Prayer has many forms. Prayers of blessing and adoration praises and glorifies the Divine. Declarative or Affirmative prayer are statements of Absolute Truth. A scriptural example from the 23rd psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Prayers of Thanksgiving are expressions of gratitude. Intercession or (supplication) prayer is when we pray about or for others. A prayer of petition is when we ask God to fulfill a need in our lives. Centering Prayer is a method of silent prayer that prepares us to experience God's presence within us. Some people say that meditation is a form of prayer. The list goes on and on and varies with denomination or faith tradition. I could not possibly list them all, but you get the idea: in prayer, the possibilities are endless!
My favorite definition of prayer comes from the 12 Step Group tradition. “Prayer is the conscious contact with the God of your understanding.”
Let me make this clear: to my mind there is no wrong way to pray. As we can see, the ways are many!
What is the point of prayer? In a broad sense, it might seem that prayer might be some sort of communication. Is that what we are doing when we pray? Are we picking up some sort of celestial smart phone and having a chat?
Perhaps so. Tomas Merton wrote this about communication: “The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words. It is beyond speech. It is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity, but we discover an old unity. My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be, is what we are.”
So, if we consider prayer a profound kind of communication, we might be on to something there.
What is the point of prayer? There’s a lot that has been written about prayer. A common question I hear is, “Why does prayer seem to work sometimes and other times not?”
I wonder if it might be a good idea to expand our understanding of prayer “working” by first – by keeping an open mind. Spirituality is by nature, mysterious.
When I explore a faith or belief issue, try on a spiritual garment, so to speak, I leave a lot of wiggle room. That spaciousness prevents me from constricting too hard when facing a spiritual mystery.
When we ponder this idea of prayer “working” or “not working” it might be helpful to consider what is going on when we pray.
What is the point of prayer? Theologian Paul Hasselbeck has a rather succinct answer: “Prayer is not about the goodies we get, it’s about the goodness we realize we are.”
Author and Physician Naomi Remen wrote in her book, Kitchen Table Wisdom, this about prayer: “I think that prayer may be less about asking for the things we are attached to than it is about relinquishing our attachments in some way. It can take us beyond fear, which is an attachment, and beyond hope, which is another form of attachment. It can help us remember the nature of the world and the nature of life, not on an intellectual level, but in a deep and experiential way. When we pray, we don’t change the world, we change ourselves. We change our consciousness. We move from an individual, isolated making-things-happen kind of consciousness to a connection on the deepest level with the largest possible reality.”
Prayer does not always “work” in the way we might think of it “working.”
Consider the point of prayer. When we understand that prayer does not change God, and may not change our circumstances – however, that it changes us. Then how could it not work and work every single time?
I thank you for reading, be blessed this day.
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