prayer

 What is praying? I've been struggling to know what I ought to be doing when praying, or to see its point. There are a range of answers (talking to, spending time with, God) which aren't wrong but don't get someone like me anywhere. And whilst I've sometimes found rote prayers (the Rosary; repeating the Jesus Prayer - below) truly meaningful, at other times that all seems pretty empty.

Lord Jesus Christ, son of God 

Have mercy on me, a sinner

Here's how I'm thinking about it now. Prayer is about righting imbalances in the soul. (Soul: not some non-existent spooky entity; instead: the grounding core of our being, the possibility of our hope, conscience and liveliness.) It's about inner honesty. On the axis of acceptance and striving, it's at the acceptance end. It's the practice of the relinquishing of futile will and the restoration of a trusting acceptance - even if the result is a new, different, kind of striving. It's the restoration of contact with the ground of your being, it is resting securely in that ground.

    Examples:

Praying for mercy (e.g. the Jesus prayer). The truth is that many of us spend our lives shrouded, to different degrees at different times, in shame. It's one of the stickiest and most perception-shaping affects there is. It often remains unconscious, driving our moods and reactivities rather than revealing itself clearly to us. By praying for mercy (ie for loving compassion, warmth, kindness, care) we make it possible to become conscious of such shame as was before only semi-conscious. We own it. So that then we can put it down, dissolving it in the greater sea of love. It occurs to me that prayers of mercy may sometimes make possible the soul state required for other prayers to meaningfully be meant.

Praying for a friend who is sick. It seems to me superstitious and irreligious to imagine that privately praying for the sick aids their recovery. So what's such prayer really about? I honour the friend in my heart; I stop ignoring them and their troubles. I remember what most matters - friendship, life, love. As part of this I may plead their recovery; it's good to be honest like that about what one wants. But at the same time I know that I can't myself effect their recovery. In the language of faith we say: I put them in God's hands.

Praying prayers of gratitude. We tend to take good things for granted. And this makes us miserable because we then tend to only notice the difficulties in life, rather than have them properly set against a backdrop of all that's good. By praying prayers of thanks we vivify attitudes of humble gratitude in our mind, recall all that is good, and can affirm life positively, rather than conceive it as a tiresome business to be handled. The latter attitude is exhausting, and adopting it sucks the life not only out of ourselves but also out of those who encounter us. Cultivating gratitude and hopefulness (a willing expectant attitude) rather than fear and management is a true tonic.

Prayers of contrition. We aren't always good at acknowledging our faults. By owning, in our hearts, what we've done wrong, we can then know God's forgiveness. (Confessing to God in the presence of another person, e.g. a priest, can help this become even more real.) This sets things aright in the soul again. The unconscious or semi-conscious guilt that gnaws away at us can be let go. (Of course it may also be important now to make apt reparation to wronged others.)

As well as these there is, for the Christian, the most fundamental prayer we have, the one Jesus taught us, called The Lord's Prayer. It incorporates several of the above, but also stresses that theme we might call 'the fear of the Lord' (which, the Psalmists tell us, is the beginning of wisdom and a fountain of life). This has to do with the cultivation of humility, the acknowledgement of how little under our own steam our lives can meaningfully be. All prayer is unselfing: it's placing ourselves back in God's hands (which we only imagined we'd left). Prayer, it restores us with that ground of our being, i.e. with God.

Our Father, who art in heaven

Hallowed be thy name

Thy kingdom come

Thy will be done

On earth as it is in heaven

Give us this day our daily bread

And forgive us our trespasses

As we forgive those who trespass against us

And lead us not into temptation

But deliver us from evil

And finally there is such prayer as vivifies within us what I want to call 'icons' or 'archetypes' of love. (I think this is what psychoanalysts gesture at with their notion of the 'installation of the good internal object'.) Of these the Hail Mary is supreme:

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee

Blessed art thou among women; blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus

Holy Mary, mother of God

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death

Perhaps I could leave it there. But there are a few further things I'd like to share. One is that, in learning how to pray, I've found it helpful to ask the Holy Spirit to teach me how to pray. This gets me out of the unhelpful idea that it's my ego/will that's supposed to be praying. (I think this may be what's meant by the idea that it is not we who pray, but the Holy Spirit who prays within us.) Another is that prayer and worship needn't be two separate things. Sometimes prayer can involve us in a fuller acknowledgement of the mysteries and wonders of life. A third is that when I don't want to pray, when I am tetchy and can't see the point, this is because my soul is 'on the run'. I am secretly, tacitly, unconsciously, afraid - of really contacting the shame or loneliness or fear that is latently alive in my soul. And then I dwell sulkily in my accidental prison. There's too much ego, and too much of the fear from which ego stems, in the way for prayer to happen. But I do think that, with practice, especially with frequently voicing the Jesus Prayer throughout the day, it has become easier to stay alive to love's possibility within me, and easier in that way to pray the other prayers too.