Prayer is so often misunderstood. People have ideas as to what they think it is about, or what it should do, and if those expectations are not quickly met, people easily give up and stop praying (or pray half-heartedly). Even though many, if not most, people have an intuitive grasp of petitionary prayer, they fail to comprehend it and its true value. This leads us back to the kinds of questions people raise as to why we do it. God in his perfection certainly needs nothing from us; why, then, do we pray when we want something from him? Shouldn’t God just give to us our needs? If we look at what prayer is, however, we should begin to realize why God gives us the possibility of prayer: it is not that he needs us to pray, rather, it is a gift he has given to us that he allows us share in the work of history, to not have our lives entirely controlled by him as if we were puppets. But he also wants to work with us, and so he has opened up the possibility that we can ask him for his help, where he will provide it in the way he best sees fit. This gift of freedom is an act of pure love on God’s part.
God is love; the proper revelation of that love is the Trinitarian character of God, wherein we find three unique persons sharing with each other their whole person, communicating with each other in their unique, personal ways, their eternal love. Prayer is our means of sharing in with that divine communion found within the Godhead. It allows us to have personal communication to and from God similar to the way each of the Trinitarian persons of the Godhood have with each other. God has given us the free space to open ourselves up to him and communicate with him. God in his perfection has no need for us, but in his loving nature, he desires to share the divine life with us. Since he does so out of love, he does not want to force us to do so; he leaves it up to us to choose whether or not we will open ourselves to him. He might nudge us, find ways to remind us to consider what he is offering to us, but he has given us our freedom, and desires to let us choose whether or not we will engage him in his tri-personal reality or not. All forms of prayer relate, in one fashion or another, to this point.
The great spiritual writers, when discussing prayer and their prayer life, agree that the nature of prayer is that it is our loving dialogue with God. For example, St Theodore the Ascetic says, “Prayer is converse with God, contemplation of the invisible, the angelic mode of life, a stimulus towards the divine, the assurance of things longed for, ‘making real the things for which we hope’ (Heb 11:1).”[1] Saint Symeon of Thessalonike agrees. “Prayer is conversation directly with God, being always with God, having one’s soul united with him and one’s mind inseparable, as David says: ‘My soul clings to you,’ [Ps 62.9]; and ‘My soul thirsts for you’ [Ps 62.3]; ‘As the deer longs for the springs of water, so my soul longs for you, O God’ [Ps 121.1]; ‘I will love you, O God my strength’ [Ps 16.2]; and ‘My soul is always in your hands’ [Ps 118.109].”[2] It is a dialogue, but, in its mysterious ways, it changes the person who engages it and, through them, even changes the world. “Prayer is by nature a dialog and a union of man with God its effect is to hold the world together. It achieves a reconciliation with God.”[3] Thus, St Edith Stein says, “The work of salvation takes place in obscurity and stillness. In the heart’s quiet dialogue with God the living building blocks out of which the kingdom of God grows are prepared, the chosen instruments for the construction forged.”[4]
Prayer can be a difficult habit to acquire. We are crying out to God, but it often appears there is no reply. It is then, when we feel entirely cut off from God, and do not sense his presence, we need prayer the most:
We can pray at moments when we become aware of our blindness — and we can include in this term whatever makes us blind to God and to all that surrounds us — and when we sense that the One who can cure us is passing near. Prayer arises at moments when we become deeply aware of our separation and of the fact that our life is suspended over death, that nothingness is within us and lapping round us from all sides, ready to engulf us.[5]
We are trapped in ourselves, and prayer is the means by which we can come out of our shell. We must open ourselves up to God’s response to us. Since we are not used to opening up to God, the difficulty around prayer is similar to the difficulty around any other activity, such as exercise: what is hard, if not impossible at first, slowly (sometimes, very slowly) becomes easier and easier. Thus, with prayer, we must constantly open ourselves and pray, until at last, we are able to understand and discern God’s response back:
How can you make people understand that they are supposed to grow into prayer? —It is just like with a foreign language; you teach the pupil word by word. The language of God and the saints. And all at once they speak the language fluently. But this is possible only when you teach them the rudiments very clearly. In an I-though relationship. Then the pupil also hears how the teacher speaks the language with others, he listens and acquires fluency.[6]
The different kinds of prayer are all different ways our love for God can be expressed. As such, we find in any kind of prayer a means by which we can transcend ourselves, and become something more than we are now. Love brings us out, requires us to abandon ourselves. We turn to the beloved and give them all that we are; prayer is our turn to God in love. As we experience different stages of love for God, we will experience different stages of prayer life; the more reserved we are in our love, the more difficult prayer is going to be, and the more difficult it will be for us to understand God’s response back. But, as we begin our progress, we should never be discouraged. When we pray out of obedience, we still are opening ourselves to God, and we allow God’s work to be slowly done in and with us; it is still an act of love, however sleight the love, so that what St Isaac the Syrian says about prayer remains sound:
The purpose of prayer is for us to acquire love of God, for in prayer can be discovered all sorts of reasons for loving God.
