"I wish I had time for prayer; I just don't have any. I am so busy," said a man who seemed to me to have a thin soul. I suggested that he find some time to be with God by cutting down on the time he spent with others, including me.
Prayer is a means to one goal: being with God. Don't pray to be rich, or successful, to own things or to achieve worldly accomplishments. God doesn't tune in to these frequencies. People who remain in a childhood relationship with their parents, one in which they express wishes and demand they be granted, may replicate that pattern with God. God has higher expectations from His adult children. God does not hear self-serving pleas and if He does His inevitable answer is, as Matthew urged, Grow up. (Matt. 5:48)
Praying about your health may be self-serving. For example, should you ask God to cure your cancer or heart ailment? Should you pray to God to end the suffering of a friend or for peace on earth? These seem to be selfless and innocent prayers. Actually these prayers assume that God isn't aware of or doesn't care about suffering or world conflicts, and that He needs your prayers to be prompted or persuaded to do a good deed. But God knows everything, cares about everything, and does exactly what must be done. You don't know God's reason for perpetuating conflicts around the world or for not alleviating a person's suffering. To pray that God should stop these events is grandiose and presumptuous.
You may rightly ask, How then do I pray? If I cannot pray for self-interested, mundane, or altruistic purposes, then what do I pray for?" It is difficult to answer these questions if you associate prayer with requests. But it is easier to answer if you think of prayer as contemplation. You can meditate on godly values. For example, you may ask, "How can I be more a loving and compassionate person?" or you can just still your mind and let the answer blossom in the silence.
Praying is primarily a calm and disciplined silence. It is God's language and the language of all tongues and creatures, a silent and effortless communion. Praying is also an interactive covenant between you and God. In your youth you may wish for things to be-representing your youthful hopes. In your adulthood you may wish to have the wisdom to accept things as they are-representing your yearnings for maturity. In your mature years you may wish nothing-representing your cultivation of gratitude. That is the Holy Contemplation.
Prayer is the language of the soul that seeks the Holy Spirit. Prayer is intended to bring a stillness of mind and a tender composure of body. In contemplating God, you need to stop all discursive thinking and all distracting moods and bring your mind to a total standstill. This will pave the path to reflective presence with God. In prayer God meets you from within. There, you contemplate how to achieve something-not wish that it be granted. Prayers can be as straightforward and innocent as "How may I live more gracefully?" and "What should I do to be saved?"
In Holy Contemplation your soul asserts only its submission. Praying in its purest form is a meditation on God. You withdraw your heart from all earthly thoughts to commune and be alone with God. Prayer is putting yourself into a devotional frame of mind to seek (but not to try to change) God's will. Prayer helps you obey His will and make it your own. The purest, most pious prayer is the one that asks for nothing. The best prayer is an expression of gratefulness, independent of life circumstances, even in an earthly Hell. A woman who had an inoperable cancer made her daily prayers confirm the sacredness of her illness: "Thank you, God, for everything, including my cancer; I have no complaint whatsoever and I have no request of any sort."
Pray with all your faculties, not only with words, and the silences, but by your behavior and your very being. Worshipping God isn't an activity isolated from the rest of your life. Words are abstract contemplations; action is the concrete manifestation of your faith. The outer company you keep is a place of social holiness-a place to reenact your prayers. If you want to speak with God, you first have to speak with people; if you want to work for God, you first have to work with people.
Prayer without faith has no wings. A man whose specific, self-serving prayers went unanswered said contemptuously that he would never again "believe in this faith business." He claimed he was too smart to fall for such unreasonable fables. As in the story of the pickpocket who meets a saint and sees only the saint's pocket, this man saw only God's pockets. He tried to argue that intellect was the reason for his lack of faith. But faith is ascension beyond reason; it is a deferential incredulity. If none of the man's prayers were answered it was because he possessed only the form of prayer, not its essence. Only faith gives power to the prayer. Even then, God may respond to the faithful's prayer on His own terms. God may not come to the hungry in the form of food or to the thirsty in the form of water or to the sick in the form of a cure. The prayer that presupposes faith and trust in God breathes hope into expectation.
If your present life is empty of any holy purpose and even if you are far from deserving of being saved, pray to redeem yourself by seeking faith. God will pour Himself into your emptiness when you are ready.
T. Byram Karasu, M.D. is the author of The Spirit of Happiness
