Humility is a condition precedent to meaningful prayer. Not even God's Love can penetrate the neon lights of an over-weaning ego.

   How do you think about humility? How does your idea of it affect your prayer life?

   For example, I confess I have prayed for my team to win?  But, why would God's light want to elevate the ego of one side and darken the other? 

   I like how my daughter prayed as a little girl. She listed all the people she wanted to see blessed and then ended with a flourish, "God bless all the people in the whole wide world."

   What could be better?

   The posture of prayer is fascinating. In every faith, people bow in deference to a higher power. Christians often kneel.  Muslims bend their bodies to the ground.

   Hands are typically important. Facing hands touched together are a prelude to entry into a sacred experience.

   The late Riverside Methodist Hospital Chaplain Reverend Bob Davis taught me that open hands at the beginning of prayer signal a willingness (and desire) to receive. John O'Donohue's poems about blessings, one of which is quoted by Liz Wessel in the Journal, offer so much:

…when we come to search for God,
Let us first be robed in night,
Put on the mind of morning
To feel the rush of light
Spread slowly inside
The color and stillness
Of a found world.”

   For much of my life, I prayed the way my little daughter did. After I graduated from Vanderbilt Divinity School in 2002 and received ordination I revisited my practice. 

   When asking for God's blessing for another, I now seek to enter that person's persona – to become another channel of light's entry into my son or daughter or a suffering stranger  (fortunately, "distance" prayers do not require the presence of the other person.) 

   But, prayer is personal. So is your decision to approach it & the world with humility. 

-Reverend Erie Chapman