Set Prayers vs. Your Own Words
In brief
A newcomer often expects prayer to mean speaking to God spontaneously, in one's own words. Orthodoxy prizes something a little different: the written prayers of the Church — the Psalms, the Our Father, the prayers of the saints — learned and prayed as one's own. This is not because personal prayer is discouraged, but because the Church teaches us to pray the way we learn any language: by first receiving the words of those who prayed well. Spontaneous prayer has an honored place; it grows best from a soil of learned prayer.
Why the Church leans on written prayers
When the disciples asked, "Lord, teach us to pray," Christ did not tell them to speak from the heart; He gave them words to say — "After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven" (Matthew 6:9). The Church has followed that instinct ever since. Its prayer book is largely inherited: the 150 Psalms that Israel and the Lord Himself prayed; the Our Father; the Trisagion prayers; the prayers of Sts. Basil, John Chrysostom, Macarius, and other saints whose words have been tested by centuries of use.
There are good reasons for this. Left entirely to ourselves, our prayer tends to shrink to our moods and our wants; the set prayers stretch it — they make us repent when we feel fine, give thanks when we feel wronged, and confess doctrines our feelings have not caught up with. They also school the beginner who does not yet know what to ask: "we know not what we should pray for as we ought," St. Paul admits (Romans 8:26). To pray St. John Chrysostom's words is to be apprenticed to a master of prayer until the craft becomes one's own. And because these prayers are shared, the solitary Christian at home is never really alone — he prays the same words as the whole Church.
Where your own words fit
None of this forbids speaking to God freely — Orthodoxy is not a script that leaves no room for the heart. The tradition simply orders the two. The prayer rule — a fixed daily set of morning and evening prayers and the Trisagion prayers — forms the frame; within and after it, the faithful are encouraged to add their own petitions, their thanksgivings, and the names of those they love. Many spiritual fathers advise ending the appointed prayers and then speaking to God plainly, in one's own words, about the day.
The bridge between the two is the short, repeated prayer — above all the Jesus Prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." It is a set prayer, yet so brief and so personal that it becomes wholly one's own, carried into every hour until, in the tradition's hope, it prays itself in the heart. In this the supposed opposition dissolves: the words the Church gives are meant to become the words you mean.
There is also a warning behind the Church's preference. Prayer wholly of one's own making, with no rule and no inherited words, can quietly drift — into flattering God, into rehearsing grievances, into a private religion of the mood of the moment. The tested prayers of the saints act as a keel. They keep private prayer from capsizing into self, and they carry the doctrine of the Church in their very phrasing, so that in praying them one is slowly taught what is true about God as well as how to ask.
A practical rule
The counsel most often given to beginners is simple: start with the book. Acquire a small Orthodox prayer book, keep a short rule morning and evening, and do not wait to "feel" the words before saying them — the feeling usually comes after the habit, not before. Then, when the appointed prayers are done, linger and speak your own heart. Over years the two grow together until it is hard to say where the Church's prayer ends and yours begins. That is the goal: not to choose between set prayers and your own words, but to be so formed by the first that the second becomes true prayer.