What Is Prayer
Timothy Solomon
What is prayer?
I ask this as someone who spent most of his life not praying. Not because I'd considered it and rejected it, but because the question itself had been foreclosed before I ever got to it. I grew up in a culture that had reduced God to a bearded man in the sky, a kind of celestial vending machine you put wishes into. And anyone who believed in that was, at best, naive. At worst, stupid. Religion was the opiate of the masses. That's what the smart people said, and I wanted to be one of the smart people.
And to be fair, the version of God I was taught to dismiss was worth dismissing. The material sky daddy who tallies your sins and grants your wishes and gets angry when you eat the wrong food on the wrong day. That God deserves every bit of the scorn the Enlightenment poured on him, because that God was never the God that the traditions were actually pointing toward. He was a caricature. A straw man dressed in robes. And the modern intellectual movement that tore him down was not wrong to do so. But what it put in his place was worse. It replaced faith with a kind of smug pseudo-intellectualism that congratulates itself for not believing in something it never bothered to understand. It threw out the bearded man and thought it had thrown out God. It hadn't. It had just stopped looking.
The people I looked down on, the ones who went to church, who prayed before meals, who talked about God without embarrassment, they had something I did not have. I could feel it. Even as a kid I could feel it. They had access to some experience, some way of orienting themselves in the world, that functioned. That sustained them. That gave them a kind of quiet structural integrity I lacked. And I resented them for it while also wanting desperately to find whatever it was they had. I called it a cheat code at the time. Everybody else seemed to have one and I didn't. Now I think it wasn't a cheat code at all. It was the opposite. It was the real work that I was too clever to attempt.
Through much journeying, through years of searching and failing and looking in the wrong places and reading the wrong books and sometimes the right ones, I have arrived at a place where I engage with God on a regular basis. Where I have a deep and personal relationship with God, or at least I believe I do. I find myself praying more and more. And to that, I find myself asking the question more seriously than I ever have: what is prayer? What am I actually doing when I pray? And what is the best way to do it?
The most obvious answer is that prayer is asking for things. But that seems wrong. It's kind of like dealing with a tricky genie, because he's pedantic and will give you exactly what it was for which you ask. Not what you meant. Not what you needed. What you asked for. There's even the old Oscar Wilde line: "When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers." That always rang true to me. The whole arrangement felt like a trap. You petition the almighty, he processes your request with the cold precision of a bureaucrat, and you get exactly what you wished for, which turns out to be the worst thing that could have happened.
So maybe you don't ask for things. I've often heard it said to pray for qualities instead. Wisdom. Discipline. Discernment. Steadfastness. Strength. I guess that's admirable enough, but it also seems off base. You're still sitting there with your hand out, just asking for something slightly more respectable than a new car. The grammar is the same. The posture is the same. You're still the petitioner. He's still the granter. And the whole frame assumes you know what you need, which is exactly the thing you're admitting you lack by praying in the first place.
Do you ask for things for others? That seems fine, even generous, but also misguided. Who am I to know what's better for someone else? I don't know what hardships are building them, what losses are redirecting them, what apparent disasters are in fact the only path to wherever they're supposed to end up.
For a long time I had settled on what I thought was the most defensible version of prayer I could find. I prayed for those I love to maintain a lifestyle equal to or greater than that to which they'd been accustomed, and to relinquish my fear, or to accept, that such a life might not be one that includes me. That felt honest. Even selfless. But even that is limited. It only covers my circle. My loved ones. My sphere of awareness. What about everything and everyone beyond that?
Each of these models of prayer is less wrong than the last, but they are all still wrong in the same way. They are all communication. They all assume that the point of prayer is to transmit some message to God and have him act on it.
And here is the deeper problem, the one that none of these models can survive. God surely already knows your thoughts, and by extension your prayers, in the common usage of the word. And after all he has his divine plan. Who am I to change that? And how could I? You cannot inform omniscience. You cannot lobby the divine plan. You cannot tell God something he doesn't already know, and you cannot persuade him toward a course of action he hasn't already considered and either chosen or rejected for reasons that are, by definition, beyond your understanding.
Which means if prayer has any function at all, it cannot be communication. Not in any conventional sense. The phone line is open, sure, but there is nothing you can say that the other end doesn't already know.
Unless the point was never the message. Unless it was always about what happens to you when you pick up the phone.
Recently, through the grace of God, and I don't use that phrase lightly because no other phrase is accurate, I think I had a revelation about what prayer actually is. Or is supposed to be.
It is to be loving awareness.
