Prayer is the final frontier of desire.

F. Rassouli ( www.rassouli.com )

Though prayer may include thought -- especially spiritually distilled thought -- it is not primarily an act of mind. It is more an act of heart. A divine personal.

The desire highlighted and presented through mature prayer isn’t greedy or desperate for fulfillment, being rooted not in hope but in faith.

Prayer is sacred conversation, even when it is absolutely silent.

In its beginning stages, prayer mostly asks. As it ripens, prayer may still ask, but its primary characteristic is deep receptivity. Put another way, prayer initially has a lot to say, but later on it mostly listens.

Ultimately, prayer becomes what it is requesting, through bringing us into such radical intimacy with What-Really-Matters that we’re no longer significantly separated from the object of our prayer.

Much depends on who -- or what -- we assume is hearing our prayers. Let us call the ear we are trying to reach God. If we take God to be a kind of super-parent or cosmic Santa Claus, our prayers will be like those of a little child asking for favors. But if we move to the other end of the spectrum and take God to be Absolute Nondual Being, our prayers will mostly be communications between wakefulness and Wakefulness.

However much wakefulness may be object-oriented (i.e., focused on thoughts, feelings, sensations, others) -- as opposed to being oriented to itself (and its Source) -- it still exists in the domain of awareness. When prayer arises and flowers in the continuum or field -- the timeless and horizonless field -- of awareness, it is already in contact with its fruition.

That is, what it seeks is recognized, at least to some degree, to be already found. There is no real gap between seeking and sought in bare awareness -- it is only in the manifesting of prayer’s requests that there appears to be a such a gap.

Prayer helps to bridge the unmanifest and the manifest by creating fertile conditions for bringing potentialities to life. Prayer provides a sacred template for intentionality.

Prayer homes us. How? By getting personal with the Absolute, and by making it viscerally obvious that we’re closer than close to It.

As it matures, prayer’s context shifts from petitioning to gratitude. Then prayer does not end with a thank you, but is a thank you.

Amen.