Prayers as Tools for Being and Becoming

Prayers are tools, but with this clarification: prayers are not tools for doing or getting, but for being and becoming. In our largely externalized culture, we are urgently presented with tools that enable us to do things (a machine, for instance, to clean the carpet), and to get things (a computer, for instance, to get information). We are also well trained in their use. We are not so readily offered tools that enable our being and becoming human. We are accustomed to think of our age as conspicuously technological. But the largest area of the human continent is impoverished technologically. 

The vaunted technologies of our day are used only along the shoreline of the human condition; the vast interiors are bereft. The consequence is that, lacking adequate tools (a technology), most people don’t venture into these interiors, at least not very far. Life is constricted on the boundary, between ocean and wilderness, where a narrow competence in doing and getting is exercised. At the center of the whole enterprise of being human, prayers are the primary technology. Prayers are tools that God uses to work his will in our bodies and souls. Prayers are tools that we use to collaborate in his work with us.