Sincere Prayer (The Cowherd and the Sage)

The genesis of this blog four year ago came from comments made to me, by faithful believers, that they felt their prayer life was often rote, or boring, or dull and repetitious. I had done a lot of both academic and practical research about prayer. I felt led to begin writing about actual prayers from Scripture, and to do so in a way that would help us all learn more about prayer and enrich both our understanding of prayer and our practice of prayer.

Of course, there are a lot of prayer books available (collections of prayer) and there are also a lot of books about prayer. I wanted to do something a little different—a little of both, in a way. A blog of devotional commentaries on each prayer in the Bible seemed the best venue. I wanted to explore each prayer with sound and critical research into language, history, and the literature, which then could be the basis for devotional activities and application of prayer in our own lives based on biblical models.
The danger of a devotional commentary is that an academic often tends to focus more on the background research elements rather than the practical aspects of prayer. For people like me, the Greek and Hebrew linguistic elements, the history, the culture, the literary critical elements are fun.

I came across the story below which I often reread, because it emphasizes that prayer is primarily about relationship. While I believe that God wants us to think critically and intelligently about our faith, we cannot replace genuine heartfelt intent with ‘proper rules.’ Rules and doctrine are important, to ground our faith in sound principles and logic. But rules and doctrine are only a means to an end—and for prayer, that is a communicative relationship with our God.
This ancient story is a reminder of that important idea.

There was once an illiterate cowherd who did not know how to pray, so instead, he would say to God: “Master of the Universe, you know that if you had cows, and you gave them to me to look after, I would do it for nothing, even though I take wages from everyone else. I would do it for you for nothing because I love you.”

A certain sage chanced upon the cowherd and heard him praying in this manner. The sage said to him, “You fool, you must not pray like that.” The cowherd asked him how he should pray, and the sage set about teaching him the order of the prayers as they are found in the prayer book. After the sage went away the cowherd soon forgot what he had been taught and so he did not pray at all. He was afraid to say the usual prayer about God’s cows because the sage had told him it was wrong to say such things, on the other hand he could not say what the sage had told him because it was all jumbled up in his mind. 

That night the sage was reprimanded in a dream and told that unless the cowherd returned to his spontaneous prayer great harm would befall the sage, for he had stolen something very precious away from God. On awakening the sage hurried back to the cowherd and asked him what he was praying. The cowherd told him that he was not praying anything since he had forgotten the prayers the sage had taught him, and he had been forbidden to tell God how he would look after his cows for nothing. The sage begged him to forget what he had told him and go back to his real prayers that he had said before ever he had met him.⁠

Jewish Wisdom: A Treasury of Proverbs, Maxims, Aphorisms, Wise Sayings, and Memorable Quotations

God did not expect the cowherd to be something he was not. God accepted him where he was in his life, and cherished those prayers because the cowherd was sincere and did the best he could with what he had.

Of course, the story does not teach us how to pray. Nor is it suggesting that we should pray as an illiterate! Yet neither is it teaching that we must pray the prayer book. This story teaches that the practice of sincere prayer is a mystery. For the sage, it was proper and right for him to pray the prayer book. At the same time, it was not proper for the cowherd to pray those prayers. He was a different person with a different background and a different context. The cowherd, as uneducated as he was, simply wanted to tell God how much he loved him, and he used his simple language and vocabulary to voice that prayer. It was precious to God because the cowherd offered all he had in the world. For the sage to have prayed like the cowherd would have been an insult to God.

We should pray from where we are in life, as best we can, and continue to learn and grow—all the while remembering that it is about relationship.