"What is Prayer?"

I do not yet have a firm grasp on what prayer actually is. Perhaps my limited understanding results from the fact that prayer is, as Richard Foster wrote in Prayer, "always initiated by God." God is the Beginning and the End of all things…including my interaction with Him. All contact with God finds its origin in God Himself; our communion with Him derives from our responses to Him—to something He’s done, to Who He is, or to what we believe we need from Him or want Him to do for us or someone we love. God created us so that He could enjoy relating to us. Even though I do not believe God tries to force us to come to Him, I do believe He’s placed in all of us a hunger to know where we came from and where we’re going. All of us, to a greater or lesser degree, thirst for meaning and purpose in life. We want to be wanted and want to be a part of something bigger than just our own circles of life.

Prayer is, I have experienced, one of the ways God quickens our souls to that for which we hunger, thirst, and long. It is also a medium through which He reveals Himself as not only the supplier of that which meets our needs, but also the cause of those very needs. But what of God’s needs? Does He have any? I do not know. Throughout the scriptures, God uses the image of a banquet to describe the kind of relationship He wishes to have with us. I’ve always wondered why God wishes to be with us so much. Could it be that He hungers for (or, dare I say, "needs?") relationship with us just as much as we do with Him? Again, I do not know. In my mind's eye I can imagine God sitting at the table and enjoying the food, the conversation, and the time just as much as we do.

The “spiritual life” has to do with how God relates to us and how we in turn relate to God. Intimacy takes time and involves great risk from both sides of the equation—God’s and ours. Does God risk rejection with us? It is possible. All my life, I have been taught that God is all knowing. I have been taught also that God is relational. How does one reconcile the “all knowing” part of God with the uncertainties and emotional ups and downs characteristic of relationship-building? If God always knows exactly what’s going to happen, how does such a venue differ from the one where I sit in front of the TV and just watch the same episode of Seinfeld over and over and over again? I picture God looking at us and wondering actually if today will be the day we say our first word, or take our first step, or do any one of a billion other things. I think God delights in just waiting to see what happens next.

Prayer is, I believe, the prime medium through which we relate to God and through which He relates to us. Prayer, while it is a means to an end--THE end being finding and discovering God--is, as Thomas Merton wrote in Contemplative Prayer, an end unto itself as well. More than just finding God, it is, in many ways, a resting in He Whom we have found (or He Who has found us!). It is in this searching and being searched, finding and being found, pursuing and being pursued that our deepest needs and, I think, God’s needs (and I hope--and pray!--that I am not being blasphemous here) are met. For me, the whole theology of prayer is muddy at best. (And, me thinks, God gets a pretty big charge out of such a thing.) Could it be that God, out of the shear possibility of intimacy with us, has chosen to “lay aside” some of His attributes so that He might immerse Himself in the authentic risk of pursuing that which He wants, but does not yet have (and may never have)? He’s done it before. Perhaps He’s more comfortable with paradox, risk, and uncertainty than we are.

I am very interested in any thoughts you might have on this whole subject.