying that went on during my growing up years in the 60s. I wasn’t prepared for anything new to happen. I had gotten comfortable with the rhythm.

His name was Basil Winch. Basil was from England, so his accent was enchanting enough no matter what he might have said. He also suffered from an advanced stage of Parkinson’s. When he stood with his cane nearly every inch of his body shook. He held a white handkerchief in his other hand because, when he spoke, he would sometimes uncontrollably lose spital from the corner of his mouth.

I hadn’t known Basil very long when on a Sunday evening the preacher called on him to pray at the beginning of the service. We were all seated. It would have been fine if Basil had prayed from his pew. No one would have thought otherwise of his posture.

But Basil stood. Standing was a long process for him. He had to will his body with the kind of effort usually required by men heaving bales of hay up on the top row of a wagon. It was like lifting dead-weight for him. It’s hard enough to be 80. It’s even harder to be 80 and broken.

His cane banged against the pew in front of him. His wife spoke quiet words of encouragement with a well-placed hand on his backside for balance. If you sat in the same pew, you could feel the shaking. From anywhere else in the room, you could hear it.

He bowed. I kept one eye open to make sure he was okay.

When Basil prayed it was like nothing I had ever heard before. There were no rhymes. No Shakesperean words meant to mimic the complicated English of King James. If anyone could have pulled it off in good fashion it would have been Basil with that wonderful accent of his.

His voice came not from his mouth but from someplace so deep that his prayer immediately made you want to hold your breath and listen. He was maybe the first person I ever heard whom I believed was actually speaking to God. His words trembled much like his body. His emotions turned his words into tears before the throne. When he finished, we all knew we had just been taken somewhere most of us had never been before.

The room was eerily quiet. You pretty much expected to open your eyes to find that we had all been beamed up to heaven. And in the quiet, Basil sat in a thunderous collapse under the weight of his own words.

I don’t pretend to understand all there is to know about prayer. I am no expert. But I know that Basil Winch changed the way I look at praying forever. The words don’t matter as long as they come from the heart.

Tonight, in a busy hospital room, there is a 4-year-old little boy who needs our prayers. His parents and brother were killed in a traffic accident late last week. He is the only one to survive and he is critical but stable. It looks like he will wake up soon to discover that his family is gone.

I don’t know the family. I don’t know this little boy’s name. God knows. And the Lord of all creation wants to know whether we care enough to pray tonight.

No proper language required.

Just an honest voice to speak on his behalf.

Amen.