Prayer is a weird thing. If you try to turn prayer into a way of asking God to do things, before long you’ll find yourself in a morass of conflicting theological precepts (e.g., God does whatever God wants versus God answers prayer). So a lot of Christians I have spoken with define prayer as little more than "communication with God." Apparently just initiating the link at all is enough to make prayer worthwhile. But doesn’t God know all my thoughts already? Oh, but God likes when you share voluntarily. Okay, sure, whatever.
Theomorph has posted some interesting ruminations about prayer. Anybody care to respond?
From just looking at the above quote (I’m doing some optimization HW; I’ll get to the rest of the entry later), I would say that while God knows what we say before we say it (noted in Ps. 139, methinks), He will not make us turn our thoughts to Him. Prayer as a free act of turning our minds and hearts toward God is the important part.
As a little hypothetical case; if God were to grant our wishes without our needing to vocalize (if only mentaly) them to God. We would all grow up solipsists, thinking that the Universe just bows to our needs. This is in contradiction to how God uses miracles to draw people closer to Him–they can odraw closer to God only if they realize that it is God giving the sign.
In the Feast of the Exultatin of the Cross, just this past Tuesday, we read from Exodus about how the Hebrews were saved from venomous snakebites by looking at a bronze snake that God commanded Moses to build. How I see that working is not that God couldn’t heal anyone whenever He wanted, but rather, the sign was a means to draw back to Him a people grown rebellious. They could heal, but only if they looked at the symbol that God had made. I.e., they could only heal if they acknowledged God and His presence.
So it is with prayer, God knows us better than we do and can do whatever He wants, but in prayer we willingly turn to him, allowing ourselves to accept what God offers. We must consent to healing before being healed.
I have a few other thoughts on this floating around, but want to read the whole entry first and read up on some sources to get my wording right. In the meantime, now to show that a Euclidean Distance Matrix is a cone! Or not…
Jerry–Yeah, when you get to the rest of my post, I think you’ll see I was moving in the same direction. Prayer is more about your personal orientation toward the greater power of the universe (regardless of what you call it–God, Enlightenment, whatever) than it is about orienting the greater power of the universe toward your own desires. (I’ll use engineering and technology for that, thank you very much. 😉 )