What is Prayer?
Prayer plays a significant role in my novel, The Twelfth Cross (released July 6th.) I’m keen to see readers’ reactions to this, as I’m not marketing it as a Christian book. The historical setting is a help, as faith is a ‘given’ in the medieval period. But in my experience, many people are more open to the idea of prayer than to the idea of God. Some would go as far as saying they believe in the power of prayer, without any sense of the involvement of a divine being.
What does prayer mean to you? Whether or not prayer is a feature of your life, how would you define it?
One prayer many of us know is the Lord’s Prayer, which Jesus taught his disciples as a pattern. It begins, ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.’ For Jesus, the practice of prayer means first and foremost to acknowledge the supremacy of God.
When we studied the Lord’s Prayer in my life group, I wrote my own version, to help embed what I’d learned. In between each phrase of Jesus’ prayer, I inserted the words, ‘You are God and I am not.’ God’s will, not mine. God’s kingdom, not mine. God’s power and glory, not mine. To me, this is the heart of Jesus’ prayer.
I define prayer simply as conversation with God. And like all good conversation, it involves acknowledging and respecting the other person, and valuing their views as well as one’s own. In prayer, the other person is God; the eternal creator of the universe and the person who knows and loves us through and through. So prayer is both the most respectful and the most intimate conversation we can have.
Since God ‘looks on the heart,’ we can and must come to Him as we are. In ‘The Twelfth Cross,’ Brother Clément is in the first throes of grief; he comes to God enraged, heartbroken and bewildered.
‘Yet on night after night of his voluntary vigil, he had been astonished by the kindness of God. The Lord had blessed him with insights, with visions and with a peace that sat alongside his ungovernable rage and grief. He had been drawn deeper into the heart of prayer, the baring of the soul before God’s loving gaze.’
