What is Prayer?

Ambrose of Milan calls prayer “the wing on which the soul flies to heaven.” Prayer has also been called “the study of truth” and “the first impulse of the heart and the last resort of the will.” The seventeenth-century poet, George Herbert, wrote a sonnet defining prayer:

Prayer the Church’s banquet, Angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;
Engine against the Almighty, sinner’s tower,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six day’s world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

The key here, is the last phrase, “something understood”-between God and the believer.

Diane Fausel