What Does it Mean to Say We are Called to Be and Become God's own Prayer?

[[Hi Sister Laurel, could you please say more about what you mean when you write about us becoming God's own prayer in the world? I think it must have a whole lot to do with how we understand prayer, but I am not sure I really get how we can be God's prayer. Our own, yes, but God's?]]

Yes, absolutely! Prayer, from our human perspective, is about allowing God to be God for and within us. Prayer is God's own work within us, in our hearts, in our whole selves. Nothing is excluded from prayer because nothing is excluded from God or the Love-in-Act that God is. Whenever we allow (because we are empowered to allow) the Spirit to open us to the presence of God in all of the ways God comes to us, we are praying. Whenever we pour our hearts out to God, we pray. When we work mindfully, open to what is true, good, real, beautiful, and meaningful, we pray. When we struggle deeply and honestly with the pain and suffering of this life, we are praying. Prayer is, in fact, what God does within and through us in our lives and world and this includes empowering us to pose the question we are as profoundly as possible, and similarly receive the answer God is.

Over the past months, especially, I have written about posing the question we are and how that presupposes the answer God is. What I have said is that we question not only because are aware of some lack and have need of an answer, but also because we already know enough of that answer to seek it. And what is also true is that God both is and desires to BE that answer! God desires to complete and transfigure us as an answer completes and transfigures the question it presupposes. In pouring out our hearts, we anticipate the answer God is. In creating us to be complete in himself alone, God anticipates both the question we are without him, and the answer we are with him. In pouring out our hearts in all things, we learn to pray. In allowing God to be the answer on his own terms, we learn to pray even more deeply. And in creating us to be his very own in all things, God pours out his own heart. Every act of creation, then, is part of God's own prayer in our world. And so, then, is every act of healing or recreation, every act of empowerment or completion God does in our own lives.

Most profoundly, we are made for God, made for Love-in-Act, made to be completed and entirely transfigured by God in, through, and with God as Emmanuel. As we allow God to complete us more and more profoundly, we see fulfilled not only the deepest longing of our own hearts, but the deepest longing of God's heart as well. To be Emmanuel and to make of us those who are also Emmanuel is God's heart's desire. In this fulfillment, we become the very embodiment of God's own prayer, the person he longed for us to become with him. Moreover, in this mutually-conditioned life, this ongoing heart-level dialogue with God, we will also transfigure our world. In Christ, we become God's own prayer FOR our world as part of the "new heaven and new earth" God is creating now in and through the Christ Event. All of this is what I mean when I speak of being and becoming God's own prayer.