The Purpose of Prayer
by Rev. Cory Coberforward
Readings
Psalm 91 (Responsive Reading for Live Service)
Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.”
Surely he will save you from the fowler’s snare and from the deadly pestilence.
He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge;
his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.
You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day,
nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the plague that destroys at midday.
A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.
If you say, “The Lord is my refuge,” and you make the Most High your dwelling,
no harm will overtake you, no disaster will come near your tent.
For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways;
they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.
You will tread on the lion and the cobra; you will trample the great lion and the serpent.
“Because he loves me,” says the Lord, “I will rescue him;
I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name.
He will call on me, and I will answer him;
I will be with him in trouble, I will deliver him and honor him.
With long life I will satisfy him and show him my salvation.”
Luke 4:1-13
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.” Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone.’”
The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, “I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. If you worship me, it will all be yours.” Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.’”
The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down from here. For it is written:
“‘He will command his angels concerning you
to guard you carefully;
they will lift you up in their hands,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’”
Jesus answered, “It is said: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time.
Read the written message below with music videos
Today we pray for Ukraine, hopefully, no matter our tradition and country. We pray for peace, healing, safety, wholeness, sanity, an end to wars and needless violence (in Ukraine and otherwise). But prayer sometimes leaves us asking, what is it fundamentally? Is it an inner monologue toward God, an effort to manifest something? Of course, prayer is often what we make it. Scripturally, prayer tends to be described as an effort to unburden our issues before God and find connection with Divinity, as well as seeking reconciliation, healing, unity, resolution, and peace – even for our enemies. In many religions, there’s a shared approach to prayer that includes both personal beseeching as well as various other types of meditative approaches that may include mantras (like with the Lord’s Prayer or many Hindu prayers) or praise and thanksgiving. Whether it’s beseeching, praise, mantric, or more silent prayers, these are designed to help us let go of our issues and our mind’s wanderings and open toward the transcendent light of love, joy, and peace within, helping us turn into conduits of peace, especially when we allow all four meditative, prayerful modes transform our minds.
The reason I mention the importance of all of these types is the pitfall of only employing beseeching prayers, which can sometimes centre on egotistical fears and desires, or a misunderstanding of the universe, while not allowing the more meditative prayers to take us further home. Beseeching God is a scriptural tradition, as is active praise – which opens us up to thanksgiving and gratitude, but when we don’t allow space for God to speak (often with silence) we miss many of the benefits and the impact of prayer. You might say that God often answers with silence, but that doesn’t mean that we take the time to listen!
Asking God for something can help get it off our chest and out of our heads a bit, but this only lasts if we let it go after seeking assistance (trusting in God’s will) and turn toward our source within (which is often characterized by the openness of silence). Otherwise, prayer can easily become another tool for our thoughts’ incessant seeking for control over life and we continue to be constricted by our egoic ideas. When we don’t know or forget that the scriptures ask us to seek unity with God in prayer (or in some traditions, with our shared Buddha Spirit, the Divinity of Awareness, or the Tao), we may not even realize the help and peace close at hand.
When Christ was asked how we pray, he offered a mantra that gets us out of our heads and into the purpose of prayer – no matter our religion. He reportedly said,
“But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
“And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this:
“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
“For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” (Matthew 6:5-15 NIV)
The entirety of this prayer is a type of beseeching and praiseful mantric or repeated prayer, covering both basic necessities (perhaps, in a way, offering up the fear that these will not be fulfilled) as well as much more transcendental or spiritual concerns. This prayer might serve to encapsulate much of Jesus’ core message: that we should seek unity with the will of God (which is centered on love, as he also teaches) through letting go of our egoic desires and obsessions.
Key within what we call “The Lord’s Prayer” is the emphasis to forgive others their trespasses – a type of emphasis on letting go of the past – otherwise, Jesus says, God will not forgive us. Inherent in this is a type of reciprocal action, as if God’s punishment is a type of mirror or something that we lay on ourselves, and a subtext that emphasizes that we are one in God, as Jesus often asked us to be. There’s a good reason that this prayer has become a type of mantric prayer for many people and churches, as it calls us toward an active unity with God while also allowing our minds to walk within its rhythms and meanings, distracting our egoic ramblings. This gives our “monkey mind” (as they say) something to do, while we become aware that we are more than our yearnings and our random yet habitual thoughts.
This means that the Lord’s prayer is meant to not only express to God our desire to escape temptation, but to help enable us to do so through the act of praying itself. But what is temptation? Our reading today explores Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness, and although we can break these down in multiple ways, they all seem to centre back on temptations to not trust the will of God. Trusting in God’s will partially means trusting that everything that happens or will happen is in God’s hands, and although this may sound naïve, this trust is at the core of the spiritual teachings of many traditions, sometimes called trusting the Tao or the Buddha nature of the universe or Krishna or Allah.
This doesn’t mean that in the future there is one ultimate plan that explains everything, but that every moment is the plan! Every moment is an effort toward uplifting and empowering people toward awakening, which I believe is also the ultimate point of prayer. Our tendency to identify with the will of our ego and our limited idea of self, which suffers life due to its fearfully changeful and selfish nature, is why we rail against circumstances, and why in the Lord’s prayer we ask not to be led into this core of temptation and all of its tempting fruit. No, in the prayer we ask for the Lord’s will to be done, not our own.
Further, trusting in God’s will means actively letting go of the will of our false self, what we call ego. We know which voice within is the ego’s because it talks all the time, whereas our “prayerful self” in unity with God’s will is deeper within, perceiving our egos while often silent. Like the inner silence underlying the Lord’s prayer or more silent prayerful meditations, this silence is the perfume of clarity itself, it’s the spaciousness of our awareness. It’s not a type of stilted silence forced upon us, but an openness that allows for all other thoughts to arise and for us to flow through life with compassion and peace.
When we stop jumping on each thought, no longer believing our ego’s claim of vast import, we notice that they pass without our help and can start to truly understand and centre in this spaciousness of spirit or consciousness, which allows us to let go of temptation. This prayerful openness and awareness towards consciousness, God, and God’s will, is a natural state – we don’t have to craft it, and so when we start to notice it we can finally find rest and true peace. We become aware that it was always with us even when we were constricted by our false ideas of self, since even this was perceived in its openness and light.
In Christ’s temptations, instead of listening to the dictates and yearnings of Ego, the Devil, he instead stays still: not turning stone into bread, not taking over the world, not putting God to the test and jumping off the temple. This stillness to the dictates of ego does not mean that we refuse to work for peace in this world, as we know Christ went on to work for social justice in many ways and invite people to unity with God, but like Christ, it is indeed the best way to start our own “ministries” and work for change: letting go of our identification with our egos and its yearnings and ramblings. Indeed, Satan appealed to Jesus’ sense of self separated from God, asking wouldn’t it be better if you controlled things, don’t you need to survive and eat this bread, shouldn’t you double-check that God’s got your back? Just like Jesus, we don’t have to directly fight Satan, just notice that it is Satan or ego (not ourselves) and not empower it, turning to the wisdom of love that’s always with us for guidance even when it’s silent – or what some might call, prayer.
Peace is with you,
Rev. Cory