I Don't Know How to Pray Anymore and You Can Too
✛Upcoming Stuff
✛Hope You Know About
✛Todays Publication: I Don’t Know How to Pray Anymore and I Do It Anyway.
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✛Upcoming Stuff - Upcoming conversations with Jim Palmer, (Re)thinking Faith, Savannah Locke, and Tori E. Owens.
✛Hope You Know About - I’m really proud of these two organizations: lovehaiti.org and thecurian.network. Maybe you’re someone who likes to pray for things and/or give to some things. In either case, you are welcome to interact with these nonprofits. Thank you.
I Don’t Know How to Pray Anymore and You Can Too
Are you like me? Has the crack in your faith done a number on your prayer life? Surfaced a question you can’t quite shake? A question that goes something like this?
What if divine power was never the power of domination but the power of presence? Not imposed from above but woven through, moving with all things toward more than any single purpose. Not power over. Power with. Present to everything. Open to more than one end.
Yeah. That one. It’ll mess with your prayer life. Ultimately, I think there are more honest reasons to pray now than ever before, but the transition hasn’t always been smooth. Here are eight reasons that keep prayer in the mix for me. Maybe they’ll be helpful for you too.
Why I pray:
① -Jesus prayed. I’m a big fan. I’m trying to do stuff he did.
② -I’m part of a tradition that prays. Do I agree with everything that tradition has done or is doing? Ha, no. (Reminds me of an old Smothers Brothers bit where Dick asks Tom, “Would you jump off a bridge for that guy?” Tom snickers: “Not again.”) That’s about right. Not again.
Still, the tradition has had some good stuff and either way, it doesn’t get to define me out of itself. I’ve inherited enough good alongside the wreckage that I’m claiming my seat and my own understanding of what prayer is or isn’t. Idk, but being a christian who doesn’t pray feels to me like a poker player who never bets. You can sit at the table. You can study the cards. But eventually you’re going to want to risk something.. 🤔
③ -Prayer helps me slow down, to increase the interiority of who I am, and hold things. Look, I’m no longer trying to fix things when I pray. I’m trying to get myself in a position where I can hold all the awkwardness, much of which, isn’t really fixable. Some people meditate, take walks, or are intentionally quiet for portions of the day. Some people pray. Oh, and some of us do all the above. The point is, it helps me. Do I have empirical evidence? No. I can only trust that I’m telling myself the truth.
④ -It’s true that I’m not really trying to fix things when I pray, but also, in a larger sense, I pray because by faith I think I might be influencing things to align with uncontrolling love, and in doing so, I’m imagining a better world in the future. Sometimes, in prayer, I sense something like hope or patience or idk what to call it, and when I do it helps me actually be the kind of person I want to be. And look, if that’s true, then prayer is encouraging me to live differently. And if I live differently, it influences those around me. And maybe they influence others. It doesn’t take long for one to see that, well, of course, it’s layered, indirect, and much more complex, but in this way, the whole world (community, govt, ecology) might be influenced.
Conversely, if I can pray with an imagination that’s been filtered through the idea that the whole world (community, govt, ecology) might be different, then in some sense, I’m bringing the kin-dom of love into the present, which might be the very thing Jesus was getting at when he taught us to pray “your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
⑤ -I pray because of science. Seriously. Consider physics and the discovery that once two particles are entangled, they never fully lose each other. Separate them by millions of miles, change the spin of one, and the other responds — instantly, without any known communication between them. Distance doesn’t matter. Space-time coordinates don’t matter. They remain, somehow, in relationship.
I bring this up in the context of prayer because prayer seems to me less about private transactions with God and more about entering a fundamentally entangled existence with one another, with creation, with the cosmos itself. Romans 14:7 puts it simply: none of us lives or dies to ourselves alone.
If particles can affect one another across impossible distances, it suggests the universe isn’t finally made of isolated material substances, but of deeply entangled fields of energy and relationship. The scientist and theologian Ilia Delio calls this undivided wholeness. I think she’s onto something. And I think our prayers participate in it. If so, maybe this is all just a divine entanglement.
⑥ -I pray because I keep feeling the invitation to do so. Meanwhile, St. John of the Cross said: “When you feel the nudge to draw close to God, it’s because God is drawing close to you.” I think about that a lot. Idk if it’s true, but idk if it’s not true either.
⑦ - I keep after prayer because for me, prayer is grieving. And I’ve needed to grieve a lot. I’m niether proud of that nor ashamed of that. It’s just the reality. And look, if you can grieve without prayer, good. Go for it. But whether you consider it prayer or not, the world needs people who can grieve; that is, people who can name justice and then lament all the injustice. Out loud. Personally and communally. Yeah, for me, much prayer has been grieving, which leads me to the last reason …
⑧ -Because honestly? In many instances, I don’t know what else to do but to pray.
Beautiful. Really resonates with me. My prayer life was in the toilet until I read some process theology. If God can lure and draw and persuade in a nonsensory way, we can too (just a bit less effectively, presumably). So my prayerful longings for a love-based universe beam out into everyone else's "initial aims" and that can influence others (as well as myself) to maybe be more loving. You said similar stuff in your post, just more elegantly.
We Friends (Quakers) have a saying in response to prayer requests, I hold you in the Light. This clarifies trusting in Christ and not in my problem-solving skills.
Richard Rohr discusses how Christ is in solidarity with our suffering. I find much comfort in believing this. God is not like a vending machine where I put my request in and get the candy bar, but Christ is going through the challenges of being human with me, with all of us.
Lately, my meditation/prayer time has become more about being in the presence of God, sensing that I am held in love, asking to be transformed by Divine Love, and stating, "I am here to listen."
This is a big change since I grew up in a conservative Evangelical Church. Thank you for these thoughtful questions.