PRAYER, THE NATURE OF

THE NATURE OF PRAYER

Prayer is the language of friendship with God. Prayer sustains a life of friendship with God, a friendship that God took the initiative to start. It has the pedagogical and transformative aspects of all spiritual practices. They help situate daily life in the horizon of God’s friendship. Spiritual practices should not degenerate into mere technique. Friends enjoy regularly conversing with each other because that is the lifeblood of the friendship. The practices of Christian prayer have their own integrity; they are not means to personal growth or strategies to trigger peak experiences. As disciples of Jesus we are expect to admire and revere him. But Jesus desires more than that: “I call you not my servants, but my friends.” The servant-master relationship has little room for the intimacy of friends. Jesus treats them as friends by disclosing who he is and where he is going. Knowing Jesus is mysterious, but that knowledge grows through intimate conversation that is the basic medium of friendship.

We start to pray not in a vacuum but in community through forms and rituals that have been shaped over time. The Lord’s Prayer shows that we are introduced into God’s family, and it contains the basic modes of all private and communal prayer: praise, thanksgiving, intercession, repentance.

As with the initial stages of friendship, people begin to pray for a variety of reasons, some of which are probably self-interested. Typically we begin to pray for what we want, then we are gradually led to seek what we need, namely, a deeper and unconditional relation with God where we let God be the judge of what we should receive. Prayer may begin as a technique, but under the impetus of the Spirit it becomes a practice, a virtue, sheer joy. A regular discipline of prayer has its own dynamic and rhythm that should shift attention from self-concern to the Other. It moves toward whole-hearted attention to God who is revealed through Christ. Prayer becomes an activity that is done for its own sake, just as friends want to be in each other’s company simply because it is good.

At the same time, friends are bound by common interests beyond themselves. Their common cause, whether sports or justice or the environment, enriches the bond of friendship and draws the best from them. Christian prayer pulls Christians beyond themselves to active devotion to God’s cause in the world. It longs for God to reign in the whole of creation, for a deeper impact of God’s liberating and healing Spirit. Intercession for the world naturally leads to service in the world.

Prayer is not an aid, a technique or means. Rather, prayer is part of having a life formed in joy, gratitude, awe and compassion. These gifts are directed towards God and all God’s creation.

Even prayers of intercession are not pragmatic strategies but they are exercises in locating our concerns in the concern of God and opening ourselves to finding God’s way of responding, which quite often does not match our requests.

 Although we do not pray in order to become reverent, humble, grateful, caring, and hopeful, these virtues are formed in paying whole-hearted attention to God and seeing the world through the perspective defined by God’s word.

The Gospel tells us that the intercessory prayer locates all the events of life and all the happenings of our time within the space of God’s reign. Nothing great or small falls outside the compassion of “the One in whom we live and move and have our being.” Intercessory prayer helps us perceive traces of the dawn of God’s reign. It brings what we need into the scope of what God wants, relating all things to the friendship that God has for us.