Dear God, thank you for today, for the compliment Bill gave me at work, for the avocado sandwich and companionship I shared with Dave at lunch. <\/em>But before I\u2019d get much further I\u2019d be ruminating some incident that had happened during the day or running through my checklist for the next one.<\/p>\nI often wondered why I even tried to pray: What was the point? While I certainly thought it proper to thank God for blessings\u2014health, home, family, friends\u2014and apologize for failings\u2014envy, anger, petulance, pride\u2014I thought it selfish to ask him for favors\u2014a slimmer body, a better job, a bigger house.<\/p>\n
With six billion people on a planet rife with poverty, violence, disease, who was I to ask for anything? And then, when it came right down to it, I couldn\u2019t believe, as Clare, Laura, and Fran did, that God responded to petitions. The Holocaust, Viet Nam, 9\/11, Darfur, Katrina. Was no one praying then?<\/p>\n
I was a failure at prayer.<\/p>\n
And it bothered me.<\/p>\n
So I met with Fr. Boniface, a priest at the Catholic church I go to, to ask him what I was doing wrong.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cWhat you do isn\u2019t what matters. Think about what prayer is. It\u2019s a conversation with God. It\u2019s about entering into a relationship with him. When we converse with people, we come to know them, and that takes time. It\u2019s the same with God. Prayer is about falling in love with God, being close to him, now and in eternity.\u201d<\/p>\n
What a baffling response. Until that moment, if you\u2019d asked me what prayer was, I\u2019d have called it an obligation. Something I did to be good. Something I did to thank the perfect, omnipotent, omniscient Creator for my stint in the world.<\/p>\n
Prayer, a relationship with God? It was a concept I\u2019d heard before, mostly from Protestant students at the Christian college where I teach. When one student, Hannah, wrote of her personal relationship with Jesus, I\u2019d pictured him in blue jeans, sitting on her shoulder, strumming a guitar, singing love songs in her ear. How strange.<\/p>\n
Still, while part of me thought this picture crazy, another burned with jealousy. Jesus was right there for Hannah. Where was God for me?<\/p>\n
I, like most people of the Judeo-Christian tradition, had been taught that God is omnipresent. He is everywhere. But omnipresence is difficult to fathom. Perhaps my problem with prayer was I couldn\u2019t sense God\u2019s presence when I prayed. Presence is crucial to relationships. Absence causes love to fade away.<\/p>\n
So I read about Divine presence. The transcendent view stresses the otherness of God: He\u2019s above the clouds, beyond the stars, not in the material world. And I realized scripted prayers placed God out there for me\u2014too far to sense his presence, too distant for relationship.<\/p>\n
The immanent view sees God within all parts of creation:\u00a0 He\u2019s in every object, element, animal, plant and person\u2014including me. And I realized my improvised bedtime prayers placed God within myself\u2014so close he dissolved into my substance, too indistinct for relationship.<\/p>\n
Yet I knew, absolutely, that I had felt God\u2019s presence in my life. I\u2019d catch my breath at a tangerine sunrise and whisper, \u201cThank you, God,\u201d then be moved to smile at everyone I passed along the street. Or I\u2019d be startled by an ambulance siren and think, God, please let that person live<\/em>, then be prompted to write to my aunt who\u2019d had a heart condition for years. Or I\u2019d shriek when my daughter burned a skillet and wince thinking, God, why am I so testy?<\/em>, then be spurred to take my daughter out to lunch.<\/p>\nSo while I can\u2019t sense Divine presence beyond the clouds or within me, I feel God close, and clearly, in unexpected moments like these\u2014moments of awe, joy, fear, sorrow, or contrition. God captures my attention in these moments. I cry in recognition, feel a surge of heart. I respond with acts of love, often in spite of myself.<\/p>\n
Are these exchanges conversations?\u00a0 I\u2019d like to think yes. Thus, they\u2019re no less prayers than the kinds I struggle with.<\/p>\n
Jan Vallone is the author of Pieces of Someday<\/em>, a memoir, which won the 2011 Reader Views Reviewers Choice Award and will be re-released in fall, 2013. Her stories have appeared in The Seattle Times, Catholic Digest, Guideposts<\/em> Magazine, English Journal, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Writing it Real<\/em>, and Curriculum in Context<\/em>. Once a lawyer at a large law firm, and later an English teacher at a tiny yeshiva high school, she now teaches writing and literature at Seattle Pacific University.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I had a problem with prayer. It\u2019s not that I didn\u2019t think of God or talk to him; I did every single day. But I didn\u2019t understand what made me do it, didn\u2019t know what it accomplished, wasn\u2019t sure what I was doing was prayer. You see, I just can\u2019t pray as Sister Clare taught […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1864,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,974,50],"tags":[75,71],"class_list":["post-3564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith-topical-categories","category-jan-vallone-authors","category-relationships","tag-friendship","tag-prayer"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>I had a problem with prayer. It\u2019s not that I didn\u2019t think of God or talk to him; I did every single day. But I didn\u2019t understand what made me do it, didn\u2019t know what it accomplished, wasn\u2019t sure what I was doing was prayer.<\/p>\n