Many people nowadays doubt the value of prayers.
And they are right in a way. So many prayers go unanswered.
Unheard, unanswered prayers have caused many to stop praying.
I feel we cannot blame it all on the prayers;
but rather on the way we pray, on the way we were taught to pray.
As children we were asked to memorize the prayers taught at school.
Then we followed the ways of our adult examples:
just recite what was memorized without any thought
without any reflection, and quite often really fast.
The more prayers we can say, the better,
sometimes repeating the same prayers up to fifty or more times in one session.
This type of prayer is pushing many rational thinking minds away from religion.
This type of prayer is however not completely useless as some want to believe.
Just making time for God and even reciting learned prayers without thinking about the meaning
is still a valuable experience to many and if it is done in group it has a binding effect among the ones participating in the group prayer.
But prayer can be so much more.
I invite you, even if you have given up on praying, even if you have given up on faith,
to take ten minutes of your time and say a prayer, not only with your lips, fast within your mind,
but say the prayer you learned as a child, in an extremely slow way, giving a lot of thought about the meaning of each word, each phrase you say. If we would teach our children to pray like that, the chances that they enjoy prayers would be soooo much bigger.
Taking some time to feel the creative intelligence of the universe,
that intelligent force which is truly what we call God.
That intelligent force that makes a tree in your garden grow against gravity,
brings all what's in an apple from deep under the ground to some place high in the crown,
lets it ripen before it is finally obeying the law of gravity and falls on the ground.
Atheists call it the laws of nature, the forces of nature, but where do the forces come from?
So well balanced that a tree full of apples, once a seed, now bears fruit high in the sky, every year.
If all of nature was the result of a limited number of forces, laws of nature, it makes it only more amazing. Laws of nature are not laws; they are mere regularities that are discovered that happen in a certain recognizable pattern. Gravity is one of these, an undeniable force, but so well balanced with other forces that the fruits go up a tree stem, that the evaporated water floats up to form clouds, giving life-essential water to all that lives.
If we start our prayer praising this life giving intelligence present everywhere in the universe, we stand in awe. Our prayer is no longer mindless recitation, but some beautiful thoughts about the world around us and its Creator boil up from deep within our heart. We can intuit the intelligence. Prayer becomes an excitement, something enthralling, something that makes us feel good from within and something we can feel from without.
Please go on and say the prayer you learned when you were small,
thinking, reflecting, using the fullest of your imagination
and you will discover something really valuable...
