Prayer is the sense of union and fellowship that takes places between our soul and God's. It is "all the ways we communicate and commune with God" (Barton, 63). It is "anything we do to be aware of God's presence" (Forest, 16). Some people think that prayer is all about talking to God. Others believe that it is thinking about God. Brother Lawrence, a 17th century Spanish monk, would declare instead that prayer is simply the practice of the presence of God. It is the practice of a continual awareness of God's presence, an awareness that informs our every action out of a love for God.
There is a Christian spiritual classic called The Way of a Pilgrim that tells the story of a Russian pilgrim who sought to make prayer a continual practice on his journey. Confused about the commandment of I Thessalonians 5:17, which instructs the Christian to "pray without ceasing," the pilgrim decides to seek out the answer of how he might be able to pray continually in all that he does. To do this, the pilgrim meets with many experts on prayer, but none of them have the answer for him. Finally, the pilgrim encounters an old monk who teaches him the Jesus prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me!" The monk instructs the pilgrim to repeat this prayer regularly throughout the day, in increasing increments, until the prayer becomes second nature to him, until the point that the pilgrim's prayer begins to fill every moment, beating with every heartbeat, even in sleep. Essentially, the pilgrim's prayer had to move from his head down to his heart.
"The crisis of our prayer life," writes Henri Nouwen, "is that our mind may be filled with ideas of God while our heart remains far from Him" (1981, 71). Real prayer must come from the heart. It must flow from our inner being out into our lifestyles. Every mundane action on the road is an opportunity for prayer: whether it is walking, talking to a stranger, taking pictures of the scenery or kneeling before a shrine. Forest writes that "nothing we do is meant to be 'merely' physical or 'purely' spiritual. Every act has the potential of uniting the physical and spiritual" (7). Brother Lawrence speaks of his own experience of prayer, "that he was more united to God in his outward employments than when he left them for devotion and retirement" (23). The practice of the presence of God is what makes us aware of the sacrament of the present moment. It is what helps us realize that every moment has the potential to become holy, because every moment is an opportunity for prayer. Once we discover this inward state of communion, prayer becomes transformative, as the pilgrim in The Way of the Pilgrim describes:
As I began to pray now with my heart, everything around me was so delightfully transformed: the trees, the grass, the birds, the ground, the air, the light - all seemed to proclaim that they exist for the sake of man and bear witness to the love of God for man. (24)The fundamental purpose of prayer, according to Ruth Haley Barton, is "to deepen our intimacy with God" (63). This intimacy teaches us to see the world through God-coloured lenses. We begin to realize just how close God is to his creation, to us. We begin to understand how much He loves us, not for what we do but for who we are. Through prayer, we are vulnerable to God. We offer ourselves to Him and in the process find our very reason for being. Pilgrimage is given its sacred quality through the experience of prayer. "A pilgrimage without prayer is no pilgrimage at all" (Forest, 32). If we cannot engage in prayer - in soul communion with God - then we will never find the One whom we seek.
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