By Rev. LeRoy E. Zemke
Pastor, Temple of the Living God

When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou has shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
Holy Bible, Matthew 6:6

Prayer to be fruitful must come from the heart and must be able to touch the heart of God.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Life in the Spirit.

PRAYER: a form of deep internal communion with a spiritual reality or a faith based spiritual practice that posits a belief in Divine Being. It's approaches and techniques vary within each religious or spiritual environment.

If there is one almost universal form of spiritual practice that is heard throughout any faith based community around the world, it's most likely to be prayer. The ubiquitous prevalence of prayer and the one who prays, speaks to the almost universally and deeply held perception in its effi cacy and a profound belief in a Divine Being that undergirds its many faces and forms of practice as well as practitioners.

My purpose in writing about prayer is not to examine its multiple forms or to defend its detractors. Rather it's my intention to encourage those who somewhat haphazardly or only occasionally fi nd themselves at the door step of using prayer as a signifi cant and meaningful way to approach and connect
to God or Spirit wherever one might be or whenever one is in need, or wishes to express, gratitude for life's endless unfoldings as they appear in our lives.

It has often been said that the difference between prayer and meditation is as follows: prayer is one way an individual speaks or seeks to speak to God. Meditation is one way an individual listens or receives a communique from God. While the statements are perhaps a bit simplistic, they do reflect a popular language in an effort to understand the relationship between two very well known and major approaches of spiritual practice.

Prayer is first and foremost a spiritual practice! It's origins are lost in any meaningful way to ascertain any of the hows and whys. Nearly every major (and minor) religion has some form of prayer practice. In western culture, the recorded prayers of Jesus especially the Lord's Prayer, the saints of Christendom and the rabbinical recorded prayers of Judaism are offered as prime examples of "appropriate words" and formulas in using prayers as a worthy spiritual practice.

Anyone can use prayer, anywhere, anytime. There is no "best" time, place or occasion. Prayer is a surrendering of one's outer focus to time, place and occasion as the determiner of appropriateness. In prayer, one is seeking to connect with an All Knowing Holy Presence, omnipresent and omnipotent that is always available to each of us.

In approaching the "altar of prayer," one sets aside that one must be in a church, Temple, Synagogue or Mosque. It can be offered in one's bedroom, or bathroom, kitchen or closet. It can be spoken in a garden, a park, on a walkway, pathway, around a lake, in a car, train, boat, airplane, on a mountain top or in a valley. Night or day, at home or away, anytime is an excellent time to pray. Literally anywhere in the world is the vast "altar" of prayer, from the battlefi eld's blood spattered domain to the impassioned cry of the imans of the Moslem's prayer call five imes a day. All cultures, races, creeds and no creed at all are he right environments to enter prayer's domain.

Why do we pray? Perhaps it's because somehow we trust a divine Power to guide us, to reveal hope, comfort, inner peace, a sense of ease in times of stress, fear or pain. Prayer enables us to lean upon the "Everlasting Arms" of an Almighty God in times of great loss or danger, fear or anxiety.

The act of prayer enables us, I suspect, to lift our sense of relentless worry to an internal place where we can let go of it and surrender it to a Divine or Holy Presence (beyond ourselves at the human egoic, emotional or mental level.) Here we feel connected to something larger than we are, with our worry fi lled set of circumstances, fear based outcomes and often panic driven push for answers or specifi c results.

Because I believe that at an essence level of ourselves, we are innately and inexplicably a part of a Divine Wholeness, the sense of real empowerment genuinely emerges within the very heart of our life. We definitely feel release, ease, cessation from incessant pain or mind numbing depression. While all the issues in a specific situation may not be resolved, our discomfort, often paralyzing fear, diminish and change. We feel hopeful, positive and remain expectant of good outcomes or favorable results. As we become willing to live with and move in the direction of an acceptable outcome, we enter a realm where we find balance internally.

I shall leave the actual science behind what happens to those who can articulate the ever changing nature of how our deep inner energy shifts, alters itself, collapses, reforms and reconfigures itself, to explain the process of prayer. I know it works, beyond any reasonable shadow of doubt.

In my opinion, prayer works because we no longer doubt that God - the All Great Source of All Life runs, "rules" and directs the course of human affairs. Prayer is essentially an aligning to what is best for us... not always what we want (from our limited human view). Prayer is not a directing of God to fulfill our intensely ego driven needs, wants, or wishes. I suspect it has more to do with our discovery of what is really for our higher (or highest) good, even when we do not want to admit it, recognize it or be willing to accept it.

Having a prayer based life profoundly changes our perception of our relationship to the world in which we live. One very powerful change is that we see the world as a friendly and essentially cooperative environment. While there certainly are dangers, imbalances and even groups of persons who appear to be dedicated to dark and nefarious purposes, we no longer internally support those who are linked physically, emotionally, mentally or energetically to such ends. And as we change internally, the world we experience or live in also changes.

Relationships shift in the face of a dedicated prayer life. When we focus upon wholeness, we act and speak from a more loving space. We may not like what others say nor what they do ... ither to themselves or express towards others/us. Yet as we find an inner way to affi rm them, to support them as spiritual beings, unfolding into their greatness, one step at a time, we let go of our judgments of them, our hurts, our disappointments and our constant wishes that they would be different. As that happens a gentle releasing occurs, in us, and, slowly, in time, in them. It may not be instantaneous, but it is one that permits us to surrender our own limitations that cloud our vision.

Prayer, as a practice, allows us to deepen our connection to wholeness, to the Life Force, to God, (however we perceive God to be), and we actually sense a shift in the outer worldbecause of it.

When we change our views, feelings, attitudes, etc. about how we want God to run the universe including those persons who are most directly related to us by family bonds, friendships, business or social connections or a host of other kinds of attachments, we discover freedom. A freedom to be who we are!

And when we rediscover, genuinely, and deeply our own connections to a Divine Presence, we recognize that everyone in our life is necessary part of the whole picture, a vital part of the whole plan. And they are performing their role, their part in their own inimitable often irrepressible, certainly unmistakable fashion.

This discovery is, unto itself, an unfolding process. We find our answers as we pray, more often, in how we let go of our intense reactive responses to perceive injustices and inequalities in our own life. Then, gradually, we allow for change in the lives of others in much the same way. A powerful kind of breakthrough for us, occurs, when we actually see more clearly what God is unfolding in the lives of all beings, and, in our own unique manner come to recognize what is also occurring and unfolding for us.

When we pray with a conscious intention to become a vessel for the work of Spirit, the fl ow of the Sacred, or Spirit to actually grace our human affairs, we see something larger at work than the purely personal or ego needs of ourselves (or others). It is this discovery, that gives us hope, that frees us from our confl icts, our confusion or our pain and allows us to move into the realm where we are more aware, more connected, more at peace within the very heart of our lives.

It is useless to think that God can be persuaded by our prayers to suspend one single law in our behalf ...but it is only truth to say that, by our prayers, we bring ourselves into the knowledge and the love of God, and therewith gain more and better help than if suddenly every law in the universe were altered to our benefit.
John Haynes Holmes, The Messiah Prophet