Why I Keep Harping on Prayer

So why do I keep insisting on prayer? As if it were the one necessary groundwork for any solution to - or even remediation of - each and every human problem, no matter how earthly, technical or practical? (Which of course it is.)

Because there's nothing we busy, commanding humans do that works so personally, intimately, knowingly, as does prayer. There is nothing else we do, however proactive and decisive and sure, that is half as penetrating as prayer. Nothing that ushers us so confidently into, not some remembrance or image or abstraction, but the Real Presence - and not just of God, but of anything: any person, place or thing. So that at last we may discern its real nature, and true need. Now granted, since our expulsion from Eden this human world has become a pretty competitive, mutually-isolating and -uncomprehending place. But if there yet remains, in any living thing, some residue as it were of Eden - of openness or unguardedness, of innocence or trust - it is prayer that will most surely help you find it. 

Of course there are all sorts of creatures we may meet - usually human or demonic - who refuse to be known. Or more precisely, who insist on being known only as they know or imagine or present themselves. Indeed, such is the degree of their self-enclosure, that they'd sooner be known in a way that provokes us to fear, anger or even violence, rather than let us know them as they are. I.e., in the Way that most helps us to love them. In a word - and without their being the least bit masochistic - they're the sort of creatures who'd much rather be hit than hugged. Out of sheer cussedness, or pridefulness, if you will.

Now in the case of demons, of course our anger achieves nothing, and we have no hope of loving them in any way they might receive (much less approve of). But in the case of humans, it is only prayer that seeps in through the wall, past any merely human self-image or pretense or armor. And the miracle of prayer is that it does so with the least merely human intrusion or "interference" in their lives.

In short, it is the one influence that accomplishes the most while "doing" the least. Prayer is, in fact, precisely what you "do" when you wish to ensure the fullest possible scope for the fullness of God's work inside that poor creature. Even as you yourself - out of respect for the self-enclosed person's independence and "freedom" - would seem, indeed, not to be working at all.