Prayer As Dreaming In League With God (PrayerLife)

Tipp City, Ohio

I just read Notre Dame philosopher Gary Gutting's interview with Jewish philosopher Howard Wettstein (University of California). Wettstein has some delicious words to say about about the praying experience.

"Prayer, when it works, yields an awe-infused sense of having made contact, or almost having done so. Having made contact, that is, concerning the things that matter most, whether the health and well-being of others, or of the community, or even my own; concerning justice and its frequent absence in our world; concerning my gratefulness to, or praise of, God. The experience of sharing commitments with a cosmic senior partner, sharing in the sense both of communicating and literally sharing, “dreaming in league with God,” as A.J. Heschel puts it, is both heady and heartening. Even when that partner remains undefined and untheorized."

Real prayer is experiential and existential, not theoretical; which is to say that real prayer is about intimacy, not distance.