Today's morning insight - the more I work with prayer in the Church fathers, for my latest book, the more I am convinced that the Church fathers would say:

It's better to pray short prayers than long prayers, and it's better to repeat a short prayer over and over than go on and on with a one-time improvised prayer.

It's better to pray with the words of Jesus, or the words of Scripture, than to pray in your own words. Not that there is anything wrong with praying in your own words in your own private prayer, necessarily, but if Jesus criticized prayers that "babble like the pagans" (Matthew 6:7), the point is that we are more likely to fall into babbling on if we are praying in our pwn words than if we are praying shorter prayers from Scripture. (And as I have shown elsewhere, the word "repetition" is not in the Greek of Matthew 6:7, so it's not against repetition in prayer).

When it comes to leading prayer in a group, especially if that means extemporaneous prayer, the Church fathers would say that's only for clergy to do, or lay catechists who have theological training and who are authorized by the bishop to do so. This is because it's easy to accidentally fall into heresy when making up prayers without theological training.

I think Protestants are not going to like this book. But I did not set out to write a Catholic book about prayer. I set out to write a book about prayer in the early Church, and it should not surprise us that Catholic prayer traditions did not develop in opposition to early Christian prayer, but directly from it.