Your Father knows what you need before you ask. — Matthew 6:8
It’s simplistic to say that prayer is more than just asking God for something. Yet, especially in times of stress, our prayer life resets to a list of urgent requests.
Father Richard Rohr, in one of his daily devotions, described what we can learn from the early Christians who lived a monastic life in the wilderness: “For these desert mothers and fathers, prayer was understood not as a transaction that somehow pleased God (the problem-solving understanding of prayer that emerged much later), but as a transformation of the consciousness of the one who was doing the praying.”
Maybe such transformation happens when we set aside time each day to simply be quiet, regardless of what we may be experiencing. Silence opens our inner ears to hear a deeper voice that comes from far beyond our small selves.
It’s not an accident that when silence is the preface to prayer, that voice eventually guides us to praise our Creator. Recently I heard a quiet whisper during prayer time, a whisper that called out to the One Jesus addressed as Father:
You are always more eager to listen than I am to talk.
You are always more eager to forgive than I am to repent.
You are always more eager to give than I am to ask.
What do you hear in the silence of prayer? Maybe it’s when we are the most comfortable with silence that our spirits are changed a bit. And the problems that may have driven us to prayer don’t seem so big anymore.