The Brooklyn Tabernacle, a 3,500-seat evangelical prayer palace in downtown Brooklyn, was built in 1918 as one of the largest and grandest vaudeville houses in North America. It is still a hot ticket. Its youngish, racially diverse congregation packs the pews each week to praise God and bask in the sounds of a Grammy-winning 250-voice gospel choir. But the tabernacle is more than just a popular church. It is also a destination for evangelicals from all around the United States and beyond, laymen and ministers alike, who come as acolytes to study prayer. “Prayer is like other activities,” the Rev. Daniel Henderson told me when we met at the tabernacle the week before Easter. He was visiting Brooklyn with a group of seminary students from Virginia. “You learn from people who are already good at it,” he went on. “The people who pray at the Brooklyn Tabernacle are committed. Praying with them is an education.” Henderson is a peppy, unassuming man in his early 50s, a Jerry Falwell-trained Baptist minister. After serving for many years as the spiritual leader of a megachurch in suburban Minneapolis, he left the pulpit and founded Strategic Renewal, a nonprofit organization that holds “prayer summits” and how-to-worship seminars around the country. (Henderson was also a contributor to the magazine Pray!, which recently went out of business.) “The fact is, most pastors never learn how to really pray,” he explained. “They get to the seminary, and people just assume they know how to pray. But that's not true. Prayer is a lot more than reciting words. It requires mastering both theory and technique.” In the afternoon, in a classroom of the tabernacle's annex, Henderson delivered a workshop on technique to an audience of pastors and seminary students. “Some people think it is better and more meaningful to pray alone, but that's false,” he told his students. “You improve by praying with others who can mentor you, people who are more expert than you.” According to Henderson, there are rules of effective praying: “Let God begin the conversation. Keep your prayers brief and clear. Repeat simple Scripture-based phrases. Pray standing up to fight torpor. And pray directly facing others, eye to eye, in a loud, clear voice.” That evening Henderson took his students to the tabernacle for a practical demonstration. “Tuesday nights here are the biggest regular weekday praise services in America,” he told me. “Nationally famous. It's always exciting to see something like this, especially in New York.” The chapel was nearly full when we arrived. The congregants were on their feet, eyes fixed on a giant video screen, singing, “Lord, your grace is so amazing, wonderful, wonderful; everyday your love's unchanging, wonderful, wonderful.” A song leader stood on the stage leading the mantra, accompanied by a very soulful praise band. The chapel is engineered for mass intimacy, with separate audio systems for preaching and music and state-of-the-art theatrical lighting. A new song appeared on the screen ' “I was created for your glory, all my days were made for you” ' and the congregation sang and swayed. Pastor Jim Cymbala, the leader of the congregation, came out dressed in what looked like a track suit. A shapeless man in his mid-60s without obvious charisma, Cymbala played college basketball at theUniversity of Rhode Island and has a point guard's pugnacity. That night he preached a harsh sermon denouncing the Samaritans as demonic ' not the sect's traditional image ' which made him seem like a hard man to please. In his 20s, Cymbala started an urban ministry in Newark, and a few years later led a small church in Brooklyn. One day, while Cymbala was fishing in Florida, God spoke to him and ' his wife recalled in a published interview ' said: “Lead the people to pray, and I'll supply sermons and all the money you need. There will never be a building large enough if you lead the people to pray.” Out of that inspiration grew the Brooklyn Tabernacle. Twenty years later, the church has a fair-size empire with overseas ministries and a line of commercial prayer products. The Brooklyn Tabernacle operates a prayer line on which people can call or e-mail requests. The evening I visited, Cymbala read a request from a woman who had recently been evicted. “She's either from Virginia or her name is Virginia,” he said, squinting at the paper in front of him. “Either way, I want God to help this person and the others who have contacted us for prayer.” Soft music began playing, and ushers efficiently passed out three-by-five cards with handwritten requests submitted by people from around the country. Everyone got a card. Mine read: “From Pete and Angela who are struggling through financial problems. And Angela has an extremely bad thyroid condition.” Cymbala instructed us to form prayer groups of two or three, stand facing one another and read the prayers out loud. I formed a threesome with the man on my left, a middle-aged political consultant from Washington, and a tall fellow on my right who had recently moved to New York from Gary, Ind. “Would you mind reading mine too?” I asked the tall man, handing him my card. “I don't actually pray, and I don't want Pete and Angela to get shortchanged.” He nodded with nonjudgmental solemnity, read the request and asked God to bless the couple with prosperity and health. This transaction made me feel like a jerk. All Pete and Angela wanted was a simple prayer, and