By the fourteenth century Walter Hilton in his Ladder of Perfection began to offer advice for effective spontaneous prayer for both public and private worship. Formal prayer, though, was still the norm in most churches. Anyone visiting his tomb at Cathedral Church in Southwark, England, finds a copy of those beautiful prayers on top of a prayer desk. And no one can read those prayers without being touched by the sincerity and beauty of their thoughts. Later poetry, especially after the Reformation, would relate to prayer in a more intensely private and personal way.
Literature is replete with poems, narratives, and plays in which prayer plays a major part.
A search of the most reliable but admittedly incomplete bibliographic sources for poetry lists over three hundred poems about prayer, and a similar fiction list includes over two hundred short stories and about seventy-five novels whose themes turn upon prayer. And literature is not alone among the arts. I recently allotted myself thirty minutes to make a very unstructured tour of Chicago's excellent Art Institute. One need not think hard and deep to come up with music that was written about prayer or to inspire prayerful meditation. In this issue, you will read about holy places of prayer and will learn they can just as easily be in your home as in some grand cathedral.