Prayer as: Communion, Social, Listening, Response — a few quotes
Prayer as Communion:
“What we do FOR the Lord entirely depends upon what we are IN the Lord. Further, what we are IN the Lord wholly depends on what we receive FROM the Lord. And what we receive FROM the Lord is directly proportional to the time we spend alone WITH the Lord in prayer. If I seldom talk with God it indicates that he plays a secondary role in my life and soon the world commands more of my attention than God does.”
—the Rev'd Ernest Harris, Northern Ireland
Prayer as Social:
“Prayer is participation in the relationships of the triune God. . . . In praying for others we find that we are being pulled into a zone of interconnection. Prayer is supremely social. We are swept into a current in which nothing is separated from anything else, no one from anyone else. . . . Intercessory prayer is an experience of connectedness and mutuality, because it is praying ‘in God’ who lives in relationships. In intercession we meet others in the perichoresis, the divine dance of Father, Son, and Spirit. As the letter to the Hebrews puts it, Christ ‘always lives to make intercession’ for us (Hebrews 7.25), echoing the words of the Apostle Paul that ‘Christ . . . who is at the right hand of God . . . intercedes for us’ (Romans 8.34); this Son communicates eternally with the Father, not in order to plead a case for us as a kind of lawyer in heaven, but so that we can lean upon the prayers he makes and make this movement of prayer our own. We enter into the life of prayer already going on within the communion of God’s being; we pray to the Father, through the Son, and in the Spirit. This is why the everlasting God ‘has time for us’.”
—from Participating in God by Oxford don Paul Fiddes
Prayer as Listening:
“Listening prayer is friendship with God.”
—Leanne Payne
Prayer as Response:
“God has the first word. Prayer is answering speech; it is not primarily ‘address’ but ‘response’ . . . “We learn language by being spoken to . . . slowly, syllable by syllable, we acquire the capacity to answer: mama, papa, bottle, blanket, yes, no. Not one of these words was a first word. Hundreds of thousands of words, for days and weeks and months, were spoken to us before we began to answer, to speak our own words. All speech is answering speech. We were all spoken to before we spoke . . . “At some point we find ourselves answering God; the usual way to describe this use of language is with the word prayer. Prayer is language used to respond . . . with the potential for saying all that is in us. Prayer is . . . language in process of being adequate to answer the one who has spoken most comprehensively to us, namely, God.”
—excerpts from Working the Angles by Eugene Peterson
