How Does Prayer Feel?

            Prayer is not something you do.  It is something done to you.  You can't force it, can't make it happen.  You can't communicate it or understand it.  It comes upon you suddenly, a force to be reckoned with, a force that, like as not, will change everything you've ever done.  To say that prayer is God is not far from the truth.   It is not an understanding of God, or a vision, or a perception.  It is certainly not a bunch of words.  Prayer, rather, is that sweet spot you hit after months, or even years, of trying, a curve ball that crosses the plate just so, so powerful, so true, that even a nanosecond of it can change a life.   All that matters then is that we not confuse prayer with our own actions.

            It's easy enough to sit and praise this experience.  Religious people sometimes do that. By saying more and more grandiose things, we can make the experience happen.  But that would work only if we could flatter God into action, and God, while deserving of our praise, is not quite so corruptible.  Our problem is not in appreciating it, but in recognizing it when it comes.  Actually, this has been a bone of contention for nearly a thousand years.  Some, like St. Bernard of Clairvaux thought that experiences of God only happened to the very few, to those specially chosen by God, and only after years of preparation.  Others, like St. Ignatius of Loyola thought that prayer could happen to anyone, and suspected that it was far more common than generally believed.  I tend to fall on the side of Ignatius.  Nearly everyone has religious experiences in their lives, though often they misread them as unresolved fantasies or some such.  It is that feeling of being suddenly caught, surprised, and awestruck, of suddenly quieting the interior noise, all the self-abuse and the badgering and the bad memories which produce them.  Like a man suddenly confronted by a deer on the trail,  holds up his hand for silence and loses himself in the fragility of the moment. 

            Loses himself.  That is the key to this puzzle.  Prayer is a sudden loss of self, a fast reminder that in losing we find, and in finding, we realize that we lost nothing.   Prayer then is different from contemplation as the nave differs from the vestibule.  When we practice contemplation, we stand at the threshold of prayer.  We knock.  We wait to enter.  But contemplation is not prayer in itself, for that only happens when the door flies open and a hand reaches out from inside and pulls us bodily into the church.  As soon as prayer overcomes us, we know that we are not in control, that our desires and fears are no more real than dreams.  In fact, that is what happens--reality and dreams exchange place.  In prayer, we realize that the most real thing of all cannot be seen or felt or touched or tasted.