In Silence Why We Pray

Introduction ?Faith itself is the soul's true country, and prayer is its native language.'With those words I concluded a chapter of an earlier work, The Hidden Jesus: A New Life. That book considered certain specific questions about the ancient Hebrew notion of the mystery of God, and about the earliest Christian assertions concerning God's continuing activity in Jesus of Nazareth. The questions and the assertions, taken collectively, comprise the basis for Judeo-Christian faith. Faith, I suggested in The Hidden Jesus, is primarily an attitude about reality'a refusal to admit that life has no meaning and that everything is doomed to extinction; faith then involves a willingness to wonder, to ask questions rather than simply to deny what the senses do not immediately validate. Faith goes further and more deeply than belief; I hope to make this the subject of a future book. a The apparent problem of the hiddenness and silence of God runs like a motif through the entire range of the Jewish-Christian Scriptures; they very much concerned me in The Hidden Jesus. Hiddenness and silence do not imply nonexistence, absence or a sort of divine detachment. On the contrary: people have become aware, however dimly, of the reality of God, and have realized a relationship with Him, only in silence. Hiddenness and silence are not nothing, nor are they to be taken for God's remoteness; they are in fact the condition of our meeting with God in time, amid the chaos of the world. If the silence and hiddenness of God are signs of His presence and the key to understanding the deepest meaning of our lives, then we may indeed listen for God, hear Him in His silence, and find Him as the ultimately real Reality precisely in that silence and hiddenness. In other words, communication with God may be not only possible but also necessary; indeed, it may be actual long before we realize it is as so. Hence the book you are now holding'an inquiry into the meaning, nature, history, quality, types and effects of prayer in human experience. a If one wishes to approach prayer as an intellectual construct, it can be studied as a psychological phenomenon, a theme in the history of world religions, a subject for academic theological discourse or simply in its most familiar form as written or spoken entreaties or formulas directed to a higher being. In this book I have chosen to examine the subject from a different perspective. My aim is not to present yet another history of religion, nor an analysis of the sociological aspects of certain forms of institutional religious life or formal worship. Likewise, I do not offer a history of mysticism: the rarefied language of many mystics is too idiosyncratic to be adequately treated in this book. But some mystics are more accessible than others, and because sometimes they have cogent and powerful things to say about prayer, their writings will be considered here. I have elected to treat prayer as an expression of an individual's inner life as it develops within the contexts of several dimensions of human experience. Dialogue is one mode of discovery about oneself and others, and prayer may be spoken of as a profound sort of dialogue. Asking, needing and desiring in some ways characterize every life in its ordinariness, and this implicit sense of one's contingency relates directly to our sense of a relationship with God. Suffering often makes people turn to God, or at least wonder about His presence or absence, and a cry amid suffering is among the commonest kinds of prayers. Love, too, in all its guises and categories, makes us somehow aware of the inevitability of connection with another and others: this human experience cannot be separated from a sense of the divine. Reflection on our experience, on what we do or feel or endure or receive, forms what we call our inner life. That reflection is the fSpoto, Donald is the author of 'In Silence Why We Pray', published 2004 under ISBN 9780670033478 and ISBN 0670033472.