What is prayer? Who is God?

I was watching a YouTube clip about developments where a robot can chant the Buddhist  Funeral Sutra. It prompts the questions about whether prayer is simply a matter of repeating certain verses in a mechanical way or whether there is an entrainment between us and God which encounters both body and soul. There can often be an attitude where we can approach prayer as an activity to be undertaken rather than as an encounter with the living God. We are aware of how many of the saints call us to pray always and to be aware of how God is present in each of our activities. This can often be a bit disconcerting as we can see ourselves as distinct from God and we can become used to addressing God in the third person. We hear this in our everyday language when we talk about “us and them”. It can be easy to notice that we hold God at arm’s length for fear that too much may be asked of us and that we may not live up to our own expectations of who this God may be.

Yet our dialogue in prayer is called to be more like “I and thou”. This is the language which brings God closer to a conversation which draws us towards someone who wants to relate to us as a person and not as a thing. We see echoes of this in the scriptures where the words that touch us most are those where God meets people face to face with a raw honesty which engages with their lived lives. This is not a God who watches passively from a distance but rather a God who seeks out the human heart and transforms the person. A person is changed by the encounter and we know from the Gospel stories of healing and forgiveness that they find that they are freed to give praise to God with their lives.

The story continues in the some of the poetic books of scripture such as the Song of Songs in which it is hard to tell who is speaking the lover or the beloved. The two seem to be intertwined in a celebration of deep and mutual love which enriches both and in which both are drawn to the other. There is a nuptial quality to this love which sees no separation between the two. There is an ever-deepening communion which allows each to celebrate the life of the other. That God may be all in all.