Prayer is born of a longing, a need. We are empty and long to be filled. We seek solace in things and relationships until they all fail us. Eventually, we know only God can fill us.

We have no choice but to pray because our other choices, the choices born of our well-intentioned but puny intellectual efforts to know God, are hopelessly inadequate. Prayer, then, in its simplest form is any conscious attempt to experience the presence of God.

But this is only the beginning. As we seek through prayer to know God, our awareness of God as us increases and expands. And as prayer fills us more and more, we become more and more aware of the experience of being part of God. This means that as we pray, we are drawn inexorably into the creative flow of the universe, so that we begin perceiving things not with human eyes or human ears or human minds but from the absolute core of us—the divinity within us. As we approach this point in our prayer life, the emphasis of our prayers begins to make a subtle shift.

Rather than praying to God to help us or for God to be with us, we begin praying from that sacred presence which is our very essence. So we can say, then, that when we pray, we are lifting our personal identity to a higher awareness—the awareness that it is God that is praying! When we pray, it is the mind of God seeking to fulfill itself as us.

So the longing that we feel to “come home” to Spirit is Spirit Itself calling us to awaken, to open our hearts and see what is in there, and once having seen, to let It come forth into our everyday world.

If you'd like to read more about prayer, you might enjoy the book The Quest for Prayer: Coming Home to Spirit by Mary-Alice and Richard Jafolla. Visit the Unity online store for more details.

To share a prayer request with Silent Unity online, click here.


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