Whether you have a religion or not, you have certainly heard of prayer and may have been asked to join in praying for someone or something. Even atheists have been found to pray from time to time. What is prayer? How do you define or describe it? This isn’t a question about why people pray or the reasons for prayer, but what it is and perhaps even how it is done? This is one of the questions that drove me to study for my master’s degree in theology. There are three famous verses from the Christian Bible in the book 1 Thessalonians, chapter 5, “Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In all circumstances give thanks, for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus.” This is actually one of the best sets of instructions for living life in The Bible for many reasons, but that one sentence, “Pray without ceasing,” always disturbed me. How can you pray without ceasing?
When you hear the statement, “Pray without ceasing,” what do you think of? Do you think of monks and nuns in cloisters gathering for prayer at many times throughout the day, beginning well before sunrise? Do you think of Muslim people praying at set times throughout the day? I think of these devout people and more. I think about Buddhist and Christian monks and laity with their prayer beads ticking off prayers as they go about their day. I also think of the Eastern Orthodox practice of saying the “Jesus Prayer,” most commonly translated into English as, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Many people repeat the short prayer hundreds of times a night with the eventual goal of making the prayer an automatic prayer that is running ceaselessly at the back of the mind throughout the day and also during sleep. But are these diverse practices really the continuous prayer indicated in 1 Thessalonians? Except for the rare case in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, for example, is anyone really praying without ceasing? We all have to sleep sometime.
Perhaps we cannot pray formulaic prayers without ceasing and still live our lives. And this kind of prayer may not be the prayer that was thought of by the author of the Bible verse, which again begs the next question of what prayer is. Perhaps it is not limited to a formula of words that we repeat? Every religion and many spiritual traditions have formulaic prayers as prescribed sets of words or outlines that tell the person who prays what to say or think. These kinds of prayers are very helpful because they help the praying person to focus their thoughts and heart, but there is a deeper meaning of prayer. Another definition of prayer might describe it as not only words that we say or think, but also other vocal exclamations, mental images, and even actions that are a response to the creative action of God or our Source. One person might make a non-verbal exclamation of joy which could be a prayer. Another person may imagine all of the peoples of the world embracing each other in love. Still another might use dance to pray with their bodies. Have you ever heard of the phrase, “a labor of love?” Our work and other actions we take can be offered up as a prayer. Cooking for loved ones can be prayer. Could this wider view be closer to the correct understanding of prayer? Still, I keep thinking, we’ve got to sleep a few hours a day.
Breaking the bonds of prayer defined as sets of formulaic words helps us understand more deeply what prayer can be and how we can do it continuously. But all of this diversity while interesting and even beautiful is also a little too complicated. I see abundant possibilities but I think the deeper truth is, like a theory that conforms to Occam’s razor, simple and short, barely even a thought. The answer to my question of what prayer is came to me as a kind of revelation. One day, I can’t say when precisely, it struck me that everything would make much more sense if I reframed the verses from 1 Thessalonians. We read those short statements, “Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In all circumstances give thanks, for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus.” as commands or orders, or at the very least as very strong suggestions. What if they were none of these? What if they were in fact descriptive statements of what we are always doing? What if we understood these words to be instructing us that we are continuously rejoicing, praying, and giving thanks whether we know it or not? How would you understand prayer and how you are conducting your life if you knew that every thought, every single verbal and non-verbal thought, was in fact a prayer?