Not chanted in your head as some mantra subvocalized by the voice in your mind, though that is a good place to start, and I won't pretend I didn't start there myself. Ram Dass gave the mantra: I am not my body, I am not my thoughts, I am not my mind. And he is also famous for saying I am loving awareness as a repeated phrase, a kind of anchor. Those words were enormously helpful to me. They are a good place to begin. But they are the beginning, not the destination.
Because here is what is often lost in meditation, and I think in prayer too: it is not about having words go through your head. That is the whole point, to avoid that. The subvocalized version, the mantra version, the repeated phrase, that is training wheels. Necessary, maybe, but training wheels nonetheless. The real thing is when the words dissolve. When you stop narrating the experience and start having it. It is to let the feeling permeate the body, the mind, and the thoughts, so that those things can dissolve into pure feeling. So that you are not your mind. Not your body. Not your thoughts. You are what remains when those fall away.
It is to open your heart and your mind's eye to see all things with love and attention. Not to think the words "I love this" or "this is beautiful." But to stop and slow yourself and let the mind's eye expand and see yourself as loving awareness and be the universe looking back at itself in a strange but all-loving recursive loop.
To let your eyes be God's eyes and for them only to see good. Not in a banal or superficial way. Not in the way that pretends suffering doesn't exist or that everything is fine when it plainly isn't. But to see all things as good no matter how difficult that may seem. To see the good in things, especially the ones that resist it. That is not denial. That is the hardest spiritual work there is.
And this is why the true prayer must be felt and not thought. A thought is a symbol, a compression, a reduction of something continuous into something discrete. A thought about love is not love. A thought about God is not God. The voice in your head that says "I am grateful" is not gratitude. It is a representation of gratitude, a little internal press release about a feeling you may or may not actually be having.
God does not need your press releases. He already has the raw data.
So the true prayer, the best prayer, must be an intentioned and attentioned feeling. Not a transmission to God but a tuning of yourself to become an instrument of his loving awareness. Not an instrument that plays to God but one that plays as God. My eyes to be God's eyes, as a gift by grace, so that God might observe itself and what it sees be good and full of love.
Because if the universe is everything, all space, all time, all information, all energy, all possibility, and I am part of that universe, and I observe within that universe, then I am the universe observing itself. That is not metaphor. That is not poetry, or it is poetry but it is also just literally what is happening. And the universe, God, the totality, whatever name you want to give the thing that has no outside, cannot know itself as an object, because to know something you need a boundary, a separation, an arm's length. The totality has no arm's length. It has no outside. It can only know itself through its localized expressions. Through you. Through me. Through every conscious being that has ever stopped long enough to look.
Prayer, then, is not talking to God. Prayer is being the place where God talks to himself. It is lending your eyes to the infinite so that the infinite can see itself in the finite, and finding, in that seeing, that what it sees is good.
In practice this is simpler and harder than anything I have described. It is to take a moment and see how the details emerge on the branch of a tree, things your eyes would have missed at a quick glance. The way the bark splits and heals. The geometry of the leaves. The specific angle of light that makes one branch glow and leaves another in shadow. But it is not just the pretty things. It is also the oil marks in the cracks of the pavement and the water stains on your shower door. The pattern of wear on a doorknob. To see these things not as noise but as signal, not as ugly but as specific, not as beneath attention but as the very stuff of which attention is made.
I get to look around me and see nothing but beauty and possible perfection. Even if it is imperfect relative to me right now, by allowing for the good, I get to say that if I have made a wish, it just has not manifested yet. And that the path to its manifestation is not linear, and it is continuous.
All those years I spent thinking the people who prayed were foolish, I had it exactly backwards. They were not the ones missing something. I was. The modern intellectual posture that replaced religion did not elevate us. It impoverished us. It gave us the vocabulary to tear things down and none of the tools to build anything in their place. And prayer, real prayer, is a building. It is the act of constructing, moment by moment, a way of seeing that makes the world larger instead of smaller. It does not require belief in a bearded man in the sky. It requires only the willingness to stop, and to look, and to feel what is actually there.
The best prayer, I think, is felt not thought. It goes something like:
I am loving awareness, and loving awareness is aware I am.
But even that is just the training wheels. The real prayer is when you stop saying it and start being it. When the words dissolve and what is left is just looking. Seeing. Feeling the world press back against your attention with its own weight and detail and specificity. Letting the feeling permeate you so completely that the mind, the body, the thoughts, all of it falls away, and what remains is awareness, loving, aware that it is.
The universe, aware of itself, through you, right now.
That is the prayer. That is the whole thing.