Last week’s post explored our need to be transformed by God’s love, and the ways in which spiritual disciplines are avenues that lead to this transformation. For the next several weeks we will delve into several specific disciplines. Today: the spiritual discipline of prayer.

Consider something that Frederick Buechner wrote:
We all pray whether we think of it as praying or not. The odd silence we fall into when something very beautiful is happening, or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of us as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the skyrocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else's pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else's joy. Whatever words or sounds we use for sighing with over our own lives. These are all prayers in their way. (85-86, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC)
Buechner reminds us that prayer isn’t about saying the right words at the right time. Prayer isn’t about eloquent language. Prayer is, instead, about our attitude toward God and our relationship with God. It is about trust, wonder, awe, compassion. Prayer can be the silence that occurs or “the ah-h-h-h!” that echoes forth when we are struck by the beauty and glory of God’s creation or the gentle love shown in a newborn infant. Prayer can be the inarticulate mutterings that issue forth when we are humbled and feeling inadequate in the face of someone’s pain.

Prayer can be words, too: words of hope, of aspiration, of thanksgiving, of intercession, of praise. Even then, especially then, we need to remind ourselves that prayer really isn’t about the right words or eloquent expression of them. Prayer isn’t about expertise at grammar. Instead prayer is about honest, from the heart, sharing with God of our deepest longing and hope and praise and gratitude and concern. Prayer is about connecting with God as with a dear friend.

Verbalized or not prayer can transform us as it provides a central means of (a) fostering our relationship with God, (b) realizing God’s never ending love and care, and (c) deepening our relationships with others as we lift their joys and concerns in prayer. This doesn’t mean that God is a celestial genie who grants our wishes as we ask them. Sometimes, even after fervent prayer, one whom we love dies or has a crisis continue unabated. The relationship that we foster in prayer isn’t about getting all that we want. Instead that relationship is about encountering God and God’s love, and being transformed by the encounter as it assures us of a God who never leaves us even in the face of pain and need and death.

Augustine had it right, I think, when in his Confessions he wrote:

“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”

Augustine knew that prayer is about relationship with a loving God. Prayer is about resting in that God’s love regardless of whether our hearts are troubled or rejoicing. Prayer is about knowing that our hearts, though full of either joy or sorrow, are unsettled until we know God as a place of love, care, hope, and rest. The spiritual discipline of prayer provides the gateway that leads to this gracious God. Join me in prayer that doesn’t care about what, if any, words are used, but that cares, instead, about finding a God in whom our restless hearts can find joy and hope and rest so that our lives may be transformed in the encounter.

Dave Fetterman is the Director of Christian Education and Spiritual Formation at Westminster Presbyterian Church.