Prayer - Bridging the Gap

Last night I led a small group of members of The Australian Association of Religious Education in a prayer service that was designed to be inclusive of diverse religious traditions.

The AARE has its major constituency among Christian religious educators, which is to be expected, but it has among its members people from the Jewish and Muslim faiths as well.

It occured to me as I was preparing for this service that prayer was a common element of all religious traditions and that in many respects prayer is at the heart of our understanding of how to bridge the gap between humanity and the divine.

When you look at the sacred writings of all religious traditions there are numerous exaples of written accounts of prayer as well as instructions about how to pray. The writings of the religious mystics of all traditions also centre on bridging that gap.

The thing that struck me was that there seem to be basically two appraoches to prayer that are common to all.

Firstly, there are word-based prayers that are usually petitionary - asking the divine to intervene in the affairs of humanity so as to create a particular outcome. Jews and Christians find numerous examples of this within the Psalter where some even cringe at the punishments God is invited to visit upon the wicked. Word-based prayers also function to make an intellectual connection to the act of praise and adoration to the Divine. In a geographic sense this form of prayer is about us sending messages to God.

The second approach to prayer goes beyond words - it is meditative or contemplative - and seeks to create a space in which the human-divine encounter can take place. For some this means contemplation in silence. For some it involves the repetition of a mantra. For some it involves physical activity. The objective here, though, is to see what God might want to say or reveal to us.

Both these approaches are, I think, vital to a healthy prayer life and relationship with God, regardless of your religious tradition. What do you think?