I knew you would come around to the topic of prayer; so let us take a look at prayer. There are many books that have been written about prayer and I don’t want to repeat the main points raised there. What I want to do with you is to focus on some of the points of contention and criticism of prayer and underline why prayer is so important in the life of believers. We can also see in the example of Christ, that prayer was a central aspect of his life and he frequently turned to prayer.

Prayer, in its simplest description is a turning of a person towards God and this is done for a variety of reasons. One of the most common is to turn to God to ask for something whether it is for healing or for strength or support in general. We can also turn in prayer to God in order to offer praise or thankfulness for something. There are set prayers that have been used for centuries but there are also prayers which can be composed by us. One of the biggest complaints about prayer is that often, they are unanswered and it feels as if we are not being heard or God is not there. This is a very common complaint – why should I pray, it doesn’t change anything.

An important point in this matter is that God has freedom because He is personal and this is one of the reasons why we can even pray to Him. For religions such as Buddhism, where there is no god, there is no prayer – there is meditation. Now if God is free, and He is the creator and upholder of the universe, then we cannot expect that we would be at our every beck and call. The relationship between God and answers to our prayers is much more complicated than the simplistic picture people sometimes have of our putting in a request and God, like a servant, answers it.

Another question is how and why should we pray when the situation seems hopeless in, let us say as an example, a case of a terminal illness. True, in some cases the progress of the illness is halted, but in the vast majority of cases, it almost seems that our prayers are totally ineffectual and pointless. Why should we go on praying in these cases? There are a variety of reasons given for us to continue to pray. The first is the affirmation, through our prayer, that the world is not as it should be. The situation in which someone is ill is not normal and is not part of God’s will and we affirm this through our prayers. Prayers in cases of dire illness are also a reminder for us that we should get more involved personally with the person who is ill by visiting, by sharing with them our wishes for them.
One of the areas in prayer that most of us fail to do is praise and gratitude. It is very easy for us to forget that all that we have is a gift and we fall into the illusion that it is we who have endowed us with all the good things in our lives.

There are many, many more things that can be said about prayer but there is one area that is not that frequently brought to our attention but something that is crucial for us and let me now focus our attention on this point.

I want to again talk about what it is that is unique to Christianity and see how this ties in to our life of prayer. Christianity did not give us a new moral code; it did not give us a new religion. What Christianity has brought is something that Christ accomplished and that is the end of death – death has been destroyed by death as is sung at the Easter Service. The character and nature of human death has been changed forever. The rebuttal that is often brought forward is that nothing has really changed – people continue to die as before. True enough but there is more to the idea of death than merely a biological extinction. Death has now become, because of Christ’s death and Resurrection, an opportunity for humanity to enter into a special relationship with God. This is one of the reasons that Christ died – to enable this opportunity to come into effect, he has broken down the barrier that existed between the uncreated God and creation which by its very nature was mortal. Previously there was much talk about Christ as a ransom, and this was fraught with difficulties because the immediate question arose – ransom to whom and for what? For what, was easy to answer – for forgiveness of sins, but to whom this ransom was to be offered, was not so easily answered. Remember as well, that the main ‘sin’ of humanity is death and by attaining the forgiveness of mankind’s sins, in essence what Christ was gifting humanity with was an antidote to death – immortality.

How does this affect each of us? Now for each of us death has become a supreme opportunity to deepen our union with Christ and through this union, we have access to eternal life. Our death now becomes akin to Christ’s death and it is so accepted by God the Father and thereby our mortal createdness is no longer a barrier. We still need to die because, in a sense, that is the sacrifice we offer to God, something that each of us has to do personally and willingly. It is in this process of death that we can renounce our rebellion against God and move away from a self-centered existence. That is why we still have to go through biological death, in order to become united to God, through Christ, in a supreme manner. So, things have indeed changed but not in the preconceived manner that we had expected.

There is something else that we need to consider here and that is the term hypostatic union (which can be understood as personal union). This is just a theological term that denotes the fact that in Christ two natures exist side by side without any amalgamation, mixing, or diminution of either, the divine and human. This points out the important point that humans can interact with the divine in union without humans being dissolved in God and losing all identity. And because of this, we can interact and unite with the human nature of Christ and thereby become as he is. When we suffer death, our created hypostasis (our deepest and personal being) is connected through the hypostatic union with the divinity in Christ and thereby we have a new life which now cannot be touched by death since our sins are forgiven.

Prayer comes into all this because through prayer we open ourselves to union with Christ. Prayer is not just an option for us – it is literally something that impacts on our very being in the New Creation. In prayer, in a sense, we are already preparing ourselves to experience the dynamics of biological death in that we are strengthening and building up our union with Christ, which will come to serve us when we go through the passage of biological death. We become united to Christ through prayer, but we also come to be united with others for whom we pray and thereby we are building up our interconnections with those for whom we pray. In a sense, prayer is a matter of life and death for us and we can appreciate why it is so important for everyone searching for God. It is through prayer that we are impacting who we are and who we will become. It is also important for us that we are members of the Church because it is there that we consolidate and build up our relation to Christ through prayer and praise, and our relation to other people.

What happens to us after our earthly death is a mystery and we gropingly try to discuss it based on what Scripture opens to us. But, taking as a foundational truth that God is Trinity, we can also transcribe this to our human existence. A believer’s deepest identity is rooted in and sustained by his relationship with God. And from our everyday lives we see that who we are is defined by our social interactions whether they are with family, friends, community. This is beautifully described in one of the troparia of the Church services: Your creative command was the cause, beginning, source, reality, hypostasis and substance of my being. We are because so because God wills it and we will continue to be because we now have the capacity for a relationship with God and through this, obtain true and immortal being – we will become sinless. And the most fundamental aid for us in achieving eternal life through communion with God, through Christ, is by praying and that is why prayer is fundamental to our being.

Much more could be written about prayer but I hope that I have made it clear why we pray and how important it is to keep praying in spite of obstacles and challenges to our believing.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas