Benefits of "Scripted" Prayer

A Protestant friend sent me this question. I give my answer.

"I was wondering if you could help me with something. I've recently become more appreciative of liturgy and I'm wondering if it may be a beneficial aspect of our walks with God that Protestants have done away with too quickly. My question is, how sincere are you being when you recite prayers, and how often do you pray when you are not reciting a scripted prayer? I feel like these recitation could help me and my family, but I want to make sure I do it right. Hope that makes sense."

My answer. 

"I'm being fairly sincere. But there are aspects of these prayers that I really appreciate that I didn't get from the freestyle kind of prayers as a Protestant, namely, meditation. Not only are you supposed to be sincere, but part of the structured prayer is to help one meditate on the truths within the prayer. So not only do these pre formed prayers lift up your heart, but they also lift up your mind and intellect as well, and it is that which is more important, because it is within your intellect that the will resides. And so you have better opportunities to train your will that way. When it comes to these freeform prayers, there can actually be an overemphasis on emotional sincerity, a leading of the heart, when the heart can be lead astray, and be lead astray easily. Under the command of the intellect and the command of the will, is your being more perfectly oriented towards God, since things are in their proper order. So, I think when you ask about sincerity, you might be working off some culturally protestant assumptions here. I mean, Protestant liturgies have this, but high church Protestantism is kinda dying out, so, I'm speaking in generalities of course. But yes, I'm still fairly sincere. That doesn't mean I'm always sincere. There are days when saying prayers feels like a chore. But that's okay. Because it still instills a habit within you. If it is a prayer of this or that saint (I love St. Thomas' prayer Panis Angelicus when taking the eucharist) then that saint is also accompanying you in that prayer. So you have help from others as well, from the saints who are perfectly sanctified already.

And this habit is important. I remember last year, I had a severe anxiety attack that psychosomatically paralyzed half my body, and at the time it happened, I thought I was having a stroke and I was on the floor dying. And I remember, because it was during the pandemic and church openings weren't on the horizon yet, I kept saying an act of contrition. And I had it memorized. And I memorized it because that was the best the church could offer us without giving us sacraments. Encourage us to memorize and make perfect acts of contrition. And sure, there were times where I'm like, am I really contrite about it today? And I wonder about that sometimes. But when it mattered most, when I thought I was within 60 seconds of meeting Jesus, I had the prayer to fall back on, and I could intentionally direct my will and direct my intellect to those words within the prayer. I could know, with clarity and certainty, that I was truly sorry. I didn't have to be, like when I was a protestant, always kind of wondering, 'if I die today...am I going to be saved? Am I sincere about my life, as I lay dying?' I didn't have to worry about that last year as I was on the floor hearing the ambulance sirens in the distance. I had already predisposed my intellect, my will, and thus my heart and soul, to genuinely asking for God's forgiveness. I could have been so doubtful as a protestant, where I might not even get into the habit of praying because of fears of insincerity. So like, sometimes you hear in the military or any gun training, or any combat training in general, that in moments of panic and crises, you fall back naturally to your lowest common denominator. That's what these prayers also add to your life. They add like a spiritual floor that becomes difficult to get below. They might not increase the heights of your spiritual potential, but they do raise your lowest common denominator, I think. Besides, Jesus literally told us to pray a certain way, so surely there's benefits to whatever our Lord tells us to do

I'd say it's like 1/3 freestyle, 2/3 scripted. You don't have to choose between the two. You can have both Usually, scripted ones where there's structure in what I'm doing anyways. So during the liturgy, before and after meals, before a test, whatever. But if I get a phone call from a friend, and he's like, "Hey, my wife is leaving me, I need prayer" like, okay, I'll say something on my own. Maybe add a Hail Mary at the end or something.

I mean, all the structured prayers we have anyway all started as some dudes own made up prayer haha, so, maybe, be a saint and have a prayer of your own, and maybe future generations will pray like you!