If you know that there is a God, a Source, and intelligent Creator of you and this entire physical universe, and I assume that you do since you are still reading this, how would our Source distinguish between thoughts that were prayer and thoughts that weren’t prayer among the hodgepodge of language, images, feelings, etcetera that flood though our minds every day? If we know that we and our Source are one, our Source not only hears but is fully aware of everything! So if this is the case, I begin to think that every thought, every daydream, every knee-jerk reaction, is a prayer and is known by God and the entire universe. Every “yes,” every “no,” every “stop,” and every “go” thought are prayers and received by our Source. How does that thought make you feel? Is it liberating to know that you are so fully known and received by your Source? This I know to be true. Or, are you feeling unsettled and perhaps a little scared because you have started cataloging the kinds of thoughts you have every day? Are you thinking that alongside the loving and beautiful thoughts you have, there are at least as many that range from not so nice to downright nasty? If you are beginning to feel uneasy, that’s okay. People who believe that they don’t have negative thoughts and are never angry or offended would do well to begin a meditation practice because some self-inquiry is in order. For the rest of us, there is no need to worry because everyone from your next door neighbor to perhaps even the Dalai Lama has a combination of positive and negative thoughts. I realized these thoughts, both wanted and even unwelcome, are not the prayer described in 1 Thessalonians.
It is not the human thought, the thoughts we have in the language we are thinking in whatever language we speak, be it English, Spanish, Korean, Farsi, or Ancient Hebrew, that are received by God and the Universe; it is the preverbal thought: the thought that either formed into words and language in your head or did not. If that preverbal thought is translated into “I hate her,” or “I’m going to kill him when I get my hands on him,” that is not the thought that is prayed. Remember that the brain that we use and most of the processing that it does are not any more our Selves than the computer we use and eventually replace when it no longer functions. I first encountered the understanding that we are not our thoughts when I began learning meditation in the Buddhist tradition. Those English, Spanish, Korean, Farsi, or Ancient Hebrew thoughts are not the thoughts of our immortal selves; they are a function of the brains we are using in these bodies that we are co-creating with. Our prayers, the prayers we pray without ceasing, are the preverbal thoughts of our eternal Selves.
Our eternal Selves are always praying: communicating with our Source from which the Self is an emanation, as a wave emanates from the ocean. Our Selves, in other words, our souls or our spirits, are, like our Source, in the state of Love, Joy, Wellbeing, and Awareness, and as such have only thoughts of love, joy, and wellbeing. As in 1 Thessalonians, our Selves are the ones who are rejoicing always, praying without ceasing, and giving thanks in all circumstances. However, there are also the diversity of thoughts that are time and again popping into our awareness here as we occupy physical space with our bodies. Is there any relationship between these two seemingly very different kinds of thought? Or are the minds of our Selves and the minds of our physically conditioned and informed brains just both off doing their own thing, as it were? My understanding is that there is a relationship, and it works like this. Our eternal Selves and our temporal selves (the minds that are working through our brains and the nervous systems of our bodies) co-create the focus of our attention, and just as our verbal brains, our temporal brains, usually react or respond to what we are focusing on, so do our eternal Selves. The Self has a prayerful, loving, joyous, creative, and positive response, while our physical brains with verbal thoughts have habitual responses that are hit and miss, meaning those thoughts are sometimes positive and sometimes very, very negative. When our brain’s thoughts line up with or are in accord with the thoughts of our Selves, we feel that joyful, loving feeling of prayer and even rejoicing. When we are not lined up, we are resisting, and if we are emotionally aware of what we are feeling, we feel the resistant emotions of frustration, anger, hate, and even despair. That is not to say that any of those emotions are wrong or even intrinsically bad; they are merely showing us how much resistance we have and how different the thoughts we are thinking are from the thoughts of our eternal Selves. If we know that, we can begin to shift the focus of our thoughts from resistance of what we think is true to something we would like instead. When we feel outrage or injustice, we always have the choice to shift our attention and appreciation for the justice that exists and allow avenues for more of that in our experience; we can intend our way to a more just world.
So, it is our Selves who are praying without ceasing, rejoicing always, and giving thanks in all circumstances. And God, or whatever name you want to give to our Creative Source, is always responding and saying yes to those prayers. It is then up to us to be ready to receive the answers to our prayers by following the current of our intentions by living the intentional life. In so doing we will live the lives of Love, Joy, Wellbeing, and Awareness that we intended when we came to live in this physical world.
