What is Prayer?

Some responses to a survey someone sent me on the subject of prayer

What is prayer?

Prayer is speaking with God, i.e., speaking to God with the intention of listening for him speaking to me.

Why do you pray?

Because those who put their faith in Christ are commanded to do so, because communal prayer as a component of Christian worship helps to form and sustain the community of faith, and because at times I feel the need to articulate my hopes, fears, worries, etc., to God. (I believe that God exists in some temporal fashion, and thus that our prayers actually do have an effect upon him. Even if God already knows what I need, my asking him for it gives him a reason to provide it he did not already have. The future of God’s creation is open, and how things go depends in part on what we and God work out together; our prayers are, I think, a significant part of that.)

How important is prayer to you, and why?

God created this world with the aim of it being inhabited by creatures he can invite to share in his triune life. Now, prior the resurrected life when he will again be empirically present with us, our speaking with God, communally, and also individually, is the principal way to be living that life. Many times, to pray is to remind myself, in the face of the countervailing evidence, that there really is a God who listens, cares and acts.

I do not assume that God has the ability to know precisely what goes on in a human being’s mind, nor, if he has that ability, that he would exercise it in a systematic way, given the value he places on the integrity of persons distinct from himself. I assume instead that what God knows of our inner selves depends to some degree on what we choose to tell him. The physicist Leo Szilard once told a friend that he was writing an account of his experiences, but that he wasn’t planning to publish it. The friend asked why he was doing it, and Szilard said he was writing it for God. The friend said, “But God already knows what happened!” To which Szilard replied, “Yes, but not from my point of view.” I believe that to pray privately is to invite God into my subjective world, asking him to see things from my point of view, and seeking help to begin to see things from his point of view.

How often do you think a person should pray, and why?

This varies greatly from one individual to the next. It’s analogous to, “How often should a person talk to his wife, to his best friends, etc.?” Because God is God, he is not everything; he wants us to live our human lives and not be concerned principally with religious matters. But he does intend for our relationship with him to be uniquely important in our lives. I think it's particularly important to pray when you don't feeling like praying.

Have you experienced the impact of your prayer in your own personal life? If so how?

The most important prayer for me has been in corporate Eucharistic worship, particularly the “prayer of humble access,” in the (old) Book of Common Prayer, where one kneels at the altar to receive the elements. Praying that prayer, one finds oneself simultaneously alone before God and together with one’s fellow worshippers, all of us being shaped by God’s unconditional acceptance and love. I grew up within evangelicalism, which was for me in many ways a religion of condemnation and control, so this has been a decisive, transformative experience. Now when I pray I know I speak to a God who really does love me as I am, a God in whose presence I have no need to pretend to be more faithful, or wiser, more serious, more committed, or better than I am.