I couldn't bring myself to offer one. I took the card back and said, “I'm having a good thought for Pete and Angela.” I wished them happiness and wealth, in Hebrew. The two words sound alike in Hebrew and are a commonly used secular benediction. My prayer partners said, “Amen,” and we all sat down. The tabernacle's missionary to Haiti then took the stage and launched into a long, bitter account of her difficulties getting her car out of customs in Port au Prince. In heavily accented English she asked the congregation to pray against the Haitian customs assessors. Cymbala stepped in and asked the congregation to pray for a miracle ' and to help make it come true by donating $8,000 to liberate the mission's automobile. I calculated my share at $3 and paid gladly. In the absence of faith, works. I am, and always have been, a Sam Cooke agnostic: “I don't know what's up there beyond the sky.” And I have never been able to pray and mean it. On the two occasions when it appeared I was going to die, I didn't give God a thought. At the time, I saw this as a confirmation of my freedom from superstition. Thinking back, though, I find it disappointing that, faced with mortality, I worried about whether I had remembered to lock my front door. But I am in a small minority, at least in the United States. According to a recent study by the Pew Forum, 75 percent of Americans report that they pray at least once a week. Interestingly, only 39 percent attend a worship service once a week or more frequently. Steven Waldman, the editor in chief of Beliefnet.com, says he thinks this gap means prayer in America is becoming detached from traditional denominations. “In a way, prayer has become its own religion in this society,” he told me. “People pick and choose. They want to be their own spiritual contractors.” This tendency toward do-it-yourself spirituality affects every denomination. According to Waldman, there is a widespread phenomenon of Protestants burying plastic St. Josephs to help them sell their homes. Some Orthodox Jewish rabbis recommend the Lord's Prayer as a pathway to spirituality. Jesuit retreats routinely incorporate Hindu and Buddhist techniques of meditation. And for those who can't find what they want among the traditional brands, there are personal trainers known as spiritual directors. “People once learned to pray from priests and ministers and rabbis,” Liz Ellmann, executive director of Spiritual Directors International, told me. Spiritual Directors, with its headquarters in Washington State, has 5,400 registered practitioners in the U.S. alone who help people “seeking the mystery we name God.” It came into being in 1990 at Mercy Center, a Catholic retreat in California, but is nondenominational. “A lot of people today don't have that training,” Ellman said, referring to traditional prayer. “They want to learn how to pray, but they feel awkward in a house of worship.” Ellmann helped arrange a session for me in Manhattan with Joy Carol, an Anglican woman whose 20 or so clients range the religious gamut. Our meeting took place in her Morningside Gardens apartment. I felt a certain amount of trepidation visiting a stranger with what sounded like a trick name. Joy Carol met me at the door. She made me a cup of tea, seated me across from her on a living-room couch, rang a Tibetan prayer bell, lighted a candle and said a short prayer so gentle that I mistook it for small talk until she said, “Amen.” I was there as a reporter, but we agreed to do the session as if I were a client. She began by telling me about herself ' a Nebraska farm girl who became a woman of the world as a consultant to the Ford Foundation, Save the Children, theUnited Nations and other groups. She has master's degrees from the University of Maryland and the Episcopal Church's General Theological Seminary in New York, and now she preaches and leads retreats around the country. Fourteen years ago, she told me, she was almost killed in a car accident, and soon thereafter she survived a brain tumor. This was the start of her path from do-gooder to spiritual trainer. And now, she asked, what was my journey? Carol is an exceptional listener, and I readily told her about my own brushes with mortality and my vague sense that learning to pray would be a good skill to have, if it didn't require believing in God. She nodded understandingly; this was the Upper West Side, after all. “I can tell you are very intelligent,” she said ' always the right thing to say to a reporter ' “and that's fine, but sometimes intellect is a block to spirituality. And I'd like for you to discover your spiritual side because, well, it feels good. But it is work too. A lot of people in my practice have to work hard at it. Are you sometimes silent?” “I sleep with the television on,” I said. “Well, why not take a minute for silence one day. Sometimes in stillness we have spiritual moments. Just sit and ponder.” After 90 minutes of spiritual discussion, the sun was sinking over Broadway, a sure sign that my time was almost up. “What do I do now?” I asked. “Just ask yourself: 'What is really meaningful to me in my life? Is there something I'm longing for?' Let it roll around in your brain. If you would like to come back, you're very welcome to.” We rose and walked to the door, where she took me in a sisterly embrace and said, “You are a very special person.” I left the apartment in a glow. Only on the way down in the elevator did it