To pray or not to pray

What is prayer and who is it for? Does it matter?

[Pixabay]

I sometimes discuss issues of religion or spirituality on social media with Clark Strand, former senior editor at Tricycle magazine and author of books on Buddhism and how to access underappreciated or misunderstood elements of religious tradition.

While working on a new book, Clark has been posting quite a bit over the past year or so about prayer with an emphasis on the rosary.

Recently he posted that "everything prays" and that "the purpose of life... is life".

I replied that I used to say (here on this blog, actually, in 2006 and again in 2008) that we need to replace "of" with "is" in "the meaning of life."

I also thought that his sentiments resonated with the idea that everything we do is a prayer, so the question becomes not "Should I pray?" but "What am I praying for?"

This raises the question of what we mean when we use the term prayer, and this actually gets back to something I recently wrote about spirituality.

So what is prayer and who it for, anyway?

Life as prayer

I have heard the advice that one should make ones life into a prayer.

But what if we look at it the other way around. Your life IS a prayer, whether it is intentional or not. 24/7. A prayer to whom? Some tribal sky deity, a big guy in the sky on a white throne? Well, for those who don't have such an immature view of God, obviously not.

It is a prayer to your deepest self, which is connected through every other thing in existence through the heart of the cosmos. It is a prayer to the source, substance and sustainer of everything that was, is, will be, can be, or could be. It is a prayer to our noblest and most sincere aspirations. It is a prayer to that which binds us all together and makes us aware of our common nature and our interdependence with all things. It is a prayer to a way of looking at the world, a fundamental orientation to existence, in which meaning is inherent to all things, in which such meaning is defining these things and acting as the essence of the relationships between all things, relationships which therefore allow these things to exist (not to go into detail as I have the past, but there must be some distinction between two phenomena in order for them to exist as separate phenomena). To the ground of being which is also the transcendent Thou. 

Then the question becomes, not what do you believe about this or that religion, but rather, what kind of prayer are you making out of your life?