Well, I've skipped church this morning because I have a hangover :-( Not a good start. Still, I might as well use the time to add my next post...

Of course, the most obvious form of personal devotion is Prayer. I was brought up with the assumption that prayer was an individual 'conversation' with God, usually personal though sometimes from a book. It always struck me as something extra-pious, rather selfish (please god let me pass this exam, etc.) and generally as something which I would feel very silly doing. When I decided that private devotion was an essential part of my experiment, I steered clear of anything that felt like talking to myself. I decided it was safest to start with meditation, since it's fashionable and free of doctrinal additives, and doesn't involve the P-word. I chose the sanskrit mantra So Ham (or Ham So) meaning "I Am That" - which had interesting judeo-christian resonances as well as expressing (according to wikipedia!) a union with creation. Unfortunately, keeping focused was difficult. It was a surprise to me how many minds I seemed to have - the one that was chanting and breathing, the one that was watching the chanting and breathing and thinking how well I was doing at not thinking, the one that was watching the second one and realising that after all I was thinking about not thinking, the one that had wandered off and was writing a shopping list... I decided I need professional instruction.

In the mean time, I tried the rosary. After all, that involves repetitive words but also thinking and concentrating. It took me a while to find out how to use it, and longer to get over the 'weirded-out' factor of doing something I associated with devout catholic ladies in their mantillas. But there I had the opposite problem: I just had too many things to think about at once. After all, how do you 'meditate on the joyful mystery of the Annunciation'??

One option is to give somebody else the responsibility: use regular structured Offices. From an atheist or indeed a protestant perspective, that seems rather mindless and implies that the prayer is something God needs rather than something that people need. But one thing that Christian writers often emphasise is that one shouldn't get too hung up on 'feeling the right things'. If you don't feel inspired, that doesn't mean you shouldn't pray and see what happens.

I recently spent a couple of days in a monastery. I loved the regular services, with their focused, unhurried, repetitive chanting. I didn't have to concentrate on thinking or on not thinking - just on singing. The words and notes weren't easy at first, but they were a damn sight easier than trying to sing some stodgy Victorian hymn, when you haven't got the music, everyone else in the congregation knows it (or thinks they do) and the organist is playing seventeen different harmonies with the volume turned up to eleven. After a while, you're able to chant without worrying about it, and either give your mind a rest or think about something appropriate.

The most spiritually moving service I've been to was a Taize service, named after the non-denominational monastery of Taize in France. They use songs with a single repeated verse, and often with candles and icons. After a certain number of repetitions your mouth just starts singing automatically and instead of looking forward - thinking about the end of the song or what's happening next - you just accept it as an ongoing state which you could remain in all night. I was thinking about a number of things which were worrying me, and I found that the service gave me space not just to think but to let out my emotions. Perhaps that counts as praying.

But it's not so easy to recreate regular prayer at home. For a start, I couldn't get hold of a book of hours at a reasonable price, and nor could I find any simple plainchant. I was left with the Book of Common Prayer, which might as well start with the words Caution: Do not try this at home! Perhaps the compilers of the book were distrustful of private devotion; certainly the morning and evening prayer need a priest, a church, and half an hour.

I found I enjoyed the psalms. They're often maligned as having a violent and selfish attitude, which they do - but it's refreshing to realise that these elevated texts are actually the voices of lay people from over two thousand years ago, being petulant and self-righteous and demanding, and getting angry with God. It's a reminder of the very immediate, present, practical relationship the writers felt they had with God, and it's encouraging that even the most ignorant and self-serving kind of faith can be made holy.

I also found, after a few weeks, that I started to feel as if I had prayed even if I hadn't. Everyday things began to take on a quality of worship.

On the other hand, that could be just an excuse, because I've very quickly lapsed from saying prayers twice a day. I've begun to see why monks make a profession out of this - you really can't say the morning office with any degree of seriousness whilst waiting for the kettle to boil. I always feel too hurried or too tired to do it justice. It's starting to look as though, if I want to make a go of this prayer-life lark, I may have to make more changes in my life than I thought.