occur to me that she probably says that to all her clients. But how did she intend to teach me to pray? What would happen in our next sessions? I didn't ask her at the time. I thought I should ponder for a while and see if I could figure it out on my own. I couldn't, though, and a few weeks later, I asked her by e-mail about my spiritual blueprint. “Life is about living out the questions ' not necessarily coming up with the answers,” she replied. “I would hope that you would find yourself moving to a deeper level of questions, insights, spiritual growth, and with that a yearning for the Presence of the Divine. Prayer would naturally be a part of the process ' and we would work out a way for you to pray that would fit your style of life and your unique spiritual journey.” A FEW DAYS before Passover, I went to see Rabbi Marc Gellman. I found him in the kitchen of his Long Island synagogue, Temple Beth Torah, wearing an apron and covered in flour, baking matzo for the kids in the religious school. We had never met, but Gellman dusted himself off, gave me a bear hug and led me into his study, which is full of mementos from his various careers. Gellman is a Reform rabbi of liberal theological leanings, a member of the Golf Writers Association of America, the former head of the New York Board of Rabbis, a scholar with a Ph.D. in philosophy from Northwestern University and a celebrity. He and his friend Msgr. Tom Hartman are the stars of a long-running cable show called “God Squad.” HBOmade an animated kids' film based on a book they wrote together. When I described to Gellman the exhilarating atmosphere at the Brooklyn Tabernacle, he sighed with professional envy. “There is no prayer harder than suburban Jewish prayer,” he said. “Our people don't get emotional in public. The only time I can recall really serious praying was after 9/11. I did 30 funerals around that time. We got 2,000 people at a memorial service. That was transcendent davening. “Evangelical Christians, Pentecostals, they go to church to pray,” Gellman went on to say. “Why else would they be there? But Jews are different. People come to temple to identify with other Jews, or socialize. The writer Harry Golden once asked his father, who was an atheist, why he went to services every Saturday. The old man told him, 'My friend Garfinkle goes to talk to God, and I go to talk to Garfinkle.' There's a lot of that.” “At least they come,” I said. “Sure. But when you have a large percentage at a religious service who aren't actually praying, it dilutes the quality of the entire experience.” “Like subprime mortgages on a bank's balance sheet,” I said. “Toxic Jews.” Gellman laughed. Two young associate rabbis who were sitting in on the meeting laughed less. Unlike Gellman, they do not have tenure at the congregation. One teaches prayer through yoga. Among her techniques is to encourage mourners to say the Kaddish prayer while standing on their heads, to acknowledge the upsetting nature of death. Reform Judaism is nothing if not responsive to changing times. Recently its liturgy incorporated a special prayer for people undergoing sex-change operations. And a predominantly gay synagogue in San Francisco, Congregation Sha'ar Zahav, has composed its own prayer to be said after anonymous sex. “In the dark, in a strange place, our father Jacob encountered a stranger with whom he grappled all night,” a reference to the Biblical story of Jacob wrestling with an angel. “He never knew the stranger's name, yet their encounter was a blessing which turned Jacob into Israel and made him realize, I have seen God face to face.” The prayer asks God ' “who created passion and wove it throughout creation” ' to bless casual sex and turn it into a blessing “that allows us to both touch and see the Divine.” Rabbi Gellman doesn't get involved in the midnight grappling of his congregation, anonymous or otherwise, and he prefers tried-and-true prayers to exotic new ones. “I think it's important to use Hebrew, saying the traditional words, even if you don't exactly know their meaning,” he said. “Praying in English is like kissing through a veil,” one of the young assistants said. “In the old days,” Gellman said, “cantors made the women cry. Now they just want to do performance pieces. And congregational singalongs aren't the Jewish way of praying. Our prayers are meant to be chanted rhythmically.” “Is that how you do it here?” I asked. Gellman gave me a long look. He and I grew up in the same Reform tradition. Both of us know how well mumbling Hebrew prayers would go over with the Reform Jews of Melville, Long Island. “I'm saying that techniques can make a difference,” Gellman said. “Like wrapping yourself in a prayer shawl if you want to shut out the world. But really, when you come right down to it, there are only four basic prayers. Gimme! Thanks! Oops! and Wow!” “That's it?” “Yep. Wow! are prayers of praise and wonder at the creation. Oops! is asking for forgiveness. Gimme! is a request or a petition. Thanks! is expressing gratitude. That's the entire Judeo-Christian doxology. That's what we teach our kids in religious school.” “What about adults who want to learn to pray?” “I tell them to start with prayers of Thanks! That's what Christians call 'grace.' Everybody has something to be grateful for.” “What if the person doesn't believe in God?” “Then I tell him to thank who or what seems appropriate,” Gellman said. “Hey, you've got to start