At its heart, prayer is basically a way of seeking help. This is something we have been doing for as long as we can remember. Not too long ago we were all babies and, when we felt hungry, we asked for food in the only language we knew then—crying! Our mothers somehow understood what that meant and the process worked. Now we are older and hopefully wiser, so we can use sound more intelligently to convey our thoughts and ideas. We know now what we want, how to ask for it, and to whom we should turn for help.
Generally we seek help from the people we trust and who, we feel, have the ability to help us. Sooner or later we learn that there are times and situations when no human help is enough or adequate. That is when we start seeking help from a superhuman source—God. Seeking God’s help and doing it through words or thoughts takes the form of prayer.
For prayer to become a real practice, and not a periodic ritual, certain conditions are absolutely essential. First, a deep faith that God exists. God is not simply an idea or a hope but a real Being. A devotee may view God as someone with form and qualities or as a nonpersonal presence; either way, to a devotee, God must be real. Another requirement for prayer is the unshakable faith that God listens to our every word. Indeed, God doesn’t even need the words really. God knows our thoughts even before they are formulated into words. The third requirement is the deep faith that God responds to every prayer.
The last claim, that God answers every prayer, may seem to contradict our experience, for most of us have seen many of our prayers go nowhere. God doesn’t always give us what we want. The prayer often doesn’t seem to work. Our problem is that we are looking for a specific answer—a yes from God, a yes to whatever we want. God’s “problem” is that God loves us and hence will only give us what is good for us. When we don’t get what we prayed for, the prayer has indeed been answered with a firm no. A loving parent will give the children only what is good for them, never what is harmful. When God says no to our prayers, that is an act of love, not indifference or anger.
We have a selective memory of our past and no knowledge of our future. Toggling between memories of what happened in the past and anxiety about what may happen in the future, most of us miss out on the present. We know precious little about what is really good for us in the long run. God knows everything about us—our past, present and even future—so a devotee submits to God’s wisdom and believes that God gives us only what is in our best interest. In retrospect it often feels like a blessing that many of our stupid wishes were not fulfilled. The devotee realizes that God listens to every prayer and answers every prayer either with a yes or a no. God’s yes and God’s no are both filled with love.
But what is it that I should pray for? The obvious answer is that I should pray for whatever I need. It is possible to divide my needs into two broad categories—one, everything I need to make my life in the world happy and comfortable, and two, everything I need to make my life happy and comfortable even beyond. This world, after all, will be with me only for the next few years (no one knows what the “few” stands for), so it makes sense to think of our needs for the beyond too.
It is not the purpose of prayer to make God aware of what we want (God alread knows it) but to articulate for our own benefit what we need. Sometimes putting words to inchoate thoughts and hazy ideas helps us see clearly what’s going on within us. It is possible to discover that we can easily do without some of the things we thought we badly needed. It is like online shopping—we stack the shopping cart with everything we fancy but just before checking out, when we see the overblown list and the costs, we may start deleting some of the things, recognizing that we would be perfectly fine without them.
With age and experience as well as with changing circumstances, our needs also change. What seemed important at one time may no longer appear to be so after a few years or in a different situation. While our needs in the world keep changing, what remains constant for the devotee is the need, a hunger really, to see God and to be in God’s presence—and so the devotee prays for everything that will make it possible. That eventually becomes the prime focus of a devotee’s prayer. One can imagine God saying a hearty yes to that kind of prayer. In unseen and subtle ways, an intense prayer for God-realization eliminates possible hurdles on the path.
Something like that happened somewhat dramatically in the life of Narendra (as Vivekananda was known before he became a swami) when he was 21. After his father’s sudden passing, the family was left in dire circumstances financially. To make matters worse, some relatives tried to deprive the family of even their property. Feeling desperate, Narendra approached Sri Ramakrishna, requesting him to intercede on his behalf to the Divine Mother, so the family could be helped. Sri Ramakrishna asked Narendra to go and pray in the temple of Mother Kālī. When Narendra stood before the Mother, he was so overcome by Mother’s presence that all he could pray for was knowledge and devotion. When he returned to Sri Ramakrishna and told him what had happened, Narendra was sent to the temple again and, every time he went there, he forgot his original intent. Prayer for him had crossed over the bridge from seeking help in worldly matters to seeking help in attaining God. (Later Sri Ramakrishna blessed Narendra that his family wouldn’t lack the basic necessities of life.)
A prayer that seeks favors is a prayer “with desire” (sakāma) and, as we have seen, what we seek from God does change over time. What we ask for gives us a good indication of what is important to us and what our priorities in life are. From seeking material things or removal of physical suffering a prayer can evolve to seeking qualities essential for spiritual progress, or seeking spiritual freedom itself.
But there is an even higher form of prayer, the one “without desire” (niṣkāma). A stage is reached when the devotee does not even seek spiritual freedom. If anything, the devotee seeks merely to remain in the presence of God all the time, everywhere. The thinking is simple. God loves me and will give me what is good for me, whether or not I ask God for it. I’ll just remain near God’s feet. I’ll be like the kitten who is content no matter where her mother places her. Prayer then becomes simply a way to bask in the eternal sunshine of God.
from Vedanta Blog - Ramakrishna Vedanta Society https://ift.tt/7Vl9Agk
