I remember my first prayer taught to me as a kid was
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to Keep
And if I die before I wake
I pray the Lord my Soul to take
I don’t know where this prayer is from, but my mom taught it to me from a very young age. My family is a mix of religious observances; one parent was spiritual but highly resistant to organized religion. The other came from a history of Catholicism but broke away to search within the protestnat and non denominational churches. My mother was very religious, drawing upon God for strength in her times of need. We would go to church every sunday and during the Worship (music) part of the service she would become very emotional. You would see some congregants with their hands up, either one or both. You would see many of them with their eyes closed and crying. They were having intense encounters with God. And of course, you would see others just stand their politely being in that space and waiting for the sermon. Sometimes, you would see people speaking in tongues and during parts of the service people would go up and get prayed over either in English or in tongues. Most would fall on their knees as the prayer went on. Growing up with my mom meant sometimes going to sunday school, but always going to church. I became enraptured with Christianity when I was young, choosing to be baptised as the age of twelve. I was dunked into a dirty lake, but I came out feeling clean and different.
During my youth, I prayed the above prayer before bed. I would then, throughout the day as things came up, pray to God for certain things, asking for things to either go my way or that I would get something. As time went on, I learned that you can just have a conversation with God, though one sided. As I grew older, I learned more on my own how to pray, picking things up as I go. Praying was natural to me, and it seemed like the easiest thing in the world. But when my friend mentioned that she didn’t know how to pray, it surprised me. I thought it came naturally. You can see people praying in movies and TV shows.
But recently I have been having questions pop up for me concerning prayer. What is it supposed to feel like? What is it actually supposed to be? What is it supposed to do? I ask this because I am starting to see a difference in the types of prayers as I observe and study other religions. I am a Christian-Muslim, or Islamic Christian and I pull from both of the religions. But I see that there are different ways to pray and to hear God.
What is prayer?
From my studies and experiences, prayer is a conversation with God, an activity to spend time with God, a way to keep in touch or connected with God. Prayer can be rote memorization sayings of prayers made up, or passages from Holy texts. Prayer can be free flowing conversation with God or listing off the things you are grateful for from God. I have found that prayer can also be basking in presence or savoring a moment of true grace when you realize bodily how much God does for you, and giving thanks in that moment. Prayer can also be noticing how God nudged you or chose different paths for you that helped you in the here and now, or made you become who you are today. Prayer is all kinds of things with different strategies. In general, it is communing with God in all the different ways.
Why Pray?
I don’t want to give you a list of reasons why you should pray, but I would like to share the reasons why I like to Pray. I pray to keep myself in a constant state of building and scheduling my life around God. Everything I do, I want to have God in the decisions-making process. I pray to keep myself humble, remembering that God is always with me and gives me everything I have both materialistically, spiritually, and from every opportunity that I was able to take advantage of. I give thanks to God for even giving me my natural characteristics, my high reading ability and my tendency to contemplate things (or live inside my head). I was intelligent enough to go to College because God gave me that intelligence and put me on a path to cultivate and expand it. I pray to understand the things going on around me, or to help me make sense of what happened in my past. Noticing how different events in my life are connected or built off of each other make me realize that everything happens for a reason. I also pray to just be with God. I pray to enjoy God’s presence. When I pause and meditate, or am able to center myself when I see something beautiful or breathtaking, I’m able to feel God’s presence and I love just basking in it. I pray to become closer to God. In a way, I pray to keep getting my “fix” of God’s presence.
How do I pray?
I reach up into the air and focus my holy energies as the sky darkens, and I invoke the name of my God and send down thunderbolts upon my enemies!!!! No, I’m just kidding. Rarely do I pray to influence the material world around me. I’m afraid that doing so would make me forget that all that happens, does so because of God. And to try to exert my will upon the world through the invocation of God’s will, even a request of God’s will would keep me out of a state of humility.
But I pray in several ways.
Rote Prayers: The biggest way that I pray is the rote prayers. I do 5 prayers (Salat) a day reciting al-Fatiha from the Qur’an and the Lord’s Prayer from the New Testament. I also use a prayer I picked up that was attributed to being said at a UN meeting
Please God Give us pure hearts that we may see you
Humble hearts that we may hear you
Hearts of love that we may serve you
Hearts of Faith that we may abide you
And a few lines of sayings that I have developed over my life, some times together, sometimes just single or several lines together.
Please God guide me
Lead me ever closer to the straight path
Allow me to be a better person
Let me be closer to you
Thank you, thank you for everything that you do.
Bismillah, al-Rahman al-Rahim (in the name of God, the most merciful, the most beneficent).
The random lines I listed above are not said during the Salat prayers a day, but over the course of the day for random reasons: If I go out, if I remember something, if I am about to embark on something. There really is no rhyme or reason as to why I do it but it comforts me to talk to God even in passing.