somewhere. If people say prayer is a crutch, I don't disagree. Sometimes you need a crutch. But I don't believe in a God who is a magician and miraculously answers individual prayer. That's absurd.” ONCE IT WAS ALL simple. Catholics prayed in Latin for salvation in words and ceremonies dictated by the One True Church in Rome. Protestants prayed in fancy English for the expiation of sin and a place in a decorous heaven. Jews prayed in Hebrew to the One God who had inexplicably chosen us for a private destiny and saddled us with commandments. And then, in the time it took to go from Frank Sinatra to the Beatles, these ancient taboos and walls began to crash. Prayer changed, too. For Catholics, the key event was the Second Vatican Council. “Vatican II was a course correction when it came to Catholic prayer,” says Bradford Hinze, a Fordham University professor of theology who is old enough to have personally experienced the change. “Emphasis shifted to the centrality of the Bible for Catholic prayer.” Part of this populist shift involved better exposing laypeople to a centuries-old method of Biblical exegesis and meditation called lectio divina, or divine reading. Practitioners set time aside for a daily Bible reading in four stages: reading the text carefully (lectio), contemplating its meaning (meditatio), entering into a dialogue with God about it (oratio) and reaching a wordless contemplation of God (contemplatio). “Priests and women religious have always been taught to do this,” Hinze explains. “But Vatican II called for 'full and active participation' by all Catholics. Part of that was praying in the vernacular. Another part was introducing lectio divina to laypeople.” After Vatican II the practice became widespread among the laity. Catholic prayer has not only become more accessible to the laity, it seems; it has also become more private and personal. Janet Ruffing, a member of the Sisters of Mercy, is the director of Fordham's program on spirituality and spiritual direction. “In America, among Roman Catholics, roughly 80 percent of those doing pastoral ministry in Catholic parishes are women,” she says. “Women religious have been very active in promoting deeper contemplative, mystical prayer. Until Vatican II, that was reserved for the very few. Now it is becoming the ordinary expectation for people with a regular prayer life.” Ruffing says that the Eucharist remains the defining source of Catholic spirituality, but that you can have authentic spiritual experiences not mediated by ritual. “Most people don't live in churches. And these days, most laypeople tend to do more contemplative prayer and less confession. The sacrament of penance has radically diminished since Vatican II.” In today's American Catholic Church, in Rabbi Gellman's terms, Oops! is being replaced by Wow! There is a renewed popularity to the mystical component of prayer, and it is found especially in the retreat movement. Ruffing explained to me that retreats, particularly for laypeople, are like marathons; you have to train for them. Beginners usually start with a weekend. Eight-day retreats are the next step, and for those with sufficient spiritual stamina, there is a full month of exercises. One technique used on some of these retreats comes from the Contemplative Outreach movement. Retreatants are given a single word, “like a mantra,” Ruffing says, and urged to return to it when their minds wander from prayer and contemplation. Some Catholics (and many Episcopalians) use the John Main method, named after a Benedictine monk. This is essentially Hindu chanting, which Main, who introduced the method, learned in Kuala Lumpur in the 1950s from a swami who gave him what Main called a “Christian mantra.” “There has been a watershed recovery of mystical theology in our lifetime,” Hinze says. “The church is experiencing globalization. Buddhism and other Eastern practices are increasingly influential, and we are at an early stage in our understanding of them. The fear among some is that Christians will develop an enthusiasm for Eastern traditions without discovering their own mystical sources. Still, this is the way a significant portion of American Roman Catholicism is moving. The old us-versus-them doesn't work anymore.” ECUMENISM AND UNIVERSALITY are by no means limited to the Catholic Church in America. Mainline Protestants frequently use the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius (a set of Jesuit practices) in their own retreats, as well as chanting mantras and meditations alongside the traditional liturgy. Even Orthodox Jews, who have traditionally been inhospitable to such innovations, as well as to outsiders, have shown signs of change. Rabbi Tzvi Freeman, the director of a service called Ask the Rabbi on a Web site for the Hasidic movement Chabad, speaks in a prayer vocabulary short on traditional Yiddish and long on New Age maxims of self-improvement, the nature worship of the New England Transcendentalists and Asian meditation. “A lot of people in their late 50s begin to feel small,” he told me. “Some feel existential angst. They want to relate to a higher entity. We call that 'prayer.' ” Chabad doctrine is that Jews and gentiles have, literally, different kinds of souls, but many non-Jews nonetheless contact the Chabad Web site looking for insights. To a man who wrote asking how to pray in a Jewish way, Freeman gently steered him back to his own tradition, noting that