What is Prayer?
This was the question asked in our weekly Bible Study this week. The answers given were the ones I'd expect. Conversation with God; Listening; Communicating with God. All good answers, demonstrating to me, at least, that most there had a good understanding of prayer.
I held back, not wanting to have to explain the answer that was bouncing off the padded walls of my mind. "Melding with the mind of God." Frankly, I wasn't sure what that meant anymore than the others would. It just shouted itself out to me the second I heard the question. I ended up offering that prayer was "a quest for God."
That answer too, while I have a much better comprehension of it's meaning, was vague and I'm glad I wasn't asked to explore it more intensely. The scripture we read seemed to reinforce that.
But I kept coming back to "melding with the mind of God."
I brought it up again yesterday in spiritual direction. Because, as I toyed with the phrase in my mind Wednesday and yesterday, I developed a distinction between MELDING and MERGING. I couldn't explain it. But I had an inkling that there WAS a difference, and I was attempting to express that.
So, I did a simple dictionary search; I wasn't too impressed with the outcome.
Some word paths I took in my quest, though, go like this.
When I tried to substitute Merge for Meld, I pictured a super-highway. Cars merge in from other highways, or from one lane to another. Later, those cars DIVERGE into other lanes, other highways. That sort of expresses my thoughts on prayer... but not really. When the car diverges from the super-highway onto another highway, nothing of the super-highway remains for that car. That's not prayer.
Meld worked better... but I couldn't really define that... I, being a bit of a Trekkie, kept thinking in terms of "the Vulcan Mind Meld". 'Cept, I'm not such a Trekkie that I can recite precisely what that is other than Vulcans could read other sentient minds. It's hard to put this into the language of prayer for me.
You see, what I'm trying to express is that prayer is a process of coming into a deep and personal experience of the mind of God. While we can never KNOW the mind of God, there's a sense in which we should be seeking to come to know, as much as possible, the Divine Presence.
So, I checked out Miriam Webster. The verb "meld" that I want gave me a lame definition of "blend of melt and weld". Oh, now THAT'S helpful. But, it gave two synonyms.... MERGE and BLEND. Obviously I knew MERGE wouldn't work. But BLEND hit's the spot for me..."To combine or associate so that the separate constituents or the line of demarcation cannot be distinguished".
Now you know what I mean... right? ;-}
Again, I don't really believe that degree of mixing is possible between my mind (or anyone else's) and God's mind.
But I believe that's the goal. To enter into the Divine Presence so thoroughly that my mind and that of God's begins to lose it's demarcation. Death for me brings the final opportunity to do that, and do it perfectly. We either do at death succeed in this melding or we are forever separated from God. And in the end, at that moment this final perfect melding is to occur, it's nothing I do or have done that permits it but merely and utterly, the Will of God... the Mind of God which permits or refuses.
In the meantime, we search and seek to find the way that we can best meld with God. And each and every separation from that search, from that prayer, should leave us with some little bit of Divinity intact. When I break off prayer, I should do so acutely aware that some of the meld doesn't break, that some addition to my being has occurred. I must leave prayer, changed.
Oddly enough, however, this does occur. And it's a mini death process. First, I mean this in the sense that no degree of melding occurs unless the Divine Presence wills and invites it to occur. I can seek all I want, but I will not find unless willed/permitted to do so by the One Whom I Seek.
So, when we are not melding with the Mind of God in Prayer, our Prayer is a Quest for the Mind of God. I see, now, that these are two parts of the same process, the same act, known as prayer.