Love of God proceeds from conversing with him; this conversation of prayer comes about through stillness, and stillness comes with the stripping away from the self.[7]
We must strip away the self. “Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it’ (Matt 16:24-25). No matter where we are in our spiritual journey, prayer helps us to do this. If we pray out of mere obedience, we are still acting contrary to our self-assertion, contrary to our self-will, thereby purifying ourselves from the demands of our fallen self. “The foremost purpose of prayer is self-purification.”[8]
Indeed, when we pray at liturgy, we often feel nothing. We wonder why it is we go, what good it is for us to go. The answer is that we are training ourselves to think beyond ourselves, to trust in the judgments of God. Worshiping God at church becomes an act of faith, no matter how weak we think our faith might be. “Going to Mass when we feel nothing for God is not at all a form of hypocrisy — it is faith.”[9] This is true for all forms of prayer — by praying, we show faith. We pray, seeking to be transformed, to be taken out of ourselves, and to be purified by acts of love to and for God. When we do so, even if we do not feel like doing so, we must recognize we have taken that step forward, and in such a way, we have done well:
An act of faith, hope or love is always a victory. In the same way, prayer consists in overcoming the bitterness and remorse that we often feel in the beginning of our meditation, by realizing that in God we possess all good (which thus excludes any bitterness), and that Christ grants us his forgiveness and reconciles us completely with God (which thus excludes any sadness, remorse, or anxiety). Prayer is not at all a sentimental attitude or spiritual activity; rather, it is an inward confrontation and vanquishing of the flesh.[10]
Our human love meets the love of God for us. Love is capable of joining in with love, which is why our love is capable of uniting us with God.
Just as love can manifest itself in many forms, so prayer allows us to experience all possible forms of love, to experience them in our relationship with God. The different kinds of prayer relate to those different forms of love. Since greater forms of love do not preclude the lesser, we will never find a form of prayer which, once experience it, we find ourselves no longer engaging other forms of prayer. Though we will find out when we return to previous forms of prayer, we will understand them and appreciate them differently, according to the level of love we have developed in our heart for God.
What kinds of prayers are there? For our purpose here, we will break prayer up into three different types. First, there is petitionary prayer, which, for most of us, is the foundation for our life in prayer. It is when we ask God to do things for us and for others. Since we must admit that we cannot do all things for ourselves, it begins to move us out of ourselves, though it is also clear, that in earlier stages of prayer, this kind of prayer will be more self-centered and judged according to that perspective. Then there is prayer of adoration, where we give praise to God. Once we have developed loving adoration for God, prayer becomes primarily adoration, and secondarily petitionary. In this way, prayer becomes more true to the act of love, more true to itself. We might, in our petitionary stage, engage in acts of adoration, but we will do so thinking such adoration will help us achieve our desire, while, once we have truly found ourselves adoring God, we will be engaging petitionary prayer even in such love. Finally, there is the contemplative-meditative prayer, which is a kind of adoration, but one which truly allows us to transcend ourselves and to completely find ourselves in the divine life. In contemplative prayer, we find that, having gone out of ourselves, we receive in return something new: Godmanhood.[11] “The unbounded loving surrender to God and God’s return gift, full and enduring union, this is the highest elevation of the heart attainable, the highest level of prayer.”[12] If we have truly become contemplatives, we will still engage petitionary prayer, but we will find ourselves engaging petitionary prayer with a new kind of understanding, truly capable of understanding God’s response to our prayer.
