Dear Theophilus, 

As I mentioned in my letter, I want to talk a little bit about prayer. You have expressed some questions and I think that the time is right to look at this topic. I am sure that you realize that this is something that is very misunderstood because it is very profound and very important and therefore does not lend itself to simplistic explanations. The other thing is that prayer is an empirical thing, it isn't simply something that one talks about without practising. I think if that is the approach one takes, then one will be sadly disappointed. So, Theophilus, you are warned at the outset.

At the outset we can ask ourselves what prayer is and what we will find is that there are many answers to this question. The one that we will use goes somewhat along the following lines: prayer is the search for a meeting with God. We want to meet someone who gives the world that we live in depth and who makes us realize that there is a visible and an invisible world and they co-inhere one in the other. Much of our lives is spent living on the surface of reality. This is the most obvious aspect of existence and therefore it doesn't take much effort and being as we are, we inevitably choose the path of least resistance. Prayer is therefore a form of exploration where we discover depth in the world and in us and we realize there is a mysterious depth to those that we meet in life.

The impetus for prayer is two-fold - we approach prayer because of wonder and because of sadness. Sometimes we are struck by the wonder of life, the intricacy of it all; sometimes we turn to prayer because of pain and the apparent lack of meaning in our existence. We can shelter ourselves from these two things, and many do, and go through life in a semi-somnabulent state.

Prayer is usually thought of as a conversation but preceding this is an encounter - before you can speak you must meet the one you wish to converse with. There is therefore a personal aspect to prayer that is very important. God knows everything that exists but this knowledge varies for Him (as it does for us). When we become aware of His knowing us (and this is fundamental to prayer) and when we assent to be known by Him, then we become, in relation to God not as a thing but as a person. We change and assume the high position of person. In a sense, and a very profound sense, during prayer we are becoming and if we don't pray, then we stagnate without any growth. To pray we must experience a need for communion with God, a thirst for Him which drives to to encounter Him.

But prayer has its own dangers and this may be the reason why some people don't engage in it. Prayer involves a situation of crisis and judgement. It is for this reason that Orthodox manuals on prayer have little on technique but much on moral and spiritual clarification. If we are to meet the make of the universe then we have to do it in a proper state, honestly, not offering some phoney image of ourselves. Often, we don't encounter God in our prayers because we offer not our true selves, but a mask, and since God does not deal with what is false, He does not respond to our false self. To a large extent, our perceived absence of God is subjective in that what is absent is not God, but our idea of what God should be like which more often than not, is an idolatrous image.

What are the prerequisites for prayer? Without a doubt, they are contrition and humility. It is true that when we approach prayer we expect all kinds of marvellous revelations and enlightenment spiritual satisfaction. This is a form of subtle sin which can be called spiritual gluttony. The attitude we are called on to have is that of contrition which means we are sorry for the wrongs that we have done and a promise to try not to repeat them. Humility has had bad press in our society becoming almost synonymous with subservience and lack of a spine. It is interesting to explore the root for the word, humility. It comes from the Latin, humus, which represents something which is rich and fertile, something which is conducive for growth. In the Chinese culture, water is seen as the symbol for humility because it is the lowest waters, the seas and the oceans, which are the most powerful as the rivers and streams which are above them, flow into them and make them powerful. Prayer is therefore the arena where honesty and accuracy are paramount - there is no room for deception. We must be open, even if we doubt, or even if our faith is minuscule. We simply admit this. If we look at John the Baptist, we see the all too human reaction of uncertainty. Just before he is to be beheaded, he sends his disciples to Jesus to enquire if He is the "one who is to come". He is reassured by reference to a prophecy from Isaiah and here we have a lesson for ourselves. Doubt is not an unusual state for humans and we do need reassurance time and time again. But, sometimes, this reassurance does not come overtly - Jesus does not simply say yes to the question - but John is answered through reference to a prophecy. God speaks to us sometimes through the agency of Scripture and if we are not familiar with Scripture we may miss messages to us.

I must comment a little more deeply on something which is an almost universal experience of humanity, at least sometimes in their lives - the silence of God. It has been said that God whispers to us in our joys, and shouts in our sorrows. This is to get our attention, but when something profound is to be communicated to us, it is usually done through silence. I said above that this silence is sometimes brought on by our subjective attitude, but there is something deeper here than that. Remember that prayer has its own set of laws. The encounter between God and us always leads to silence and there are several reasons for this. God's silence draws us out and permits us to be ourselves without intimidating us. (There is a deep lesson for us here in terms of how we deal with those around us). It is an expression of our painful freedom because God does not want to coerce us or to deny our free will. On the other hand, God's silence is also a sign of His freedom. It is ironic that we go through our daily lives and for the twenty three hours and fifty five minutes that we ignore God and live as if He does not exist, in the five minutes we assign Him in our prayers, we expect Him to leap to our beckon and call. It simply does not work this way because God is also free. The silence or absence of God, however, has an even deeper significance. Here we must speak poetically which does not mean less accurately but more deeply because poetry addresses not only our intellect but our emotions, our depths, as well. If Christ is the Word, then the Father is the silence from which the Word derives. It is in fact in the silence that God speaks to us most deeply. This may seem paradoxical and hard to understand but maybe several illustrations will clarify the situation. One is from the natural sciences. In the past it was thought that the vacuum, that is the space in which matter and energy is absent, is a "nothing". What we are starting to realize from Quantum Mechanics, a branch of physics which studies that which is very, very tiny, is that this "nothing" is not an absence but is teeming with activity and presence, energy which we have not yet learned to tap. It is a form of creation that we have yet to learn how to address and study. Similarly and analogously, the silence that we sometimes encounter is not absence but a presence which we have not learned to discern. The other point that I would like to make is that in our normal exchanges we offer questions and receive answers. This is fine at a superficial level but when we come to deeper matters this approach fails. What we have seen, especially in the sciences, is that every question, when it is answered, always gives rise to another question in a never ending spiral. In other words, what is absolute cannot be dealt with through this technique of communication of question and answer. Words have their limitation and sometimes they fail because they limit and can only convey a partial reality and when we deal with the Absolute, they start to fall apart completely. For growth to occur, to go beyond the level at which we find ourselves, a different approach has to be used and this is the one in which silence plays the major role. In fact, what we see is that as the life of prayer becomes more perfected, it tends towards wordlessness, and we will look at this a little more later on.

Yours,

Bar-Abbas

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