Book Review: Praying Like the Early Church

Caitrin Bennett reviews a new resource by James L. Papandrea that will help you model your prayer life after the earliest Christians. 

Praying Like the Early Church: Seven Insights from the Church Fathers to Help You Connect with God

by James L. Papandrea

If you had been a Christian in the first few centuries AD, what would your prayer life have looked like? Which rote prayers would you have recited? What role would the Mass and Scripture have played in your prayer? What do people like St. Ignatius (d. 110) and St. Gregory of Nyssa (d. 395) have to say about the function and efficacy of prayer? If these sorts of questions interest you, you should definitely pick up a copy of Praying Like the Early Church: Seven Insights from the Church Fathers to Help You Connect with God by James L. Papandrea, available from Sophia Institute Press. 

When I chose this book, I hoped that it would help me add in some new “tricks” to help me step up my prayer life. While it did definitely help me level up in prayer, this was largely by simplification of prayer rather than by complication. Addition by subtraction, you might say. And this is precisely why I would recommend this resource to even the newest or least catechized Christians. Instead of overwhelming me with new ideas and making me feel inadequate, Praying Like the Early Church helped me see some of the simplest elements of the prayers I am already praying from a new perspective and with new depth.  

A new perspective on favorite prayers

For example, three of the most important parts of any Christian’s prayer life should be the Mass, the Sign of the Cross, and the Our Father. All three were already part of my schedule, but this book reinforced for me why they are so important. It gave me new zeal to truly pray the Mass, agreeing with the priest’s prayers of consecration with a resolute “Amen!” I have learned to slow down when praying the words of Christ in the Our Father, as well as when I am making the Sign of the Cross to truly invoke all three persons of the Trinity. Papandrea helped me see that if I simply go to Mass, pray the Our Father and make the Sign of the Cross, that’s already a very solid prayer day in and of itself!  

There is more here, too, but it’s all surprisingly simple. Ask Mary and the Saints to pray for you. Try short breathing prayers, where each line corresponds to a breath in or out: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Praying the psalms, especially through the Liturgy of the Hours, has always been a beautiful way to incorporate Scripture into prayer. This has long been one of my own favorite ways to pray — and may I recommend the free podcast The Liturgy of the Hours: Sing the Hours, which offers Lauds (Morning) and Vespers (Evening) prayer each day, gorgeously chanted in a mixture of Latin and English.  

The book also describes the virtues that make prayer most effective, the Church fathers’ understanding of how prayer works and why we should pray, how to “pray without ceasing,” and how to be sure you are praying according to God’s will. Every chapter condenses down a mountain of research, so that the more scholarly reader can dive into the detailed footnotes while the rest of us enjoy the approachable body of the text.  

Praying Like the Early Church gave me a new love for prayer, and especially for the prayer of the Church that is the Mass. Almost two thousand years after these early Fathers wrote about it, the important liturgical elements stand unchanged as Catholics around the world unite each day to offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass to our Father in Heaven. 

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Copyright 2024 Caitrin Bennett
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