Physical: The five prayers a day, or Salat, not only come with rote prayers but also physical movements as well. These prayers go through a series of bows. The first bow is done while standing and you bend at the waist. The second bow is a complete prostration, with your hands on the ground and your forehead touching the ground (or prayer carpet). Islam teaches us that this form of prayer reminds us to completely submit to God and to know that none of us are so great as to not bow before God. Islam teaches us that there is no hierarchy among humans except in who is most reverent to God. Doing the Salat is supposed to reinforce that. So while I am in full prostration, I try to really feel the position of the prostration, to feel myself, body and soul, give my all to God and God’s will. Along with the prostrations during the five scheduled prayers, sometimes I will also do a full prostration if I am just centering myself and doing an informal prayer to God.
I also do the sign of the cross. I picked up doing the sign of the cross when my first niece was being baptized. We had to learn it in order to pass as Catholics. I guess you can’t be an official God-parent in the Catholic church if you are not a card carrying member of the church. But the priest seemed to be full of grace and saw that my brother and I did the sign of the cross backwards. He commented that it doesn’t matter if we do the sign with a different hand because it was still the sign of the cross. I still do the sign of the cross even if I am not a card carrying member because it reminds me of the Prophet Jesus’s example and his suffering in being a believer and faithful. It reminds me that faith isn’t easy, trusting in God can be scary and full of doubt. Even Jesus doubted God at the very end, but no matter what, Even though we may doubt and abandon God, God never doubts or abandons us. That is why, in my belief, Jesus was still able to be resurrected. And that is why I use the sign of the cross, to remember and gather strength from remembrance of what the cross means to me.
Centering: There are different centering techniques that are in use today by a variety of people. For Christians, Centering prayer can take the form of centering one’s focus on a prayer, a phrase, or word from the Bible or of relating to God. For me, and many others, I use meditation. It first started as a way to discipline my mind from anxious/depressive cyclical thinking. But as I used the Headspace App, the author taught me several things that happened to align with my specific spiritual life. As I stayed consistent, I would sometimes be in states where a good memory pops up and I would have an intense feeling of joy. I would feel my face smile so wide and I would revel in it. Most of the time in meditation, however, I am just centering myself.
One of the newer things that I have come across is, in the process of doing anything, be it work, writing a blog, reading, or just sitting, I will pause, sometimes take a deep breath, and bask in a restfulness that I have been able to enter more frequently as of late. My mind stops thinking or imagining and I am present, hearing everything around me and noticing my surroundings. It’s not as intense as when I feel extreme moments of Grace and I get emotional, but I feel comfort and stillness. I believe that’s God letting me notice or become more aware of God in that moment, and so I just enjoy it. I enjoy God’s presence. And this, I believe, has been unintentionally unlocked through the course of my learning to center myself through meditation. I will often use centering techniques to focus myself during the five prayers a day.
How does God communicate back?
The answer is not so simple. There are people that say that God talks to them. But I always wonder if they mean that they hear voices or if when they say “talk”, it’s just a substitute for a feeling or thing that happens that is just the best way to describe it. Sometimes words fail us and we have to put placeholders. For me, when God talks to me, it is never actual words. God’s communication with me are oftentimes feelings of being overwhelmed with joy or comfort, sudden insights and inspirations and moments of stillness. Sometimes, God communicates with me by letting me connect the dots between today’s event to things that happened in the past. My suffering as a child allowed me to do A and B and to experience C. So without that suffering I would have never been able to do these three things. Or maybe I came across an item, or did a task that was seemingly mundane. But either hours after or even days, weeks, or months after it just so happens I needed that one thing, or that one task done and lo and behold, its already in my possession or it’s already finished. And I connect the dots and God lets me realize that God did that for me.
I don’t think Communication with God is ever an obvious thing. Its nonlinear, non verbal, and multimedia. It’s frustrating, but when I learned to sit still and see the signs and experience the stillness, I came to realize God’s funny way of talking to me. I believe that we need to learn to be still and be open in order to hear God and notice God working on us, with us and around us, and through us. Jesus in the Bible gives us an example in the scene of the Garden in Gethsemane, right before he is betrayed by Judas. Jesus goes off to pray with two or three other people which included Peter. At one point, he stopped and told them to stay awake while he went off to pray. He says for them to pray and stay awake so that they would not fall into temptation. After that, Jesus goes to pray by himself and asks God to “pass this cup away from me…”. The cup he asks to be passed is his suffering and death. The temptation he wishes for his followers to resist is denying him and abandoning him when he is arrested. He goes back to his followers, sees that they are sleeping, wakes them up and has them try again. Then he goes back by himself to pray the same prayer, pass this cup, and goes back. His followers are once again asleep (Matthew 26:38–45). Jesus had petitioned God to let him not be crucified, to avoid suffering. But God did not speak to Jesus in words. Jesus received an answer through other means outside of himself. There was no inspiration, no aha, no burning bush, and no spectacular light. He went back to see if his friends were still awake, but they were not. It was a sign that they would not be able to resist abandoning him. It was a sign that he would have to suffer. God does not often directly speak to us in words. God speaks to us through our experiences, our surroundings, and through the people who love us and who we love. Our efforts and practice are only there to try to notice God in these moments, to see how God is working with us and with our world.
