The Art of Prayer

"Be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new
feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that
prayer is an education.” (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

The Art of Prayer

Why do we pray? How do we pray? For what, for whom do we pray? These questions and many others arise whenever we face the basic question of what it means for us to pray and why we do so. In this course, we will consider how the Christian spiritual tradition has grappled with these fundamental questions and what we can learn from that tradition about what prayer means for us--contemplative prayer in particular, but also other long-cherished forms of prayer, such as praise, thanksgiving, supplication and intercession. We will consider also what it might mean, as Leo Tolstoy once put it, for one’s whole life to become a prayer. For prayer to be not merely as an occasional or discrete practice, but as an abiding sense of God’s presence that pervades every aspect of one’s existence? The ancient Christian tradition thought of these questions in light of St. Paul’s injunction in I Thessalonians to “pray without ceasing” and took seriously the idea that we could indeed learn to live in a space of continuous or unceasing prayer. We will consider together what it might mean for us to enter the space of uninterrupted prayer and how such prayer can transform our life, becoming a source of deep healing and renewal—for us personally and for the wider world.