The Nature of Prayer

What is the nature of prayer?

There are times I think of prayers like smoke. I love incense for reminding me of this -- and I see our prayers leap through the burning coals onto the incense smoke stream and get wafted upward as they disperse into the sky. So maybe it is that our prayers rise and granulate, staying aloft like cloud-cover, bridging that space between heaven and earth, like a smokey grout between levels of the universe. I see photos of the Milky Way taken from satellites and imagine that the smokey bits, the washes of light between stars, are the gathered prayers of us all, waiting in the irridescence of God's celestial reading room.

Then there are times I think prayers are like telephone calls. It is mysterious to me how I can speak into my telephone and hear someone a thousand miles away talking back at me. Yet, it happens. When I was Catholic, I'd imagine that my prayers were a telephone call to a saint. They could handle direct communication. Yet I also felt that sometimes my prayers would get sidelined to an answering machine, or a pile of heavenly "While You Were Out" message slips. There are so many people with needs greater than mine, urgencies far more urgent than mine. So I'd call on saint after saint, littering the clouds with message slips, hoping one would get noticed and that I hadn't overdone my requests for intercession. The saints were, after all, God's main messenger service.

But sometimes prayer seems like water, fluid and wild as a brook that careens down a mountainside. There is no stopping it, as it just blurts out of rocks and rills and tumbles all around the feet of God, a messy but sinceree pool of intention, flawed but shining in the sun. All of our voices merge and flow into one moment of sparkle at his feet, having gathered momentum as we flew down the hillside to him, eager and full of hope.

Yet, in Spring I am reminded that prayer is like earth, the foundation from which growth happens, the richly nurtured ground of things, the basic, warm nourishing soil of our lives. Prayer is where we work and toil, hoping that something will later blossom and grow. Prayer is, perhaps, the garden in which we attempt to grow our lives in a way that will bring God pleasure.

And then I dream, and in the silence of unfettered sleep I feel the hand of God on my heart, knowing that He has come as He always comes, to feel my prayers, and to take them into His own heart.

Communal Prayer -- Individual Prayer

Alto Artist made a helpful comment on my prior post about prayer. She said "... I think of communal prayer differently; for me it's small, in a way. In a group I can lean on the thoughts of others; when my attention wanders, I still feel like the prayer is being carried by the people around me to wherever it has to go. But praying alone--sometimes it feels too intimidating, knowing that no one else but myself is responsible for what God hears at that moment.

Alto, bless you for this. Prayer is deeply nuanced by its setting; you are so right. There is a difference between communal and individual prayer for me too - most often, in my Christian faith tradition, communal prayers are part of the liturgy, so that great ribbon of formal prayer has been winding itself out Godward for centuries. Once in a while I grok the fact that my voice joins billions of others in timeless supplication. It is at that moment that the clouds slam together, and zillions of irridescent stars tumble out.

One of the other times I get that feeling most keenly is with my extended family at Passover Seder every year. As part of their (and now my extended) tradition, at one point in the evening's liturgy, the door is held open for the arrival of Elijah. Without fail each year I get this moving image of household doors being opened in Jewish homes around the world, like a travelling wave of earthly welcome. I get that we are all a part of something bigger, a larger reaching. The Passover Seder has a way of driving home that point every year -- perhaps because it is a liturgy about community and about joy.

Then there is silent communal prayer, which has a whole different tone to it, as the prayers are not formulaic. There we sit at worship, or in retreat, sharing intention, which is a very powerful thing to share. There is a huge difference between the way a quiet room feels and the way intentionally contemplative space feels.

In both of the above -- liturgical and silent communal prayer, I feel held, even embraced -- but also I feel limited. I know there are people who can pray with others and on their own at the same time, rather like those vocalists that appear on NPR occasionally who can sing whole chords at once. Or people who can rub their tummies and tap their heads at the same time.

I can't do that.

I am a one-note-at-a-time prayer person. I can pray melody, or I can pray harmony.

Then there is solitary prayer -- such a reedy thing, like the orchestra's piccolo. I wonder how my little prayer finds its way to God. It has to work its way through so much -- through the noise of cities, the rumbling of volcanoes, the music of millions of other prayers wending their way heavenward. I think there is so much going on, that my prayer will fall like autumn's last leaf, unnoticed at the foot of the heavenly throne. I feel the weakness, the vulnerability, the impossible nature of my prayer. But then something catches in my heart, and I pray and I pray and I pray.