Learning How to Pray After Finding God, from the perspective of a born again Catholic

My experience may not apply to you,but seeing as how you asked, I’ll tell my tale. I grew up in the Anglican church and essentially found it boring, but when I stopped attending church I wasn’t left with any negative baggage to overcome. For 20 years I was an agnostic. When my atheistic wife had an experience of God while we were visiting my bother in England at the time, I decided that I better sort out just what it was that I believed about God and Christianity.My brother gave me a copy of CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity. I found Lewis’ argument compelling and so when we returned to Montreal ,where we were living at the time I, along with my wife started attending the local Anglican church. I did find in all of this that I experienced a fairly significant change in my attitudes towards others and in my world outlook. (Call it born again if you like.)Over the years I became more and more involved in church life , including becoming involved in youth ministry, which strangely enough was largely responsible for a musical ministry with various senior’s groups which has now become essentially my volunteer career since I retired from the career that paid the bills.About 15 years ago I realized that my faith was something that I believed without having put any real attempt into learning about why I believed what I did. At that point I started a project of reading to learn about God. In order to do this I did some research on who the authorities were. I wanted to affirm that if God did exist at all, what His nature was really like, how to understand the Bible and how to understand God through observing and studying nature.The Anglican church always used the three pillars of faith, those being Scripture reason and tradition. I now have many shelves of books that I have read on all of these subjects. I didn’t limit myself to reading those whose views were most appealing. I read material written by atheists’ to fundamentalists. Incidentally, I don’t worry much about denominations as my contention is that God is far more concerned about our hearts than He is our theology. BTW I think that your Pope is a wonderful Christian. I see his life as being an example of someone who lives by the message found in my signature.Eventually I found that I most appreciated, and was most influenced by, the work of 3 Brits.The first was in my view the greatest Christian philosopher of all time and that is CS Lewis. I don’t always agree with everything he says but his views resonate with my experience of life. If you were to read one book by him I would recommend The Great Divorce which is an allegory of how we humans choose hell. It essentially repudiates the idea of a deity that is standing by waiting to punish us.The second major influence was NT (Tom) Wright who Newsweek called the world leading New Testament scholar. Wright has taught at Oxford, McGill and Cambridge. He is currently with the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Wright combined his extensive scriptural knowledge with his historical study of the world that Jesus lived in. His debates with both Borg and Crossan concerning the resurrection are fascinating. The book that I would recommend in particular by Wright is Simply Good News.The third is John Polkinghorne. Polkinghorne was a major player in particle physics until in his 40’s he decided that all the major advances in physics were from those much younger than himself and he proceeded to start his studies in the field of theology. It is fascinating how he combines his theology with his scientific knowledge. The book I would recommend by him is Testing Scripture: A Scientist Explores the Bible. I like his straight forward approach when he asks the question of how we can square the concept of a God who commands genocide and public stoning with what Jesus taught, (such as love your enemy). He says simply that you can’t.There are also many videos by Wright and Polkinghorne on youtube.As far as prayer goes, I actually agree with Faith. The "Lord's Prayer" is the best place to start, and as she says you can pray around each thought expressed in that prayer. I also think of when it says in Psalm 37 that if we delight in the Lord He will give us the desires of our hearts. In other words, if we do truly follow in our hearts His message of peace, love, forgiveness, justice etc we will find our joy in those things. It is those attributes of God that we will desire. I pray that that is where my heart will be.Hope this helps.
Happy 2017