Information

What keeps you from prayer?

Ask that question in a roomful of people who don’t pray, and you will get a raft of answers: Oh, I’m too busy. I’m uncomfortable. All the people I know who pray are real jerks, and I don’t want to be one of them. I have bad memories of abusive religious figures. I wouldn’t know who I was praying to. I don’t know what to say.

Here and there one comes across that true rarity, a person who is wholly neutral when it comes to prayer, but most people have strong opinions, at least about when, how, and to whom we would rather not pray. We don’t want to be forced to pray in the forms and words of a religion we don’t subscribe to, or to a God we don’t believe in. So we don’t pray at all, and life moves along in its busy, mindless, distracted way until an eighteen-wheeler is veering over the double line into our lane and life is suddenly very simple.

This is a book about bringing true prayer to real life, preferably before real life includes an eighteen-wheeler or other looming disaster. I won’t claim that prayer can get you a new car or find the lover of your dreams. It won’t help you gain status, assert your dominance, or otherwise please your ego. It won’t even make life easier.

What it can do–what prayer, at its best and at our best, has always done–is help us to live consciously, honorably, and compassionately. Because I am not stronger, more self-sufficient, smarter, braver, or any less mortal than my forebears or my neighbors, I need this help. As long as prayer helps me to be more loving, then I need prayer. As long as prayer serves as a potent means of sharing my love with others, I need prayer.