By Reverend Laurie DeMott

In a counseling course I took in seminary, the professor said, "One of the difficulties clients face when they are in therapy is that the therapist is only available once a week, so here is a technique that you can teach them to use in-between sessions." He then described an exercise in which a person sets up an empty chair in the middle of the room and pretends that their therapist is sitting in that empty chair.

"The person should talk to the chair as if it is a normal counseling session," my professor said, "and then after talking, he or she should move to the therapist's chair and say what they imagine their therapist would respond. This technique can often uncover the wisdom that each of us carries within ourselves."

In I Thessalonians, Paul tells the people to pray without ceasing. Prayer is central to the Christian life and yet it is probably at the same time, the most troubling subject for us as we try to understand what prayer means and how we should pray. People ask me all the time, "What is prayer? What is proper to pray for?" -- and when they ask, I always think of that seminary professor and his therapy technique because at its most basic, I think this is very close to what prayer is. Put aside all of the fancy language about prayer, and the theological categories of intercession, or supplication, or petition, and when you come down to it, to pray is simply to have a conversation with an invisible God.

To pray is to come before God and tell God what is on your mind, and then listen to what God says in reply, a listening that, of necessity, due to the spiritual nature of God, requires some imagination and self-reflection. If I say, "Pray about it and listen to what God is saying to you," I am not expecting that you are going to hear an actual voice booming out, "This is God and this is what I think you should do." 90% of the time, praying is really no different than talking to an imaginary therapist sitting on a chair in the middle of the room and anticipating the reply. Each of us has a lot of self-wisdom buried under all of the debris of anger, sadness, frustration, and anxiety that we carry around with us, and so most of the time, when we say out loud what it is that we are feeling and wanting, and then imagine how it sounds to the ears of God, we will know intuitively what God has to say back to us. We will be able to imagine the love and encouragement of God or conversely the tones of disappointment, and we will be able to sense which path we need to take to move forward. If we have spent our lives studying the scripture and embracing the words of Christ, God's desires will have become so much a part of who we are, so buried within our bones, that an imaginery conversation with God will allow our intuitive knowledge of God's desires for us to emerge.

And so 90% of the time, to pray is to talk to God and then listen to that voice of God in your imagination which has been formed within you by your years of study, worship, and faithfulness to Christ. You don't have to worry about whether you are using the proper words in that prayer no more than you would have to worry about whether you are using the proper language when talking with a friend. And you don't have to worry about what subjects are appropriate and which are not because, just as in any conversation with a trusted person, there is nothing off-limits in your talking with God. If you are afraid, you can tell God you are afraid without worrying that you will be judged for that fear. If you are anxious, no matter how silly your anxieties are to anyone else, you can share them with God. If you are worried about another person's safety or health, you tell God that. That's why we pray for people -- to express our concern and our hopes and receive comfort for ourselves and those we care about. You don't have to wonder whether it's right or wrong to want a person to be healed -- it's what you want and so in prayer, you begin by being honest about all of your fears, all of your desires, all of your hopes and feelings. To jump to what is right and what is wrong to think or say before you've even begun the conversation is to cheat God of the opportunity to listen.

And so a prayer might go something like this:

You say, "God, I am so angry at my brother. I just can't seem to let go of it."
You imagine God saying, "And how does that make you feel?"
You reply, "Cruddy. It's eating me up. I just want to get rid of it, but I keep coming back to how spiteful he was. I want him to hurt him as much as he hurt me."
You imagine God saying, "That's probably why Jesus said that anger is as bad as murder."
You reply, "It does feel like murder. It feels that violent."
You imagine God saying, "Who is your anger murdering?"
You think for a minute and you say, "Me. My anger is killing me."

And so the conversation continues with God inching you ever closer to letting go of that anger and beginning to do the work of forgiveness.

What is prayer and how should we pray? 90% of the time, prayer is saying out loud honestly what we are feeling, hearing how that sounds to our own ears, and imagining how it sounds to the God we have come to know through Christ.

90% of the time.

But it is the other 10% of the time that makes prayer more than a theraputic technique, more than an exercise is self-discernment. You see, the difference between that therapy technique and prayer is that we believe that the chair we are talking to is not empty. We believe that while we may need to imagine what God would say in response to our conversation, that that doesn't mean that God is imaginery: we have faith that even if we can't see God with our eyes, that there really is a God who is listening to us, and drawing us toward greater wholeness. We believe that there is a divine strength that is greater than any human strength, and a holy compassion greater than the love of any single human heart. We believe that that chair is not empty, but that there is a power present in that room that can make us and the world into something that lies beyond our limited vision, whether through the mystery of unimaginable love or through that unwanted yet greatly needed swift kick in the seat of the pants. The problem with self-therapy is that we are all capable of great self-delusion and so even when we come to God trying to be absolutely honest in prayer and absolutely honest in listening, 10% of the time, we will end up listening only to our own voice.

There was once a little boy who disobeyed his mother and was sent to his room for a "time out". When his mother went in to check on him later, he said, "Mommy, I've been thinking about what I did today and I said a prayer."
She said, "That was a fine idea. If you ask God to make you good, God will help you to be good."

"Oh, I didn't ask God to help me be good," the little boy said, "I asked God to help you put up with me."

The God who tells us that it is we who need to shape up, not the other person, is the God who is hard to hear if we are only listening to the voice within. The God who says, "I know you can do this thing that feels impossible to you because I will give you the strength you need to do it," is hard to hear if we are listening only to the voice within. The God who says, "I need you to go all of the way to the cross for me," is awful hard to hear if we are listening only to the voice within.

And so this is why Paul says that we should pray without ceasing. Prayer is not only the conversation that takes place with God in the privacy of our cars or at night before we go to bed; prayer is also believing that God is speaking to us constantly through the words and attentions of others, through the signs that we see around us, through scripture and worship, through circumstance and even unexplained coincidence. My father, who was, if you haven't figured it out yet, my spiritual guru, told me that this is how he prayed:

"I consider a question or a worry that I want to bring to God, something that I need some guidance on or something that I know needs healing in myself and I hold that prayer in my mind all day: when I'm walking, when I'm working, when I'm talking to others. It's always there in the back of my mind as I go about my business. And then I pay attention. I listen to what people say to me even if I think it has nothing to do with my prayer. I watch for little signs around me, even if they seem only coincidental. And I bring every word and every event back to my prayer and I turn that prayer over again in light of what I have heard and seen. Some of what I have heard and seen gets discarded but some of it just seems to stick there. My mind keeps coming to back to it as if there is a message that feels like it's being reinforced. Even things that I don't want to hear will push their way through and insist on being heard when I pay attention like that constantly. That, to me, is God talking."

And so we pray without ceasing, talking with God, imagining God's voice talking back, and always always paying attention for God speaking in ways that we could never imagine, words that will lead us to greater wholeness, wisdom, and peace.