Prayer: Eternal, Collaborative Conversation

Just like a lot of other things in the Bible, I think we get prayer wrong in part because we read and interpret all of the passages about it to be individual, academic, and straightforward.

Individual: my prayer is between me and God. 

Academic: there is a pretty limited formula for prayer and as long as I stay within that formula I’m pleasing God even if I don’t understand anything about it. 

Straightforward: prayer is exactly what it appears to be on the surface and nothing more.

But what if it’s not like that? 

What if it’s actually not just not individual but actually collective and eternal? What if it’s not academic but full of mystery? What if it’s not straightforward but in fact extremely spiritually powerful?

What if prayer is an eternal, collaborative conversation from which the world is changed, sometimes by nothing more than the very act of prayer? 

What if prayer is like this:

The first step is revelation. Whether it’s special revelation in the Bible or the many ways God reveals Himself to us in accessible ways like through nature, history, our conscience, and the thoughts and experiences of others. 

The first step in the eternal conversation is God telling us, not just about Himself and how good He is at creating beauty and order, but His generous love for humanity, and His morals, and how He would like the world to be. 

All of us are constantly taking this revelation in through our eyes, ears, mouths, nervous system, and intellect. 

But we need the next step to be able to interact with that revelation and that next step is language. We cannot interact with or think about things we do not have language for. We just can’t. 

God gives us language in many ways. First though special revelation. The Bible is all about giving us language to understand the God we can experience in our own lives. It gives us language for the suffering and injustice we experience. It gives us the language of just and reconcile and forgive. Ideas humanity could not come up with on their own. 

But God isn’t a cold dictator. A distant lecturer. He invites us to meditate on these things. He invites us to roll them around in our mind, to play with them, to be curious about them, to take them out and inspect them, to pass them back and forth between each other and in so doing unlock the mystery and power of them. 

This produces more language. Human language. Great teachers and rabbis give us new concepts and contexts with which to look at things, furthering our understanding or the visibility of the great mystery of the thing. Anyone can create language about these things; prophets, kings, the kid next door, the homeless man on the street, your friend over coffee. When their wonderings and ramblings speak the truth and agree with God we gain new language with which to interact with this divine, mysterious, benevolent being.

Then we need exposure. We need time to see the revealed thing we now have language for play out in the world around us or in the pages of Scripture or reflected in the words of a friend or book or movie. All of a sudden, we’re seeing it everywhere.

Next up is reception. All this revelation and language and exposure accomplish nothing if we do not receive. If we go through life only looking for the here and now we might miss out on receiving this revelation and language. Sometimes it breaks thought to us anyway, but for the most part, we have not because we ask not, and we ask not because we’ve been told that there is nothing more to prayer than the obedient act of performing this practice for the salvation of our souls and transformation of our sinful hearts and minds. 

But what if prayer is the great act of translation between the divine and humanity? What if prayer is actually a conversation, a collaborative act between the Creator and the Created. 

When we have our hearts open, soft, curious, expectant, teachable, we learn - not just intellectually and academically, but somatically, genetically, morally. When we read Scripture, or read a book, or interact with another person, go through an experience we can receive insight into the divine. 

And that reception leads to resonance. A deep knowing and agreement within ourselves. Most things we take in in life are just life. But sometimes we encounter an idea, whether it be explicit or the intangible clicking of puzzle pieces together in our hearts and minds that we don’t have to choose to believe - it enters our souls and illuminates truth that was always there and we know to be true.

Maybe it’s just my autistic butt, but I cannot pretend to believe, and then act upon things that do not make it to that level of resonance within myself. I don’t have to have an academic understanding, but I have to have a sense in my gut that this thing is true, right, reliable, worthy. Sometimes this is called our gut. I think it’s what is sometimes reflected in the statement “follow your heart.”

This resonance may feel like delight. Wonder. Appreciation. Grief. Boldness. We don’t choose to have these emotions, it’s more like that revelation, language, resonance opened a deep well that was always in there. Like it gave us access to more of ourselves, our whole, healed selves, and what comes forth is what was always in there, hidden by the brokenness both inside and outside ourselves. Gratitude,  repentance, longing, delight spring forth unbidden. We find ourselves becoming someone we didn’t know we were. Never thought we would be. We find ourselves moving through the world changed. Interacting differently.

The next step in the prayer journey is divine imagination. This is where it gets really magical. All of the previous steps lead to an invitation to collaborate and participate in this conversation between the Creator and the created. We begin to imagine ourselves and our worlds within the context of this new knowing. We imagine - what if. What if justice or mercy or reconciliation or restitution or generosity or freedom and equality truly existed. We begin to understand the power these things hold to not just change things for ourselves and our families, but for our whole communities - not just to change but transform. To end suffering. To bring peace. To bind up wounds. To break chains. To comfort the brokenhearted. To restore what was lost. 

And this creates longing. A deep, burning, forest fire of desire to see that world come into being. As we watch the world around us continue to suffer, to go the way of history; filled with hate, and vengeance, greed, cruelty, callousness, scarcity, a dissatisfaction wells up in our throats like a scream.

We want that world where everything is as it should be. The rich give to the poor to the point that there is no longer any distinction between rich and poor. Forgiveness instead of vengeance rules and the cycle of violence comes to an end. There is space for generational wounds and family curses to heal. There is space for relationships to be restored. 

We long for this with ever fiber of our being. 

And that all that longing produces hope. We believe and feel so deeply, so intuitively that this is the way the world should be that we begin to act like that’s the way the world is. Like the right thing is the right thing even if it produces consequences in our life like loss of power, privilege, wealth, safety. We operate out of this deep well of knowing it’s the right thing to do. We can’t do anything but. 

