Sept. 20, 2025
On Prayer: What Do We Think We’re Doing?
With notable frequency these days, when talk among friends turns to all the tragedies, injustices and challenges in the world, people express their feelings of helplessness in a familiar formula: “All we can do is pray.” Yet studies over the past decade indicate that fewer and fewer people pray regularly. That’s quite a disconnect. But underlying both phenomena is an urgent existential question: How do our beliefs about prayer determine the way we show up in the world?
It is small wonder that people are giving up on prayer, if by prayer is meant supplication to a being with the power to grant particular outcomes. Volumes of theology have attempted to redeem the practice from the blatant fact that rarely does the one who prays get the exact end sought, however universally beneficial the petition. Proffered explanations often lay the responsibility for the gap separating request and result in the lap of a God who knows better, who sees a bigger picture, who gives us what we need in place of what we want. But if we’re honest, few likely find those explanations more than minimally comforting.
And that view of prayer simply will not speak when we shift our gaze from the immutable and omnipotent God many of us inherited, to the nondual God within whom our lives arise and with whom we share creative agency. If indeed we and God are complementary poles of a single divine Reality, who is it that is in control? Who are we praying to?
Prayer presumes relationship, that much seems certain. But it makes all the difference in the world to know who this God is to whom we bring our prayer. The nondual God in whom we live and move and have our being is not a being who controls, who commands and rewards, who has a plan for each person in each moment, but a creative consciousness whose own being consists in its vital and vibrant interdependence with all God’s manifestations in the world. The nondual God shares divine identity with us so completely that God’s being is forged along with our own. This is the God within a complex world evolving toward wholeness, a God who is more than any one of us and more even than all of us, but is nothing without us. In the words of St. Augustine, God is “more intimate to us even than we are intimate to ourselves.”
And it is in the union, in the very oneness of human and divine consciousness, that prayer blooms. Prayer is nothing other than the volitional turning of our individual human consciousness to the encompassing divine consciousness from which it springs. Prayer is nothing less than my life as I join it to the emptying of the divine into the world.
A Whiteheadian Weaving
Twentieth-century British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead offers us an evocative prospect of this divine evolving Reality. In anticipation if not yet recognition of a nondual God, for Whitehead God was scarcely less intimately bound in mutual and dynamic concert with the cosmos. If Whitehead’s God be not quite nondual, this God nevertheless cannot be divided from the manifest reality of living beings.
For in Whitehead’s God lie all possible potentials, all available outcomes, for each and every being and moment as
they unfold, however well they do or do not align with the love and creativity of the divine source. Yet from within this divine nature God persistently invites, lures the world toward those potentials that will create more and richer life. This God does not demand or coerce, but permeates the universe and companions its steps.
And as in each moment a single outcome is chosen and enacted, it flies back into God to be integrated with settled past and latent future to offer ever new and creative possibilities for the world’s next moment. As each entity in the universe, human and nonhuman, chooses its own next occasion, it offers itself to the world’s advance beyond its own finite position. Actions from infinite points in the universe flow together, within and among each other, in each single instant, weaving the tapestry of an ever-changing world – an arising world that flows into God for God’s own becoming and God’s simultaneous reordering of possibilities for the very next moment, and the next, and the next.
The elegant image Whitehead has tendered here to describe the movement between God and beings leans heavily toward what we can imagine within the one eternal consciousness, as divine energy sweeps from nondual Reality through each of its expressions to constitute the whole. And it no less suggests the proper role for the activity we engage as prayer. In the flow of unfolding, in the boundless becoming of the one Reality of God, prayer is simply, and profoundly, our conscious movement to discern and align ourselves with the most loving and creative potential for each moment.
Thus does prayer open the world to its own transformation. This prayer recognizes the complexity of the world, welcomes the unpredictability of its evolution; it does not run away from heartbreak or toward only happiness. It embraces its interdependence with every other creating entity. In this prayer we offer ourselves, individually and together, as vehicles of the best possible tomorrow. We accept our role in creating something truly new from the pain and sorrow and fear, from the grace and joy and promise, poised within the present moment.
This prayer is our participation in the Spirit-filled fostering of life, the life of the nondual God. Prayer is the opening of ourselves as channels for the world we want to see.
