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What is Prayer?

“So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” ~ Mark 11:24



There is a great deal of misunderstanding surrounding the practice of prayer. For many people, prayer involves asking God for some good (such mercy, forgiveness, healing, protection, and the like) or for some thing (new car, new house, more money, and the like). For most people, I suspect, prayer — whether for a good or a thing — is based on a false idea.


And that idea is that God is some great Being in the Sky who will bestow these things on those who are deserving or who meet some secret, never specified criteria. Behind the practice of prayer that is based on such an idea is the sense that we must somehow convince God to give us what we are asking for. The trick is, we never quite know what criteria we are supposed to meet.


But God is not a being. That which we call God is being and consciousness itself, that out of which discrete beings — such as ourselves — arise. If God were a supernatural, all powerful Being, then yes — God could bestow boons on those chosen according to some mysterious divine counsel. But if God is being and consciousness itself, then how does that which we call God bestow anything?


Over the years, I have frequently found myself pondering the verse at the beginning of this essay, from Mark’s Gospel, in which Jesus says that we receive that which we ask for if we believe we have already received it. It is an idea that is often used abusively: “Oh, God didn’t give you what you asked for? Then you must not have believed in the right way.” But I don’t think this verse means that. At least, it doesn’t mean that to me.


Most formal Christian liturgical prayer is focused on petition. That is, on asking for forgiveness, mercy, guidance, understanding, healing, acceptance, love — a constellation of things that represent what we, as human beings, really deep down, want to experience. Each of these brings, at some level, a kind of healing into our lives. And if we are truly honest with ourselves, it is this healing deep down inside us that we long for. I note that traditional Christian liturgical prayer does not ask God for stuff. That is a particular innovation perfected in the prosperity gospel movement which, from my point of view, is a false spirituality that has no authenticity to it. It is simply a movement presided over by charlatans seeking to enrich themselves with a religious marketing scheme. The truth is that God cannot get you a new car or increase your salary or whatever. That’s not what any of this is about.


So if we use the tradition of liturgical prayer as our clue, then we can recognize that the authentic practice of prayer is about naming our deepest longings in the hope that these longings will be met with a grace that brings some measure of healing to us at the very depths of our being.


If this, then, is what prayer is about, then what do we make of this verse from Mark’s Gospel about believing that we have received it, in order to make it ours?


What I have come to in my own reflection, given the nature of what we call God as being and consciousness itself, is that the universe itself is such that all of what we need for our own healing — and the healing of the human family — is already present. Forgiveness, mercy, love, acceptance, understanding, guidance, consolation — all of these things are already available to us. They do not require us to drop a prayer coin into the cosmic vending machine hoping that the right prize will come out. The universe, the sacred, God supplies these things to us. That is what this verse in Mark is telling us: entrust yourself fully to the universe/the sacred/God, and discover that what you need is already there.

That, however, is difficult to do. There are 1001 things that get in the way of our experiencing that for which we long, that which we need to be healed. We get caught up in the flux of the world’s demands and challenges, and we lose touch with that which we need. It is part of why we need healing in the first place. And this is where the practice of prayer comes in: it helps us to remember and to re-align ourselves with the divine grace that brings these home to us.


Liturgical prayer often asks for these graces that we need to be granted to us. But that is simply a device that allows us to access and surface our longing for what we need. Remember: we already have what we are asking for. The asking for it in prayer is a therapeutic tool to help ourselves — not something that God needs to happen or to hear.


Another prominent feature of liturgical prayer is an acknowledgment or confession of sin. This, too, is a therapeutic tool designed to help us surface the fact that we often miss the mark (what the word “sin” means) in terms of living from our deepest, most authentic self — the self that knows itself as forgiven, loved, guided, consoled, accepted.


Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Buddhist teacher, wrote a wonderful little book called The Energy of Prayer, that I highly recommend. Essentially, he talks about how “the energies of prayer and meditation allow us to reconnect with our higher [I would prefer to say deeper] selves while satisfying our basic need to connect with the world as a whole.” In other words, prayer and meditation are energetic, they invite certain energies into our lives and create energies that we “send” out into the larger world. This is why, for example, praying for others can be powerful, because it sends an energy from us to the one for whom we pray that brings connection and healing. Such a thing is not at all far fetched when we consider what quantum physics as shown us about the close relationship between particles that are very far apart. We can energetically support others in our life — and the life of the world — through the practice of prayer and meditation.

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