This hope is not empty but human. It wears skin and uses its muscles. It’s a living, breathing hope. It’s a hope that moves through the world and interacts with its ecosystem. It’s the moment something unexpected happens in the story. It’s the plot twist. Evil and chaos and hatred have been raining down in a broken, endless stream and then in the middle of it, like a new, tiny incarnation is the thing no one expected to come next in the story. A goodness. A rightness. A brazen, illogical, not remotely expedient small act of sacrifice that restores a little order and balance to the environment. 

The secure forgo their security to share it with the insecure. 

The wronged forgo their right to vengeance and offer forgiveness and love.

The healthy give strength to the sick.

The wealthy give their wealth to the poor.

Ridiculous acts. Wasteful acts. Hopeful acts.

And this hope produces expectation. As we live out this new understanding while still living in this world that is not as it should be it costs us much. But we do it because we know it’s right and we look for it to matter. To help in some way. To change things just a little, even if just for one person, for one day. To just make the world a little more right. A little less wrong. 

We look for evidence of our hope. We look to see outside of ourselves a reflection of what we know to be true inside ourselves. 

Sometimes we see little glimmers of reflected light. Moments of rightness. The victim gets justice. The innocent get protection. The disabled get support and dignity. The other gets treated as brother.

But often we act in darkness. Our hope burns like a fire in us, leading us to bigger and bolder acts of hopeful ridiculousness. Deeper longing. Ceaseless expectation. Every day that passes without the conclusion of that expectation weighs on our souls. Are we crazy? Are we foolish? Are we wrong? Or, maybe is God not listening? Does He not care? How can He not care when He’s the one who taught us to care so much? Maybe He didn’t teach us. Maybe we just got here without Him. 

When our hope and expectation don’t produce the change we long for, it produces sickness. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.”

But still we act. Still we believe those things to be so right and worthy that we do them even when it seems like spitting in the wind. Like it’ll never make a difference. This is where faith comes in.

I think, a lot of times, it doesn’t feel like faith. I think, sometimes, it feels like defiance against a passive, cold, uninterested God. I think, sometimes, it feels like rage. I think, sometimes, it feels like doubt, disillusionment, disbelief.

But all of this imagination, longing, hope, expectation, and faith produces change. 

A boldness and selflessness that radicalizes and brings back to life. 

Not just in us, like it so often feels.

But everywhere.

Like the inverse of a cancer cell. Unseen, impossibly small, and seemingly insignificant. Impotent. But leading to a chain reaction that eventually effects the whole body, but instead this time it’s a restoration of order and rightness instead of the constant, overwhelming attack of entropy on our hearts, minds, souls, bodies, the earth.

Our small, tiny acts of hope, no matter how ridiculous, unreasonable, illogical, and foolish ALWAYS produce change.

It can’t not.

Because, just like that revelation broke through all of our resistance and layers of misunderstanding and unveiled a deep resonance and knowing within us, so to do our hopeful acts serve as revelation for the people, world, cells, and atoms around us. They too see that thing, even if society around us does not, and rejoice because it resonates with them too. 

A ripple effect of imagination and longing are produced. Nature vibrates in expectation. Humans join together across lands and cultures in longing and hopeful, impossible acts of faith. 

Like a snowball rolling down a hill, gaining size and mass, this to has an inevitable conclusion of making it down the hill. 

Maybe we never see the snowball make it to the bottom. We miss it. Maybe it’s so small we can’t see it. Maybe it takes so long we’ve passed on already by the time it get’s there.

But it does get there. 

It produces change. Restoration. Order. Healing. Comfort. Goodness. Truth. Rightness.

What if prayer is the fabric of this eternal conversation between YHWH and humanity. What if each of us are weavers in this collaborative weaving project. Each bringing in their own color and texture, adding complexity and detail to the warp and woof laid out by the Creator. What if this fabric is not ours alone to make, or even generational, but eternal - from before the beginning of time, through to the end of the world. One long, ongoing song, filled with divine and human voices from every tribe and nation. 

What if we just get to enter into that conversation, be a part of the experience of being together in spirit and being changed by not just the fabric we are weaving but the act of weaving it together, with our creator and our fellow humans? 

What if when we pray, we join with everyone else in the whole world who has the same hope and longing? What if we co-create with them and usher in the antidote to the pain of the world. What if prayer is a collaborative act of daily, global, timeless incarnation.

What if the most powerful thing we can do is imagine, think God’s thoughts after Him? What if the very act of doing so changes not just us and our ecosystem but co-creates with all of nature and humanity and the Creator justice, mercy, truth.  -------------------

Some quotes I find relevant:

“The only hands God has on earth are ours.”

-- Mother Teresa

“You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of -- something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for". We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”

-- CS Lewis

“With the whole church

We affirm

That we are made in God’s image

befriended by Christ, empowered by the Spirit.

With the people everywhere

we affirm

God’s goodness at the heart of humanity

planted more deeply than all that is wrong.

With all creation

we celebrate

The miracle and wonder of life;

the unfolding purposes of God,

forever at work in ourselves and the world.” 

-- A Celtic Christian prayer of affirmation from the church in Iona.

They who pray with faith have fervour and fervour is the fire of prayer. This mysterious fire has the power of consuming all our faults and imperfections, and of giving to our actions, vitality, beauty and merit.

-- Frances Xavier Cabrini

*Stay tuned for a coming-soon DD Course on Prayer. Coming end of summer ‘25.