Praying the Tapestry
God is intimately involved with the world, but God does not work magic. God works with what is. What is in any moment shapes the potentials for what may issue from it. Some moments appear miraculous, some senselessly tragic. Because we cannot know the totality of what has been offered from the world to the emergence of each occasion, we will rarely see the dramatic results for which we pray. But eternal promise is there in each choice we make to be what we want to see. As we change what is, we change what may be.
In prayer – in any and all kinds of prayer – we take a step to make conscious our being and becoming as expressions of the God who is All in All. In our petition, we do not beseech God to manipulate outcomes; we acknowledge the pain and need in the world, ours and others’, and assent to our participation in creating compassionate outcomes. In our praise and thanks, we acknowledge the gift of life as we carry forward the creative love that is our birthright. In our prayer is our life as the imago dei, the image of God.
Each of us is a thread in the tapestry of life being woven as the life of God, each choice a fiber. The genesis of concrete possibilities will answer the world that must birth them, but each occasion offers infinite potential for compassion. And as each thread chooses the path of creativity, of love, a greater wholeness and harmony is braided into the eternally evolving nondual Reality of God and universe. Our prayer, our emptying into the Source of life to offer our own energy and efforts to the emergence of greater life, is the surrender of our self-serving agendas in service to redemption of the world, in service to a wholeness that may not be what we imagine we want, always and only because what is offered is simply beyond our imagining.
Prayer Without Ceasing
When the apostle Paul adjured his readers to pray without ceasing, he was not advocating a step back from the world to focus on God. Just the opposite. He was naming the reality that prayer is not only something we do, but that prayer is who we are. We are already engaged in the co-creation of reality by virtue of our identity in the nondual God. The disconnect arises when who we are stands in opposition to what we ask of God, when the prayer we live is at odds with the prayer we speak, when we are unwilling to relinquish the petition born of our limited desire in favor of the divine hunger for a world that meets every dream with hope and every challenge with compassion.
Our needs are great, our fears are great. We have much to express to God, and it is appropriate that, in our move to rejoin individual consciousness with the divine consciousness of the All, we reverently approach that which is so much more than our individual consciousness within a pattern of relationship with this God. Yet once there, once planted in the heart of God, I come to know it as my own heart, and come to know that I can bear the need and fear and can create from it something good, whatever the circumstances of the present. God and we, God as we, hold the pain and sorrow and joy and grace together, in the single loving Reality that calls life forward.
So perhaps the royal road of prayer is the simple silence of meditation, bringing the heart’s load into the flow of divine life, holding and bearing it together, rejoicing and celebrating it together, trusting that the whole divine Reality fears and suffers and hopes with us. Into that open space of our own becoming may then flow the gifts of whatever the next moment needs – courage, strength, comfort, compassion, action. And from the hour of prayer, we bear the load and the love into all the hours of our lives.
And All Shall Be Well
Millennia of waiting on the gods for deliverance have schooled us in powerlessness. Decades of personal experience have conditioned us in helplessness. And certainly the near view outward from any single life may give little to bolster the hope we seek. But in giving in to feelings of helplessness, we feed impotence into the future, perpetuating the very things from which we would have God rescue us.
It is only the view from within the joined human-divine consciousness that will discern the transformation hovering over each moment. It is only the donation of our thoughts, hopes, and willingness to be changed that will weave into the next moment the potential for newness. What we find there may not be the promise of a burnished earthly existence or even the beatific vision of a heaven to come. Rather, hope will spring up from immersing our desires in the generous Source of life that beckons us onward, renewing and retooling desire itself. Finally, in the prayer of undivided consciousness lies the assurance voiced by mystic Julian of Norwich, that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
Benedictine monk Br. David Steindl-Rast has described the gold within this kind of prayer as a radical openness to experience, a courageous trust in life, a hope for the unimaginable. At the intersection of all these things is the prayer which is a thoroughgoing “yes” to life. But it is not easy to be that vulnerable, to live with the uncertainty of our own tomorrows, to allow the pain or even the joys of the world to shape our being and becoming. Nor does vulnerability to one another come easily. But only in that vulnerability can any genuine experience of our union with one another and with God be known. And only in that vulnerability can possibly be known the peace that passes all understanding, that comes in assuming our proper place in the God who wraps joy and sorrow in one dance of life. The life of the prayer we are.
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