On Prayer

I found myself, strangely, in a conversation about prayer with someone I know, who, as far as I know, is a non-believer.  "What do you expect to gain from it?" he asked me at one point.

That knocked me back a little bit.  What did I expect to gain?  What do I?  "I don't pray in order to gain things," I started by saying - but then I found myself thinking, "Isn't that a rather faith-deficient approach to prayer, and to God?  Surely I should be expecting rather more than that?"

True, I don't pray in order to gain things;  that is, I try not to come before God with a shopping list, my prayer isn't an attempt to twist his arm in some way, to change his mind, to press my case for special treatment.  I do know the difference between prayers and magic spells.  The witch or wizard who weaves a spell is aiming (or claiming) to control the forces of nature, and to be able to bend them to her or his will.  Sometimes prayer may come close to presenting itself in that light, particularly when organised and co-ordinated prayers are arranged in support of a person or a cause.  I have at times joined such prayer campaigns, though usually I tend to opt out, if only because they can feel like an attempt to twist the arm of the Almighty.

Prayer, for me, is about relationship, and it is at least as much an offering and an opening of self before God as it is a matter of requesting his help and support.  Nonetheless, I should pray with the expectation of receiving, and I do believe that prayer is always answered, and some of my own experiences of prayer being answered have been amazing.  (That, by the way, is inevitably a very subjective statement, that can go no further than saying 'That's how it felt from where I was at the time').

So what do I hope to receive?  Not the miraculous, or at least not that in the sense of the elemental forces being bent and twisted round for my own benefit (or that of those for whom I have prayed, I don't only pray for myself!).  But I certainly pray with the hope and indeed expectation of gaining insight, of being supported or maybe corrected, of seeing things more clearly, of being helped.  I know that I won't always get the answer I want;  I hope I shall find the answer I need.  Sometimes that answer is immediate; at others, it's only in hindsight and at a distance that I see how my prayer has found its answer.  And there are those times when I have closed my ears to any answer;  when I haven't wanted to know.

By tradition, Christians pray 'through Jesus Christ'.  This isn't a magic formula added to guarantee the success of whatever our prayers ask for or demand.  It is a form of words that expresses the basic truth of all genuinely Christian prayer - that we should hope and aim and intend to come to God with the mind of Christ, asking those things that will best serve his will.  The starting point of prayer is that 'I am no more my own, but Christ's'.  So what do I hope to gain?  To grow into Christ, to be a better pilgrim, to be a better disciple.  For our Lord himself, prayer carried him along the road that would lead to Calvary; and it is at the foot of the cross that I make my prayer in his name.