Prayer: Some Collected Thoughts [2]

‘In praying, do not heap up empty phrases’ – Gospel of Matthew 6:7.

‘Prayer of the kind I have been trying to describe is precisely what resists the urge of religious language to claim a total perspective: by articulating its own incompleteness before God, it turns away from any claim to human completeness. By ‘conversing’ with God, it preserves conversation between human speakers’ – Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology 13.

‘Prayer of petition is a form of self-exploration and at the same time self-realization. If we are honest enough to admit to our shabby infantile desires, then the grace of God will grow in us; it will slowly be revealed to us, precisely in the course of our prayer, that there are more important things that we truly do want. But this will not be some abstract recognition that we ought to want these things; we will really discover a desire for them in ourselves. But we must start where we are’ – Hebert McCabe, God Still Matters 74.

‘God’s directing creativity is the answer to the question of the meaning of prayer, especially prayers of supplication and prayers of intercession. Neither type of prayer can mean that God is expected to acquiesce in interfering with existential conditions. Both mean that God is asked to direct the given situation toward fulfilment. The prayers are an element in this situation, a most powerful factor if they are true prayers.’ – Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology I: 267.

‘Prayer only makes sense within a certain type of universe. The mechanical world of Laplace’s calculator, where both past and future are inexorably contained within the dynamical circumstances of the present, would be too rigid a world to have prayer (or humanity, for that matter) within it...it is also not the world of modern science. Prayer also only makes sense with a certain kind of God. A God totally above the temporal process, with the future as clearly present to him as the past, would be a suspect collaborator in the encounter of prayer...The cross provides the only framework in which we shall begin to make sense of the Christian experience of prayer’ – John Polkinghorne, Science and Providence 72, 76.