Dancing about architecture

Last night I joined a small group from the Mothers' Union in the Ayrshire Region of our diocese. The evening was devoted to the subject of Prayer. Spelling it as I just have with a capital 'P' in a sense is a reminder to me of what I was trying to get across last night. In our imagination, prayer can very quickly become something big. On the strength of this leap of the imagination there quickly follows the temptation to regard prayer as something we aspire to. It becomes something we must learn. Subconsciously it becomes something always a little bit out of reach. I discovered the other day that Amazon has over 200,000 books devoted to prayer! I'm reminded of the line from Elvis Costello who said: Writing about music is a bit like dancing about architecture - it's a really stupid thing to do. 
Of course, there's nothing wrong about writing or reading books on prayer, and it clearly implies there's a market out there for this devotional material. But I wonder if, in the face of all this verbiage, one can be left with the false impression that there is some thing we are not getting when it comes to prayer, some esoteric technique or talismanic form of words. It strikes me that when Jesus was asked by his disciples to teach them to pray, he offered no such technique. Even though we now regularly repeat the Lord's Prayer, I have the feeling that all Jesus was trying to get across to his friends was to simply pray.
The Incarnation, if nothing else, surely shows us that a sea change has come about in our relationship with God. Certainly we cannot be flippant in our attitude to prayer, but I have the feeling that the abiding sense God wishes for us is that prayer is the expression (whether in words or without words) of an already existent reality. We needn't dance about architecture when it comes to prayer. We just need to dance.