Prayer

Once, many years ago he bought his eldest son a toy. He wondered at first whether he should have. Least of all because it was something he could not really afford. But it had been months since they had talked about it. Finally,  he decided one afternoon to buy it anyway and present it to the son as a surprise.

The child was so happy he broke into a dance holding the gift over his head. And if the father ever had any doubt prior to this whether or not to give him the gift, those doubts quickly disappeared in the course of the dance. It would be rarely that he would ever look into his son’s heart as clearly as he did at that particular moment.

If he were ever asked, “What is the meaning of prayer?” his thoughts would have to start from here, from his son’s dance. And then he would think: To pray is to open your heart to whomever you pray to. And that Whomever would have to listen or look or feel what that heart contains.

The heart can contain everything or anything at all. The heart cannot express something which is not there. The heart cannot lie.

And if his son ever asked him what it means to pray, he would simply remind him of that time. If he could ever feel that way and do what he did for his God then that would be what it means to pray.

But it was his daughter who asked how she would know if her faith was real. To this question he could only answer, You can never know. There is no such thing as perfect faith. We can only believe. We can only do things to express our belief. But we can never believe perfectly well. It is perfectly human to doubt. There will be times when our faith is more or less than at other times. And yet despite the limits of human faith, a prayer will always be a prayer given and received accordingly.

The greatest tragedy of the contemporary world is not if it should lose faith but if it should lose the capacity to pray. That would be the bigger loss. Because it does not matter too much what name we use for God or who we might believe Him or Her to be or if we even have a God at all. That we have the capacity to pray is of the greater importance.

To pray is to affirm the paramount importance of humility. To pray is to affirm there are things we do not yet know even as we try to know as much as we can. To pray is to affirm that there are realms beyond the reach of knowledge or ordinary human consciousness. It is to affirm that those things can be addressed. And we draw inner strength by addressing them.

Prayer strengthens and empowers. And it has done this since humans ever walked this planet. Much of what is left behind since the earliest humans have to do with addressing the unknown. They have to do with prayer. And if we trace back the roots of all art we would discover that all art began here. They were always acts of prayer.

Despite the complexity of contemporary life and no matter how profane the arts sometimes become we are right to wonder if they are not prayer still. We cannot tell to whom the prayers are addressed or whether they are prayers of doubt or prayers of faith or prayers of joy and exaltation as they would be prayers of desolation and despair. But every which way they are no less important. They are no less sacred. They are no less prayer. The world is still blessed by them.

In them do we still contain our highest dreams. In prayer still lies our best hope.