“Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest, and let this food to us be blessed. Amen.”
My family has a complicated relationship with liturgy.
In the Baptist churches of my childhood, no one ever prayed the same prayer twice. The Lord’s Prayer, handed down to us by Jesus, was dutifully memorized but rarely prayed by generations of Sunday School children. At bedtime with my parents when we were young, and later at youth group meetings on Wednesday nights, my sister and I were encouraged to make up our own prayers, to speak to God as directly and casually as to a friend.
We used many of the same phrases over and over, of course: Thank you, God, for this day. Please bless our family. Please heal ______ (inserting the name of whichever family member or friend was sick or hurting). But our parents and teachers urged us to put those phrases together in new and creative ways.
Over time, I picked up the notion that it was lazy, almost cheating, to pray the same prayer day in and day out. God gave us brains: weren’t we supposed to use them to create new and unique prayers? Wouldn’t God, like our friends, grow bored with us if we said the same things to Him over and over again?
I’m back at the Art House America blog today, talking about the table prayer I learned from my grandparents. Click over there to read the rest of my post.
cakes, tea and dreams 
Katie, I had to comment because I have been on a journey into a liturgical life for the past 2-3 years. Like you, I grew up in various Protestant churches where prayer was as varied as the people in the pews. I, too, felt that liturgical prayers, or formal written prayers were somehow not ‘real’, not creative, and not necessary or effective because they did not come out of my own head and heart. But if a prayer said in the first few hundred years of the Church is still being said today that means (to me) that it is indeed worthwhile. How I have come to love the rhythm and beauty of the Divine Liturgy that my husband and I now experience in the Orthodox Christian Church. The Lord’s Prayer, The Nicene Creed, the many memorized prayers are all part of the vast ocean that is my faith and part of being the body of Christ. By digesting these ancient words, they become a part of me. Prayer can become like breathing; not a creative thing that I DO, but a way of entering into the Kingdom of heaven. Lord have mercy on me, a sinner.