Here is Sarah Hinlicky Wilson again:

Prayer happens because a soul loves God and can’t keep quiet about it. I think it’s that simple. Or: prayer happens because a soul is angry at God and can’t keep quiet about it. (Take a look at those psalms of lament!) Or: prayer happens because a soul is sorrowful without God and can’t keep quiet about it. In each case, prayer happens. It’s not a plan or a program. It’s more like a reflex or a reaction. Whether the prayer is spontaneously composed or read out of a devotional book, it starts in the desire of the soul. We all know that you can’t just talk someone into believing in God, and I suspect you can’t talk someone into talking to God either. It has to start somewhere deep, in joy or in pain, and — this is the critical part — because of the presence and action of the Holy Spirit.

The great thing about the Holy Spirit here is that he upsets the categories of motivation and accomplishment to make everything point away from self and back to God. The Holy Spirit responds to the desire of a heart longing for God, but he also creates in the first place a heart that can long for God. Desires get turned into disciplines, and disciplines hold steady even as desire comes and goes. That’s why the whole history of the church has testified that a discipline of prayer is a good way to express and teach the undisciplined desire of the soul.

For more than twenty years now I have regularly prayed the daily office, using the traditional western liturgical forms of morning and evening prayer, or matins and vespers, as they are also called. It started when I purchased a copy of Herbert Lindemann, The Daily Office (St. Louis: Concordia, 1965), at the bookstore of Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. It's a form of prayer regimen originating in the monasteries and carried into the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and, in part, into the Lutheran tradition as well.

Morning prayer begins with an opening versicle from a Psalm, the Gloria Patri, the Venite (Psalm 95), a hymn (usually an ancient Greek or Latin hymn translated into English), a Psalm, one or more scripture lessons, a canticle (usually the Benedictus from Luke 1 or the Te Deum), prayers and petitions, the Lord's prayer, and a closing sentence. Evening prayer takes the same general approach, but the canticle is the Magnificat (also from Luke 1), and the Venite is absent. In the monasteries prayers are said several times a day, usually at three-hour intervals. I've never participated in these canonical hours in a monastery, but I would love to do so some day.

The wonderful thing about this prayer regimen is that it takes one through the Psalms on a regular basis, perhaps through the entire 150 Psalms over the course of a week or month. Over the years I have discovered that there is nothing like the Psalms for teaching one to pray. To be sure, I don't always feel like praying, and there are times when I've not followed this daily prayer for months. But I always come back to it, and it's difficult to imagine abandoning it altogether, because it's been such a source of strength for me. Hinlicky Wilson is right: it's a wonderful way to discipline the undisciplined heart.