Last Sunday evening I was drifting off to sleep when a programme came on Radio 4 with Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, talking about personal prayer. I was interested enough to open my eyes again and tune in properly, and I’m glad I did.

The Archbishop was very reassuring. No one feels their prayer is good enough, including him. But the key thing is to remember that prayer is not so much what we do as what God does in us. All we have to do is allow it to flow. He described it as unblocking the fountain of the water of life that springs up in us.

The children of St Paul’s School have learned a lovely Taize chant whose words are “Jesus, your Spirit in us is a wellspring of life everlasting.” That sums up the Trinitarian understanding of prayer: by the power of the Spirit, Christ’s prayer to the Father is prayed in us. It is an ongoing conversation in which we are invited to join.

Maybe that sounds a wee bit passive to some of you. We might feel that prayer should be more strenuous, a real victory of our will over our inertia. But it is the mere opening up to prayer that needs the struggle, not the prayer itself. You may remember another archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, saying that he prayed for five minutes at a time, but it took him twenty-five minutes to get ready to pray.

It can be jolly hard just to get started. This is where the Jews and Muslims have some very wise human psychological techniques. If you have to lay tefillin, wrapping leather cords around your wrist and forehead, or you have to perform wadu, the ritual washing of hands and face and feet before you are fit to pray, then you have a helpful ritual that gets you into the right frame of mind. What’s more, it is a communal ritual – you are doing something at the same time and in the same way as others.

We Christians seem to have cut through all that ritual with the simple invitation, Let us pray. For many generations this meant drop to your knees! For some Christians the automatic response is to bow our head, close our eyes and perhaps put our hands together. But in our corporate worship we are often on our feet for this invitation, and we simply try to compose and quieten our mind and concentrate.

But five seconds or half a minute or even a couple of minutes of silence, following this invitation, is hardly enough to create a space in which we can unblock the fountain of living water. There is usually a short and frantic list of things we need to call to mind, and sometimes there is just utter blankness and boredom.

So what can we do about it? Whether we are praying together with others in church or alone somewhere, we can look at what really helps us to “draw near to God” so that he can draw near to us, as the letter of James tells us.

We can start by looking forward to praying, whether or not be really feel like it. A wise old monk once told a novice always to run to his prayer place, so that we would feel a sense of joyful anticipation. The ringing of the church bell before morning and evening prayer helps me get into the right frame of mind.

You’ll be getting tired of hearing me talk about the Taize community, but this is an area where the brothers have real expertise. The centrepiece of each of their prayer services is a long period of silence, ten minutes at least. But they don’t expect people to come in and drop straight into silent prayer.

First they create a sacred space by providing just a few things for the eyes to focus on – bright hanging cloths, dozens of candles, and sometimes an icon of Christ. They don’t fill your hands up with books and papers. All you need is a little songbook. And for fifteen or twenty minutes they begin the prayer by quietly singing prayerful songs. Then everyone listens to a reading from scripture. It is repeated in several languages and then single verses are read in even more languages until the words just begin to sink into you.

Only after half an hour or so of this singing and listening are you expected to be still with your own thoughts and prayers, surrounded by thousands of other people who are doing the same. By this time the refrains you have been singing repeatedly tend to sing themselves in your head, and it really does feel like prayer happening without your having to worry about it.

Music is an incredibly powerful way to pray. This has been understood at St Mary’s for many generations, with its fine history of congregational hymn-singing and also the choral tradition that continues to provide a way into prayer. The challenge is to help new and young Christians learn music that will sing in their hearts too.

It is important to learn that music as early in life as possible. I remember talking to many elderly people in Hackney whose prayer was rooted and grounded in the hymns they had learned from their grandparents. For every mood or situation there would be a song to carry their thoughts to God, from the suffering of “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, nobody knows but Jesus” to the gratitude of “My God, how great thou art”.

Those who sing, pray twice, as the old saying goes. Many times when words fail us, music enables us to draw near to God. At many deathbeds I have run out of spoken prayers and turned instead to “Amazing grace” or “Dear Lord and Father of mankind.” Even a person who is past speaking will often indicate that they want to continue to hear sung prayer.

Children take to music so readily, it is by far the easiest way to teach them to pray. We try to do this in assemblies and services and at the informal eucharists. Many parents will do it at home as well. Singing a child a lullaby can be a much more natural way of praying with them than reciting “Now I lay me down to sleep”.

When we sing quietly, we open ourselves up. We unblock the fountain of life. We let the peace of God enter our hearts. Children can understand this very easily.

The image in today’s gospel of Jesus taking a child into his arms is a picture of what prayer can be, especially the prayer of intercession. Rowan Williams said that when you pray for someone, you just need to sit with them and Jesus. We don’t need to tell God what someone needs – God knows much better than we do, and already loves that person much more than we do. By just sitting quietly, or singing quietly, and picturing our friend in the presence of Jesus, we are praying for them. We are directing our love towards them, joining it with the love of God.

God is already there. James in his epistle warns us that we don’t receive what we ask for because we are praying in the wrong way, with a list of things we want or think we need. All we need to do is put ourselves in the presence of God, which is always available to us. All we need to ask for is a greater awareness of that loving presence, so that we need never be alone or afraid.

Yes, it does take an act of will. The hard thing isn’t saying the right words, or understanding a difficult bit of scripture, or contorting our minds into believing something that doesn’t make sense to us. The hard part is to stop being so self-sufficient, and just open our hearts and say yes to God’s invitation to spend time in silence.

The more full and hectic our lives are, the more we need to answer that invitation. Rowan Williams quoted Desmond Tutu, who once said he was too busy to spend less than two hours a day in prayer.

Ask yourself honestly if you have felt the invitation to prayer in the past week. It’s as if the Holy Spirit taps us very gently on the shoulder. We can say no – we are always free to do so. But if we do decide to stop and pray, even for a few moments, the wellspring of life can begin to flow in us.

Maybe it will help to sit in a special place, light a candle, gaze at an icon, take prayer beads into our hands, or simply sing a quiet song. Whatever works for us is good. Tonight at six o’clock here in St Mary’s there will be a time of contemplative prayer. If you haven’t tried this before, perhaps tonight is the opportunity you need to get started.

Draw near to God – that’s the invitation – and God will draw near to you – that’s the promise.