Rethinking Prayer

Prayer is as fundamental to our inner lives, as breath is to our physical lives. It’s a word all of us have heard, yet few of us grasp. Many of us have associations with prayer that are so confining, restrictive and even off-putting, that we’ve dismissed the whole idea of praying. For some, prayer is even a trigger word.

There is a growing number of people who call themselves “spiritual but not religious.” Many of these individuals assume prayer is religious and therefore not appropriate for them. Even many who consider themselves religious don’t pray in a way that deeply resonates with them. Atheists assume, since they don’t believe in God, prayer is not an option.

But then something happens in our vulnerable human lives, and whether we think of ourselves as spiritual, religious, atheist, or none of the above, we find ourselves scared and in real need. Someone says to us, “I will keep you in my prayers,” and we find ourselves in deep-felt gratitude, even though we don’t exactly know what it means to be held in prayer.

Prayer has been called a yearning of the heart, an instinct to reach beyond, and the most fundamental, important language humans speak. The act of prayer is evidenced in written sources as early as 5,000 years ago. Some anthropologists believe the earliest intelligent modern humans practiced something that we would recognize today as prayer.

As diverse as our human family is, so are the ways we pray. While prayer has long been associated with specific religions, we are now on the precipice of a prayer revolution.

A hundred years ago the words spiritual and religious were synonymous, but this is not the case today. The word spiritual has gradually come to be associated with the private realm of a person’s inner life, while the word religious is connected to a person’s public affiliation with a religious institution. This has profound implications on whether we pray and how we pray.

The practice and power of prayer can no longer be boxed exclusively into the category of religion. Prayer is a personal expression that connects one to a broader loving context, whatever one calls It – the Infinite, God, the Universe, Possibility, the subconscious mind, Spirit, Loving Intelligence, etc.

So as long as we pray, no matter how we pray, we tap into something mysterious and profound. We make ourselves available to transformation — an opening of the heart, a willingness to forgive, a change of perspective, awareness of a solution we had not seen before. There is no area of our lives that is too trivial or too important for prayer. As we offer our concerns to prayer, we are connecting to a wisdom, clarity and peace that is available to all of us.