At about 650 different points in the Bible, somebody approaches God in prayer, a rate surely echoed in the other scripture of the Mormon Restoration. These prayers are improvisational (like Samson‘s), in song (as with Hannah’s hymn) and formal litugies (as with Moroni’s transcription of the words of the Eucharist rite). They are offered in joy (The 100th Psalm) and humility (Daniel’s cry of repentance), and anguish (the psalm of Nephi).

Contemporary Mormons classify prayer by formality; that is, the degree to which a predetermined text or rubric applies, and by function. It strikes me that these two axes are mutually dependent. At the risk of generalizing and being exposed as the sort of academic dilettante historians generally are, I’m going to venture into liturgical anthropology and argue that the more particular the function, the more important exact wording becomes. The obvious examples are the prayers over the bread and water of the sacrament, the brief baptismal invocation, the temple liturgy, and our very real (and not, if I’m right, weird and lazy) attachment to the recitation of particular phrases for blessing of food. Prayers over the food are an interesting example of a distinctively Mormon way of prayer, I think – one that blends the ritualized sacred of formal recitation with the dynamic intimacy of improvisational prayer. Dedication (of graves, chapels, and suchlike), prayer circles, and the blessing of the sick also spring to mind here, as does our practice of using King James language. We (though of course this is not unique to Mormons) therefore associate high holiness with precise formality.

All this is entirely consistent with the ways that Mormons understand religion. We are a pragmatic people. We associate the practice faith with making the right choices, following the correct principles, giving the right answers, and our devotional life reflects this. Prayer in our tradition is a conversation with God as either literal Father or a petition to God as High Priest. I want here to offer another way of thinking of prayer; one that describes it as visceral, and even emotional experience. I’m going to describe prayer not as either solemn recitation or personal conversation, but as literary genre, a way of tapping into spiritual experience through the aesthetic, the non-verbal, in the way that great art only can do.

So, culled and adapted from a few Protestant and Catholic sources:

Prayer as thanksgiving.
The scholar Gilbert Stafford calls this “prayer as overflowing fountain.” In its best incarnations, it is a torrent of poetry, an outpouring of one’s soul in joy and enthusiasm. Mary’s Song, the Magnificat, is perhaps the transcendent example. It’s appropriate that she begins with celebrating God as Savior, for to Christians Christ is the supreme gift of God, that which all other gifts reflect and point to. Also significant are the ways in which the Magnificat embodies the themes of the Bible in general: that is, God intervenes into fallen human history, upending the injustices of the corrupt human order. God places the meek before the proud, spurns the wealthy for the poor, comforts the weary and grants mercy to the sinner. The gradual unwinding of these themes also indicates the range of God’s concerns – from the fate of nations to the hunger of the single individual, all predicated on God’s role as Savior. The sheer variety of what Mary thanks God for indicates the improvisational nature of prayer of thanksgiving; reeling off the multifarious blessings – not only given, all-importantly, to the individual, but to all humans and ultimately to history itself.

Prayers of thanksgiving are generally acclaimed as the most worthy and greatest of all forms of prayer.

A subset of the prayer of thanksgiving is what Catholics call the prayer of adoration – that is, praise for God simply because he is God, and worthy of our love and praise. This sort of prayer does not require us to thank God for anything in particular; and as such is a useful reminder.

Prayer as intercession.
Intercessory prayer properly understood is not prayer for ourselves, but for others. It is part of the liturgy in Catholic and some Protestant churches, and it’s entirely appropriate, I think, to imagine proxy work in this way.

The great example, of course, is Christ’s great intercessory prayer in John 17. Noteworthy about this type of prayer is its fervency and urgency; indeed, the Christ of this prayer is not placid or otherworldly. He is Christ the Advocate. He identifies himself viscerally with his disciples, and pleads with God on their behalf. Abraham’s intercession for Sodom and Gomorrah is another example, and a reminder that we are commanded to pray for our enemies, with all the fervency of Christ.

The grace received because of these prayer is what Thomas Aquinas called “cooperating grace” – that grace directed to the recipient not from God directly, but through another person. Engaging, then, in this type of prayer is to take on the role of Christ, to act as a type of him in relation to another, and it is thus to fill our ultimate potential as children of God. As Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead reminds us, to receive grace is only half of what God would have for us:

The other half is that we also can forgive, restore, and liberate, and therefore we can feel the will of God enacted through us, which is the great restoration of ourselves to ourselves.

Prayer as reparation.
This term is a Catholic one, and it means a prayer of confession and plea for forgiveness. The Kyrie which opens Catholic and Orthodox services is an example: the Latin is “Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy; Lord, have mercy.” We see a similarly affecting example in Alma 36:16-20, in which Alma rehearses his sins and attains redemption, as well as Psalm 51. The metaphors here (and elsewhere) are striking and consistent; sin is a heavy chain and a coat of dirt, while repentance is freedom and cleanliness. These prayers, then, are generally inversions; descent into sin (conceived as a physical construction) and relief from it. There’s been a lot of speculation about Alma 36 as a giant chiasm; similarly Psalm 51 pivots in verses 9-11, in which the various ways God grants repentance are outlined.

There’s some theory out there about what are called ‘speech acts,’ which may on the whole be more or less useful, but it can, I think, help us understand the increased significance that religion attaches to the act of verbal confession in prayer. Speech act theory argues that some of our words do indeed have objective, real, effects embodied in the saying; when one says “Guilty” when asked their status by a judge, or “I do” while standing in a wedding are two obvious examples. We speak of prayer as “sharing” our sins with God; it may be useful, then, to think about the form of the prayer of reparation as a description of actual events rather than a mere plea.

Prayer as petition.
This is, perhaps, the most personal type of prayer. It is, simply, requesting something from God. An interesting example is the Lord’s Prayer (KJV here). Christ here, after acknowledging the absolute sovereignty of God in earth and heaven, asks for a wide variety of things. Again, as with the prayers of thanksgiving, we see how detailed, and how personal, prayers can be. Christ prays not only for deliverance from sin, but for daily bread. He prays for forgiveness, and also for the capacity to forgive. This reminds Mormons of Alma 34, wherein Amulek instructs his hearers to pray amidst the mundane, to cry out to God for the bare necessities of everyday life.

And here, of course, we cycle back to the beginning; for while Amulek prays for his flocks, Mary thanks God for them. The Catholic sacraments are often spoken of as a chain guiding the faithful through life – one comes into the world through baptism and exits through last rites. While Mormonism offers some version of that as well, it might also be useful to think of life as a series of prayers.