There is a sense in which people must count the cost of honest prayer. The answer to prayer may be a demand for something we would much rather avoid doing. If it is truly the Divine Lover who is encountered, we may be very uncomfortable. Idols of our own making have a way of making us feel comfortable and at ease with things as they are. The God of justice/love is the One who calls us out of complacency so that we share divine discontent with a world which worships death. We are met and challenged to live as people of the light in a world that loves the darkness... This fear of what God may open our eyes to see may, in fact, lie behind our own resistance to God, our fear of prayer and silence.
The following prayer-poem was written by Ernest L. Brown III when he was a teenager many years ago. Our gratitude to Mrs. Fredi Brown, his mother, for sharing it with us:
Why do I pray? Why do I breathe?
Why does my heart propel the blood through my body?
Why, indeed?
I pray because I must ... because prayer is thought,
because prayer is the Nature of God.
What else can be compared to that peculiar comfort,
that indefinable calm that comes stealing over me when,
perplexed and confused, I have turned to God,
simply dropped my burdens and problems,
and flung myself into the Creator's protecting arms?
There is a spirit in us, I am told.
No one with human eyes may see this spirit;
no one may touch it with flesh-and-blood hands.
Yet when I pray I can feel it,
and then it may be said that spirit has talked with Spirit.
Not with words, for there is no need of words.
The spirit in us has touched, recognized and accepted the Lord.
All else has been lost, dropped, forgotten.
No need to remember, to fret and strive after remembering.
I have touched God -- not with my intellect,
my twisted straining thoughts,
not with human-trained logic --
but with something within me which is the spirit in us,
the Christ Indwelling.
Thus it is that I pray -- because I want to be comforted ...
because I want to be strengthened, directed, led ...
because I want to be healed, happy, solvent, loving, loved.
Because I believe that God can give me answers
when I have none of my own, I pray.