›› Prayer’s Ultimate Goal

Prayer’s ultimate goal — if, indeed, it has others — is to close the gap between us and God. If communication does not take place, then prayer can become a formula, a routine, nothing more. It continues to be good because all good customs remain good, even when they are practised automatically. However, if prayer does not bring us into a relationship with anyone, then it is nothing but one more type of therapy. This kind of prayer not only fails to bring us into a privileged communion with God, but it makes us content with a gesture that does not even put us into contact with ourselves. But if prayer is an encounter, then it becomes something of utmost importance because it is the live connection with the powerhouse of the universe. It is the source of values and of love.

Thought of like this, prayer is the recognition that we are not the center of our world. It recognizes that the center of our existence is there, in infinity, outside and above us. At the same time, it is so near that we can enter into contact with God at any time, in an instant. So, prayer is the recognition that to live represents something more than we can perceive in our own limited experience day to day. It means that we have access to a lifestyle that is unlimited. That lifestyle is only a step, only a prayer away from our small, mediocre, personal reality. That life is what makes our existence here so marvellous.

The ones who do not pray are unaware of what they are missing. They have been deprived of their eternal dimension. Their lives may be morally correct and full of values, yet they will lack depth because they have excluded from them the very thing which could raise them to a higher level of relationships.

Prayer means opening oneself to divine power.

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Source: Robert Badenas. Meet Jesus. Autumn House, Lincolnshire, England, 1995. 137 pp.