Prayer is a partnership with God
Prayer is how we find our true identity - as individuals and as the church - writes Archbishop Justin.
Prayer is one of the most intimate and beautiful activities in which human beings can engage, whether alone or with others. Prayer is how we establish our true identity, as individuals and as the church. In prayer our identity is changed, to be more aligned with the identity of God – the identity that in love we are called towards. As Mother Teresa said: “Prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God’s gift of himself.”
When we pray, we participate in the most dramatic partnership of creation and recreation. The partnership with God that involves gazing on his creation – on the events of the world he has made – and seeking that they be conformed to his likeness and image. We are changed, and the world is changed, as God allows us, through prayer, to share in his making of the world. We are his partners in making the world, in prayer.
We all have encounters with people who have a profound effect on us. I’ve have met two or three people over my life where one meeting altered my entire perspective on what life should be about. Prayer begins with an encounter with a person: an opening of ourselves to be with the person who is three persons in one: God, who comes to be with us, through Jesus by his Spirit, and being with us changes us.
So the good news, in one sense, is that you don’t have to do something to get there. God doesn’t say, ‘press these buttons in the right order’ and live a suitably good life. He just says, ‘come and be with me’. It’s an invitation.
Not praying is a guarantee of a quiet life. It may be an unpleasant life. It may be a very tedious life. It may be an exceptionally depressing life. It may be a despairing life – but it will at least be a quiet life, if you like that kind of thing.
Prayer causes huge collateral damage to all our vanity and our ambition, and our hopes of self-advancement and self-centeredness. Being in partnership with God reveals to us our true identity. Not the bad things that many of us feel about ourselves, but the sheer beauty that is what God feels about us, because of what he did on the cross. And it reveals God to us in his true identity – and we can never be the same again afterwards.
There has never been a renewal of the spiritual life of the church – which means all Christians, you and me – without a renewal of prayer. That’s why I’ve made it the highest priority of my ministry.
This reflection is based on the Archbishop's Holy Week 2015 lecture 'The Risk of Prayer'. Read the full text here.
Source URL: https://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/prayer-partnership-god