The Prayer Thread is a collection of teachings and practical prompts to help as we learn to pray in community. This text was originally delivered on January 31, 2025 as a short teaching at our online weekly prayer sit.
When a community of faith gathers together on a regular basis, the members of the community often proclaim common prayers of petition. In some communities, these proclamations follow a structured form, and in others, the petitions are proclaimed from a more personal and particular perspective. Regardless of the form, when a community or person offers a prayer of petition, they proclaim the work for healing and wholeness. Something is important. Someone is in need. Sometimes things need to get done. Reality should be other than how it appears to have been.
To offer a prayer of petition is to put words into action, to suggest that transformation can occur when we can name the pieces of our lives that are still only partial and incomplete. To put a word onto potential through a petition, is to give the word a power that moves toward action, closer to healing and wholeness. The power of prayers of petition is in the shared work of the spirit that helps shape what has not yet come to be, to become what needs to be, What Is, in Love.
Many people struggle with petitionary prayer because they confuse its power with that of magic or favor, as if there is an interventionist God up in sky with a wand determining who and when certain, and not other, prayers will be answered. The illusion of a sky God who does everything for, or to us, takes away the real power of petitionary prayer. The power lies in the participation of the petitioner to help bring forth the potential of the work of Spirit, to help bring possibility one step closer to actuality.
The powerful act of naming reality as it needs to be, how it really is through the lens of Love, is to help manifest the work of healing and wholeness through the proclamation of prayers of petition.
