Feb 11

Feb 11 Prayer

Many years ago, I wrote a book about prayer entitled Weaving a Life of Prayer. I remember thinking at the time how audacious it seemed to think that I could contribute to the conversation about prayer. The miracle that it actually was published often reminds me that the paradox of prayer is that it is an incredibly personal and yet universal experience.

Every prayer life is a unique sacred act of opening and offering oneself to the Divine One. The way in which you approach God is your way alone. And the way in which God reaches to you is for you alone, reflecting God’s ability to connect with you as the one-and-only you that ever has been or will be created.

Some call prayer watching and waiting, others call it mindfulness. Whether in silence, stillness, longing, listening, centering, crying, interceding, hallowing, groaning, releasing, worshiping, offering, with humbled heart, or bended knee, prayer in its many forms and voices all delight the One to whom we pray.. I imagine it sounds like an original piece of music sung to God, just as God “exults over you with loud singing.” (Zephaniah 3:17)

Regardless of our prayer practice and experience, we all seem to long for more in our praying. It’s a question that arises in many spiritual direction sessions. And often we begin by acknowledging that the longing itself is prayer. I like to imagine that longing for God or a deeper prayer life is actually God’s mutual longing within us. The Spirit plants that longing in the heart which compels us to embrace the Divine and settle into the loving presence that eternally surrounds us each day.

I love the way Thomas Merton expressed his unique prayer life when he said, “What I do is live. How I pray is breathe.” Indeed, the breath itself is the exchange of air God first breathed into us at creation that named us as “living souls.” Breath itself is soul-talk. And so God becomes the source and instigator of our prayer conversation.

For Your Own Sacred Conversation: