Pathways to Prayer. David Moffett-Moore

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      We pray the Our Father, the prayer that Jesus taught us. But do we really pray it or merely repeat it? Many scholars say it is an outline to prayer, an invitation to prayer, a map for prayer, that each petition may become a paragraph in actual use. The earliest Christians prayed the Lord’s Prayer three times a day: morning, noon and night. Imagine how our lives would change if we incorporated not just the words but the spirit of this prayer into our lives as regularly as we take food to eat. Imagine tasting the food of eternity as frequently as we feed on temporary nourishment!

      Does our prayer life mature as we mature? Do we allow our prayers to grow and develop or do we keep them stunted? While the prayers of our childhood are certainly good and acceptable prayers, they are the prayers of children. Adults need adult prayer, prayer that can express who they have become, not who they once were.

      God is our holy lover, the one who seeks us and longs for us and yearns for us even as we seek and long and yearn for God. God loves us with an overwhelming love, a love that all the universe cannot contain. God comes to us, to be with us and to be one with us and to invite us into union with the divine.

      God is like the wine merchant who has a very fine vintage and offers us free samples so that we may enter in and want more. God will tempt and test, entice and embrace, coax and coddle, call and beckon to us. Indeed, all of creation is God’s great cosmic welcome mat, inviting us to join with God in the inner chamber. Why delay?

      Prayer is conversation with God, not just to God. Prayer is not our wish list or shopping list, nor is it our lecture to the Almighty. It is good for us to talk to God, but not enough. We also need to take time to listen. Prayer is conversation and conversation is two way. We have two ears and one mouth for a reason! Listen twice, speak once.

      Samuel heard the voice three times over, waking him in the night. Finally he said, “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.” Elijah went to the mountaintop to be with God. There was an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake. There was a fire, but God was not in the fire. There was a whirlwind, but God was not in the whirlwind. Then there was the still, small voice, the sound of silence. Elijah covered his face and lowered his head, for in that silence was the voice of Eternity. The psalmist writes, “Be still and know that I am God,” and again, “burnt offering and whole offerings you do not desire, sin offerings you do not require, but an ear you have dug for me. I am here to do your will.”

      Prayer is communion as well as conversation. Just as prayer is more a listening than a speaking, prayer is more a being than a doing. Prayer is being with God, spending time mindful of the divine presence that is always with us, around and through and within us. Prayer is allowing the boundary that separates us from one another and from the divine and even sometimes from ourselves, to fade for a while, to lose ourselves in the great oceanic bliss.

      We think of payer as a doing, as something we do. Prayer is also something that is done within us. Prayer is being as well as doing. We are human beings, not human doings. Prayer is not just what we do, it is who we are, the very essence of our being. As Thomas Merton wrote, we mature in prayer as an apple matures and ripens in the sun: not by doing, but by being, by staying attached to the tree of life. Prayer is a thing we do, but it is so much more. Prayer is who we are. We are created to be living, conscious prayers.