The Business of Prayer

Context is everything.

A key element to all my religious babble on this blog is recognizing that you cannot blindly inject your own cultural prejudices into the process of reading the Bible. Scripture arises from a radically different mindset than can be found anywhere in the world today. You might get by with your current world view and try to make sense of what the Bible says, but you’ll get an awful lot of it wrong, if not in detail, then a misunderstanding on a fundamental level that reaps a harvest of very many errors.

Western Christians are just getting by, if they remain Western in their understanding of the Bible. They talk about prayer; they do have a grasp of some elements because, for all we could tell, God does answer a portion of their prayers. And we cannot dispute that a great many of those who claim the label of “Christian” do manifest evidence of having been spiritually born. Rather than catalog all their errors and all the different ways people get it wrong, let’s break fresh to the truth.

Prayer is addressing yourself to the Godhead. So much is obvious. What most people get wrong is the flavor of this whole thing. Consistently and without fail, God portrayed Himself as an Eastern potentate. More specifically, He dressed His revelation in terms of Ancient Near Eastern feudalism. While ANE feudalism does overlap the version that arose in Medieval Europe, there are numerous radical differences. For the ANE lord, his real treasure was His people.

Some of them were servants, slaves or even hired hands. It’s not that they had no stake in things, but He had no real stake in them. Don’t get hung up on Western values here; this is the default for life on this earth. When Western Civilization collapses, it will have been one of the shortest lived and easily forgotten. God says He has slaves and you won’t get very far if you reject His way of doing things within His creation.

He also has family — a vast tribal extended family. He has the authority to adopt people into His family and vest them with His kinship. In essence, every human on this plane of existence who ever gained spiritual awakening was adopted into His family. That didn’t mean they were automatically good and righteous, but they had something others didn’t. They were family, not slaves, servants or mere employees. There is the potential to gain a vested interest in the operations of His domain because they are in a position to understand things non-family could never comprehend.

When the folks without living spirits pray to God, it’s all a matter of custom and protocol. The ritual is the thing, though you can be sure this Lord can read their minds, too. Still, they can ask for things consistent with their status and mission in the household. How well they understand all that has a lot to do with the results of such prayer.

Spiritual folks are family. Ritual is just window dressing; it helps to keep the head oriented properly. However, the real issue is communion with your Father. The fundamental purpose is to consult with Him on His wishes, and to share frankly your own. It’s a conversation, and He’s got all the time in the world for you. Indeed, once He plants His Spirit inside yours, the conversation never stops. But we remain creatures of flesh and our flesh needs a little something extra. You can train the devil out of your flesh, but it remains flesh. So we engage in rituals to help our limited intellect stay on course and not forget what it’s all about in the first place.

Our Lord has business in His creation. Like any other ANE sheikh, He works through His family as proxies of a sort. Some are better representatives than others. He assigns missions and tasks based on His true grasp of what we are plus a measure of His incomprehensible whims. He doesn’t need your prayers; He loves the time with you, though. You need the prayers. You need them to help you stay focused on the mission.

If you look for things to proceed as they do between folks in any part of Western society, you’ll never understand and you’ll never enter His inner circle in any sense. I’ve already spilled billions of electrons explaining the mission part, and I’m sure I’ll be moved to do more, but the point here is for you to gain an image of praying as conversation with God. Yes, He most certainly does speak to you, but your receptor for His voice is not in your head; it’s in your spirit. So you have to do the work of making your soul obey and conform to what your spirit knows. So much as you can bring that about, that much will you sense that you understand when He speaks.

On the one hand, He is holy and so far above you that it’s beyond comprehension. On the other hand, He willingly sacrificed Himself to make it possible to adopt you into His family. At times you’ll scream and cry, rant and rave, and He can take it all without responding in kind. At other times you’ll wonder at the unspeakable privilege of just being in the same world where He is pleased to manifest His divine presence. There are no boundaries to this in the sense of what humans normally think in their minds.

It isn’t about changing His mind on something, but changing yours. You are trying to enslave your mind to His will, and in the process cry out for some sanity so you’ll have the will to act in His interests. Yes, I pray for things and He grants them, things that you could justly view as frivolous luxuries. It’s not because of some magical authority or superior grasp of divine will, but it’s more a matter of His whims. There are plenty more things I’ve requested that I don’t ever receive from His hand. After a time of concerted effort trying to understand His ways, you get used to how His whims work — that is, how they work in your life, not necessarily anyone else’s life. To the degree you can get your intellect and the rest of your human self to surrender and obey His will, sight unseen, you gain a better standing in the sense of knowing you belong there in His Presence.

How you go about prayer and hold this conversation isn’t the point, but that you do it is the whole point.