Prayer Is....

The rejection of science has always been around from the time of Galileo and Copernicus to the present.  Such rejection has normally proved to be pure ignorance and/or stupidity. Science is often rejected by those who claim to be religious, who think, erroneously, that religious faith is somehow endangered by the advance of science.  The truth is that religious faith is endangered, not by science, but by its own stagnation of religious conceptions.  The act of prayer is one of these stagnated conceptions.

A minister was asked by his congregation to pray for rain.  This is what he said in his prayer:  “Thy servant has been importuned to pray for rain, but Thou knowest, O Lord, that it is not so much rain that is needed on these farms as it is good old barn manure for the success of the crops in this community.”  When prayer is seen and used as a tool for getting what we think is best, or for our own desired ends, it ceases to be what prayer is.  All our praying must end with:  “Not my will, O Lord, but thine be done,” to protect us from our erroneous concept of what prayer is.

I am discovering in my present circumstances that prayer is not asking, pleading or begging that my desire be fulfilled or that what I want more than anything else in the world should  happen, in spite of the facts or with total disregard for reality.  I am finding anew that prayer is a spiritual communion with God, the Love at the heart of things.  

Prayer is itself the reward and the victory.  Prayer is not what comes after praying, but what occurs in the act of prayer itself.  The seeking is the finding.  The wrestling is the blessing.  It is no more the means to something else than love is.  It is an end in itself.  It is its own excuse for being.  

Prayer is living with One who needs us as we need Him.  It is connecting with One who is sharing with us, always, the joys, travails and the tragedies of our living.  

"You pray in your distress and in your need;
would that you might pray also
in the fulness of your joy and in your days of abundance."
(Kahil Gibran, The Prophet)