Reviewing Prayer, Part One

October 18, 2011 // No Comments »

We had a great discussion on the practice of prayer this past Sunday.With several from our community unable to be there this week, I thought it would be good to capture a little of it. The difficulty, and the beauty, of talking about prayer is that it is a bottomless mystery that cannot be captured in an evening (or a lifetime) of conversation.

We began with an image of a city with the word Prayer somewhat lost in the middle of it. While prayer is often accompanied by images of nature, the reality of prayer is that it exists in the everyday, as we learning engage with God not only to the sounds of chirping, but of street traffic.

While I don’t like the idea of turning the mysteries of prayer into some kind of formula to follow, it was helpful to break down prayer into the unique ways we experience it. Prayer can come in many forms and postures, and our hope was to understand them to see how we tend to engage with God most, while also recognize where we might be able to develop.

The broad strokes of prayer that we looked at were:

1. Praise – The contemporary experience of praise is often through music in a church service, but praise is any form of prayer that recognizes the goodness and glory of God.
2. Petition – This may be the most common understanding of prayer in our culture (and therefore it also may be the most misunderstood). Petition is the practice of turning over needs and concerns to God, with an expectation that God will act coinciding with our release of control over those concerns.
3. Confession – An act of laying bare our soul to God and recognizing where we have missed the mark in our efforts to live as God intends for us.
4. Reflection – Sometimes overlapping with confession, reflection comes as we take the time to look at our selves and our experiences, asking God to show us where we are being formed. It is a posture of listening and awareness, and often comes through journaling or Scripture reading.
5. Retreat – An intentional time of withdrawal from the immediate in an attempt to connect with the eternal. A place where prayer might be most mysterious as we engage in forms of meditation or contemplative prayer.
6. Presence – Living with an ongoing awareness of God’s work in us and around us as we go through the common activities of our day.

As we do each month as we talk about unique practices, the challenge is for each of us to reflect on these in the month to come, and talk about our experiences intentionally practicing one or two of these forms of prayer in the month to come. I’m looking forward to hearing how it goes for each of us.

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Reflections