St Gregory Palamas explains well the process of prayer, and how we start out our spiritual quest in a loving fear of God,[13] and if we persevere to the end, how we end up experiencing the glory of deification:
Because they yearn to attain to divine, unfading delight and are afraid of suffering in that fire, they break their ties with everything passionate, blameworthy, and earthly, and strive to cleave to God through intense prayer, knowing for sure that He alone has power and authority to deliver them from the agony of hell, and make them worthy of that eternal joy which passes understanding. In this way they acquire love for God, and as they become more perfectly united with God through this love, they gain all the virtues as well. When God is at work in us, every kind of virtue becomes our own, but when He is not, everything we do is sin.[14]
Having provided a foundation for our understanding the nature prayer, that it is an act and work of love, we must now explore further the three different forms of prayer mentioned above, starting with petitionary prayer.
Footnotes
[1] St Theodoros the Ascetic, “A Century of Spiritual Texts” in The Philokalia. Vol. 2. trans. G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1990),25-6.
[2] Saint Symeon of Thessalonike, Treatise on Prayer. trans. H. L. N. Simmons (Brookline, MA: Hellenic College Press, 1984), 9.
[3] St John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent. trans. Colm Luibheid and Normal Russell (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), 274
[4] St Edith Stein, “The Prayer of the Church” in The Hidden Life. trans. Waltraut Stein, PhD. (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1992), 15.
[5] Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozha, God and Man (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2004), 164.
[6] Adrienne von Speyr, With God and With Men: Prayers. trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 118.
[7] St Isaac of Nineveh in The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life. trans. Sebastian Brock (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1987),250 (Discourse LXIII).
[8] HH The Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew. Encountering the Mystery: Understanding Orthodox Christianity Today (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 77.
[9] Jean Danielou, Prayer. The Mission of the Church. trans. David Louis Schindler, Jr. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Co., 1996), 12.
[10] ibid., 7.
[11] “But prayer addressed to the Absolute as the Creator and God does not yet exhaust or fully characterize Christian prayer. Many addresses God not only ‘out of the depths’ of his creatureliness, insignificance, and nobeing, but also out of His Godsonhood and Divine-humanity, not as a servant, but as a son, crying out: Abba, Father,” Sergius Bulgakov, The Comforter. trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Co., 2004), 388.
[12] St Edith Stein, “The Prayer of the Church,” 15.
[13] While it might seem strange, nonetheless, this is indeed the foundation for our love of God, it is a loving fear, where we recognize the great and mighty mystery of God, a mystery which fascinates us even as it makes us tremble. We are afraid of offending him because of how great he is, but we also do not want to flee his presence, because there is something there, something so beautiful and attractive, that we want to get to know him more, so that we obey in fear and seek to be near him in our weak love, hoping that our obedience will satisfy him and allow us to get a greater glimpse of his glory so that we can bask in it ourselves. This is in accord with St Bernard of Clairvaux, who said we love God first for our own sake, for what we can get out of God. “So then in the beginning man loves God, not for God’s sake, but for his own. It is something for him to know how little he can do by himself and how much by God’s help, and in that knowledge to order himself rightly towards God, his sure support. But when tribulations, recurring again and again, constrain him to turn to God for unfailing help, would not even a heart as hard as iron, as cold as marble, be softened by the goodness of such a Savior, so that he would love God not altogether selfishly, but because He is God? Let frequent troubles drive us to frequent supplications; and surely, tasting, we must see how gracious the Lord is (Ps 34.8). Thereupon His goodness once realized draws us to love Him unselfishly, yet more than our own needs impel us to love Him selfishly: even as the Samaritans told the woman who announced that it was Christ who was at the well: ‘Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard Him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the savior of the world’ (John 4.42).” St Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God (http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bernard/loving_god.html), ch. IX.
[14] St Gregory Palamas, The Homilies. trans. Christopher Veniamin and the Monastery of St John the Baptist (Waymart, PA: Mount Thabor Publishing, 2009), 261.
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