as long as “we are connecting to the One Master of Heaven and Earth, all prayers are heard, every soul is counted.” Freeman suggested the man start with the Lord's Prayer and add a few words of his own ' which is pretty much the same advice Reverend Henderson gives to his evangelical students. Some of the requests to Ask the Rabbi have a highly practical aspect and elicit practical responses. A fellow named Charles wrote to inquire if there is a prayer “for someone who annoys someone else?” Answer: Try meditating on the person's good qualities. An Orthodox Jewish man said that he finds traditional prayers meaningless. The reply: Tell this to God directly and see what happens. And to a mother, on teaching her children to pray: Wake them up before you finish your prayers so they can see you pray; sing prayers with them; don't overdo it ' 10 minutes of prayer is enough for a first grader, 20 to 25 minutes for a 10-year-old. Only at the end does the Web site suggest what would have once seemed obvious: joining a synagogue. I SPENT EASTER Sunday in Berkeley Springs, W.Va., a hamlet of 663 souls in the eastern panhandle of the state. Berkeley Springs, which is also known as Bath, was America's first spa. In colonial times, gambling gave the village a racy reputation. A local historian informed me that a noted 18th-century bishop denounced the place as a “seat of sin.” If so, the bacchanal is long over. There is a small store on Main Street that sells crystals and other New Age paraphernalia and is rumored by some locals to be a witches' coven, but it is surrounded and outnumbered by a large variety of Christian redoubts. Decent people in the county are expected to be in church on Easter, although, according to the Rev. Bob Osborne, pastor of the Presbyterian church and head of the Morgan County Clergy Association, some show up for social reasons ' the local equivalent of going to shul to talk to Garfinkle. On the day I met him, Osborne expected a full house. But he admitted that he has been losing members to local evangelical churches. “They aren't burdened with liturgy or a tradition that demands intellectual engagement,” he said. I asked Osborne where I could find such a congregation, and he reluctantly mentioned an Assembly of God congregation. “I don't know them,” he said. “They are way out of town. You may have trouble finding it.” Way out of town in Berkeley Springs turned out to mean a few minutes past the bowling alley, and when I arrived at the church, the choir was still rehearsing. The chapel looked like a Holiday Inn meeting room. As I walked in, the singers and musicians were in the middle of a hymn, and they finished singing with their eyes fixed on me. A lady in a church bonnet walked over, said, “Happy Resurrection Day,” and waited politely for me to explain my presence. I told her I was a writer from New York. “God bless you,” said the woman. “Be sure to tell the people up there that this is still a Christian nation.” At the Brooklyn Tabernacle, you hear modern Christian gospel. Here you get the same old-time music that Elvis sang as a boy at the East Tupelo First Assembly of God. As the choir rehearsed, I sat in a pew taking notes. A small girl sat nearby doing the same. I peeked and saw that she was grading the songs as the choir performed them. “I want to be a reporter, too,” she said when she noticed my interest. “Maybe you'll be a music critic,” I said. “My mama asked me to do it,” she told me. I offered to show her how to write her name in Hebrew. Soon I was surrounded by the children of the choir. They wanted their own names written backward, and they also wanted a chance to testify. “I prayed to Jesus when my grandmother broke her leg,” a little girl said. “Now she can get by herself to the bathroom.” “Amen,” the kids said. “I prayed over my sister and cured her asthma,” a teenage girl said. She wasn't bragging. She just wanted me to know. “A boy named Wayne was burned in a fire,” another boy said. “The whole church prayed for him, and now he's getting around without a walker.” The church was filling up now. The pastor came over to greet me and wish me a happy Resurrection Day. We shook on it. He mentioned that he knows Sean Hannity, which was more than I could say. He took the pulpit and began with the traditional announcement, “Jesus Christ has risen!” There was a chorus of amens, and the pastor said, “Give Jesus a big hand.” There are some 300,000 churches in America, and I could have picked any one to attend on Easter morning, but I liked being in this one. Especially the kids. They didn't need Reverend Henderson's prayer techniques, or the high-tech mantras of the Brooklyn Tabernacle. Their prayers weren't Rabbi Gellman's suburban Jewish prayers of Thanks! offered to whom it may concern. They didn't pray to de-center their egos or find transcendence or to set off on a lifelong therapeutic spiritual journey. They prayed to a God with whom they were on a first-name basis, and they believed their prayers gave them power, which they used on behalf of their asthmatic sisters and infirm grandparents and a kid they knew with burns on his body. Sitting in church on Easter morning, I realized that I was probably never going to become a praying man. But if, by some miracle, I ever do, I hope my prayers will be like the prayers of the kids I met at the Love church in Berkeley Springs. Straight-up Gimme! on behalf of people who really need the help.