People’s questions about prayer are often about “how do I pray?” What techniques can I use to make my prayer time more meaningful? A better first question is “why do I pray?” All of the instructions and techniques are of little value until we wrestle with why we pray in the first place. If we only explore the how and not the why we will have another thing that we can do but little understanding of the reason for doing it in the first place. Pause for a moment to ask yourself: “why do I pray?”

Henri Nouwen said that we pray so that we can forge relationships: relationships with God and with each other. Prayer allows us to deepen our relationship with God as we encounter God’s love and peace through it. In turn our relationships with others – even enemies – can be transformed as God’s love found in prayer radiates outward from us into the lives of others.

For these loving relationships to be discovered and deepened, we need to first be willing to be open to God, to humbly admit that we need God’s love to make our brokenness whole. In his book, With Open Hands, Nouwen wrote:

Praying … demands a relationship in which you allow the other to enter into the very center of your person…The resistance to praying is like the resistance of tightly clenched fists. The image shows the tension, the desire to cling tightly to yourself, a greediness which betrays fear.

Prayer is about opening lives clenched tightly to protect ourselves from anyone, even God, getting too close and knowing us too well. Prayer is about holding open hands to God. It is about allowing “the other” – God – to enter into the center of our lives that we might in turn move outward to love and care for all of God’s children. Again Nouwen writes:

To pray means to open your hands before God. It means slowly relaxing the tension which squeezes your hands together and accepting your existence with an increasing readiness, not as a possession to defend, but as a gift to receive…Prayer is a way of life which allows you to find a stillness in the midst of the world where you open your hands to God's promises, and find hope…

Continue to reflect on why you pray. Over the next several weeks we will build on that foundation by thinking about three ways to open our lives to God and others through prayer. “Open your hands before God.” Discover the stillness, promise, and hope that flow from such openness to God. Pray with me a prayer that St. Augustine gave to us in his Confessions:

Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise; your power is immense, and your wisdom beyond reckoning. And so we humans, who are a due part of your creation, long to praise you—we who carry our mortality about with us, carry the evidence of our sin and with it the proof that you thwart the proud. Yet these humans, due part of your creation as they are, still do long to praise you. You stir us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you. Amen.